The 2026 midterms are about as high-stakes as elections can be.

Thirty-five Senate seats are up for grabs next November, as are all 435 House seats. Republicans currently hold slim majorities in both houses of Congress — one that could get even slimmer with the coming resignation of Marjorie Taylor Greene. The results of the elections could shape the final two years of President Donald Trump’s time in the White House. The midterms will also loom over the 2028 presidential election, particularly for Democrats, who do not have an obvious candidate waiting in the wings.

We’re still a ways out, but many of the most crucial races are already heating up. Here are five races to keep an eye on.

Texas

The cycle’s most heated election began months ago when Trump ally and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a challenge to longtime Sen. John Cornyn.

Paxton has argued that Cornyn is too establishment to continue representing the state, saying that “Cornyn’s Swamp friends are spending tens of millions of dollars to attack me.” Cornyn in turn has called Paxton a “conman and a fraud,” the Associated Press reported earlier this year.

The winner of that primary will face off against either Colin Allred, a former congressman, or State Rep. James Talarico, who made national headlines in 2021 when he and a group of Democrat colleagues fled Texas to prevent the state legislature from voting on bills they opposed. More recently, Talarico — who has pitched himself as a Christian Democrat — came under fire after it was revealed that he followed a number of OnlyFans models on Instagram.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whose radical outbursts are almost too numerous to mention, is also weighing entering the race — which has Republicans thrilled.

Maine

Like John Cornyn, Susan Collins has caught plenty of flak from her fellow Republicans in recent years. But the moderate senator’s main concern as she runs for a fifth term comes from Democrats, not a primary challenger.

Maine Governor Janet Mills lost an early lead to populist upstart Graham Platner — though the oyster farmer blew an early lead with a series of scandals, including resurfaced Reddit posts in which he slammed cops and called himself a “communist,” and the revelation that he had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest.

Platner has been bleeding staff in the wake of these revelations, including his campaign manager, political director, and national finance manager.

Despite all this, Platner still seems to be the Democrat to beat — though a recent poll found that voters favor Collins the more they learn about Platner.

Michigan

In Michigan, Rep. Haley Stevens, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, and Abdul El-Sayed are seeing who can run furthest to the Left.

McMorrow recently held a fundraiser with a leftist blogger who mocked Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Stevens, who endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), once screamed at her constituents for supporting the Second Amendment. And El-Sayed, who’s backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), blamed Israel for “invading” Gaza in October 2023, failing to mention that the “invasion” in question was a military response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians.

Whichever Democrat emerges victorious from the fray will face off against Mike Rogers, a Trump-endorsed former congressman who lost his 2024 Senate race by a tiny margin.

Ohio

Rogers isn’t the only lawmaker staging a political comeback in 2026. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown — a longtime leftist fixture in the Upper Chamber who fell last year to Republican Bernie Moreno — is running against Republican Sen. Jon Husted, who was tapped to fill Vice President JD Vance’s seat.

Brown was dogged with allegations of hypocrisy throughout his time in the Senate, something The Daily Wire frequently covered. The leftist was slammed for taking donations from drug companies at the center of the opioid crisis and attending a ritzy Hollywood fundraiser while constituents worried about the water quality at their home after the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine.

California

Of all the House seats up for grabs in 2026 — and, remember, that’s all of them — the most closely-watched is California, where Democrats are fighting to fill former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s soon-to-be-vacated seat.

Pelosi reportedly wants San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan to succeed her. But the candidate to beat is California State Senator Scott Wiener, a man so radical that even the New York Times has its doubts about him.

From radical trans activism to legalizing prostitution and pedophilia, there’s almost nothing Wiener doesn’t want the state to permit — unless of course parents don’t want their minor children to undergo radical gender procedures, in which case he thinks the state should be able to take custody of those children.

Wiener’s record is almost too insane to believe, but The Daily Wire recently published the definitive account of this wannabe congressman. Give it a read here.

Georgia

Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff will be defending his seat against a Republican challenger yet to be determined. The current frontrunners are Reps. Mike Collins and Derek Dooley, and former University of Tennessee football coach Buddy Carter.

The race is expected to be extraordinarily expensive, as Ossoff already has $21 million in cash on hand, according to Federal Election Commission data. Although it’s unclear who the nominee on the Republican side will be, millions are already pouring in for the individual candidates at this stage, The Daily Wire reported in October.

Ossoff most recently made waves for his vote against reopening the government, a vote that Republicans will likely lord over him throughout the cycle.

But Wait, There’s More…

North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is set to square off against Republican Michael Whatley. Former Senators John Sununu and Scott Brown are duking it out in a New Hampshire primary. Redistricting battles are sure to make house races spicy in Texas, Indiana, North Carolina, and more. And just for fun, the weirdest scion of the Kennedy family is running alongside about a dozen other Democrats to represent a district in the heart of Zohran Mamdani’s Manhattan.

It’s going to be a heck of a cycle. Stick with The Daily Wire, we’ll be covering it all!

The first time I met Cory Pesaturo, he had just hijacked the stage at a wedding in Boston with an accordion strapped to his chest. Little did I know he would do the impossible: make me a fan of the accordion.

Cory is — and I’m not exaggerating — the world’s best accordion player. He’s won the accordion World Championship three times. He holds the Guinness World Record for playing the accordion for the longest continuous time. He brings his accordion with him everywhere, and can play just about anything, including the accordion tracks in the feature film “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.”

Most recently, he took his talents to Saudi Arabia, which is now officially a “major ally” of the United States. The Saudi Arabia he presents is much different from the Saudi Arabia most Americans probably imagine. — Brent Scher

***

Earlier this month, I arrived in Saudi Arabia for my second visit to a country which has always seemed like a forbidden land to the West. I’d been invited again as a guest star to play accordion in the “Riyadh Season” concert series — this time with Egypt’s biggest singing sensation, Angham.

What struck me, on both trips, was how aggressively the Saudis are betting on capitalism.

Everywhere you go, the top Western brands are visible: Dunkin’ Donuts, Texas Roadhouse, Bath & Body Works, Chuck E. Cheese, and yes, Randy’s Donuts, with the giant donut on the roof are there for you in Riyadh. There is even a Disney castle and theme park.

On every corner there seem to be concerts, tourist attractions, and massive development projects. The music you hear playing through the speakers of high-end locations? Jazz, Lady Gaga, or Burt Bacharach. The style of filming for major concerts?  Straight out of CBS’s Grammys playbook.

Could a country truly hate America if this is what I was seeing?

When I first traveled to Saudi Arabia two years ago, I didn’t even tell my father. You can’t lie to an Italian mother, of course, but my father? If he had known I was flying to a country he associated with the worst terror attack in American history, he would have tied me to my bed. Many of my friends felt the same, judging by their reactions when I returned: “Saudi Arabia? Are you insane? Are you trying to get arrested or killed?”

But over the past decade, the Kingdom, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has charted a different course. One built on peace, prosperity, and a surprisingly familiar engine: Western-style capitalism.

It is true that in Saudi Arabia, you have no real rights against the state — no First Amendment protections, no guarantee of a fair trial, a mandatory dress code, and laws that make smoking pot or ordering a margarita about as plausible as Cardi B performing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto on the accordion — a stunt I once pulled to win a national title.

Yet, regardless of this different universe of ideas from the United States, I wasn’t afraid.

The free market being unleashed in Saudi Arabia, even if still in a more state-run manner, is the greatest modern example of how a country thought to be an untrustworthy foe can turn into an important ally.

What struck me most, though, was that while I was in Saudi Arabia, a Muslim socialist won the mayor’s seat in the financial capital of the world, New York City. Three different Saudis during the trip (including a Syrian security worker at the venue who had fled Bashar al-Assad’s regime) asked me some version of the same question: “What on earth are you Americans doing electing Mamdani? He’s crazy.” This, again, from inside the very center of Islam. And even they aren’t at all sold on the politics that Zohran Mamdani represents.

My insight is anecdotal, but the friendships I’ve formed in Saudi Arabia reveal a people not so different from my own friends back home. They want peace. They want prosperity. They want their families to be happy. They want to travel. They want to have fun.

I asked them everything — about Israel, Islamic extremism, terrorism, drinking, drugs, dating, hating their boss, weekend plans, and which video games keep them up until 4:00 a.m.

Watching a group of young men in Riyadh blast pop music at 1:30 a.m. as they inched through a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through, talking about girls and killing time, looked the same as you’d see in America. Different faiths, different cultures, same very human scene.

A handful of companies profit from global conflict. But 99.9% of businesses in a free-market economy — from Nike and Coca-Cola to Apple and Tesla — depend on global stability and rising disposable income. Peace is profitable.

In just a decade, Saudi Arabia has gone from a place many Americans fear to visit to a place I can’t recommend enough to go see. If that’s the result of “greedy capitalism,” then count me in.

Cory Pesaturo is a three-time World Champion accordionist and Guinness World Record holder who has performed on six continents and at the White House four times. In addition to giving five TEDx Talks, he is also active in the motorsports world, bringing his signature blend of innovation and artistry to audiences around the globe.