Less than one month from now, the 2026 midterm election will come to an end, and we will finally get the results from the largest-scale anti-Trump political experiment ever conducted. After an ossifying eight-year period following 2016 in which the liberal establishment was completely confident that it had the answers to beat Republicans and the liberal base was content to trust that they did, the two years following 2024 have finally brought some real political experimentation from all different sides of the coalition. Gone are the days in which the party near-exclusively ran either well-entrenched incumbents or hand-selected loyalists on the same messaging across the country. For every one of these candidates in major races that won their nominations, there are others carrying the banner of something novel, from the Berniecrat left-wing populism that the party had never before given a chance in major races to updated brands of “heterodox” centrism purported to finally allow the party to win over right-wing voters.
Which of these efforts have been good? Which have been bad? On November 4th, everyone will claim to have known all along. As I wrote on the eve of the 2024 election almost two years ago, one of the most pernicious aspects of American political coverage is the way in which pundits will come to their takes about an election first and then work backwards to justify them based on the results. We saw this occur to a cartoonish degree in the aftermath of Kamala Harris’ defeat, in which both progressives and centrists who had previously praised her and the Biden administration for representing their ideals immediately turned tail to condemn both as either unforgivably corporate or unforgivably woke. While this development ended up being politically beneficial for the left, it has also only furthered an already-deep credibility crisis for commentators among discerning viewers. The results of the political experiments being conducted around the country this month will stand as the highest-quality data that any of us are going to get about the best way to beat Republicans for the entirety of this administration. The conclusions that will be made about them will determine everything about the Democratic Party’s approach in the upcoming presidential election, from the kinds of candidates that will be viable to the policies that can be realistically run on to the size of the map that can be contested. This process could not be more important, and as things stand, readers have very little reason to believe that any of the takes that anyone puts out next month will come from anywhere other than a place of convenience.
To combat such understandable skepticism, I have once again decided to do something different. Rather than wait until after the election to give my impressions of the major Democratic campaigns this year, I will do so before any results have come in. Through this, you can be confident that my analysis of the flaws or virtues of one campaign—say, Abdul El-Sayed’s—was what I was willing to say when any kind of result was possible, not just something I pulled out for the sake of a narrative after the fact. In this list, we will cover all of the most nationally relevant Democratic statewide campaigns in the country, including all of the major competitive and competitive-ish Senate and gubernatorial contests. Listed along with them will also be other candidates who, despite not facing competitive races, are running for positions high-profile enough that the quality of their campaigns carry national implications. They will be evaluated along three principal lines:
Success Against Republicans. How well has this candidate done against their Republican opponent, and how much of that success is actually attributable to their campaign? While this will primarily be based on polling, it will privilege candidates who have done well enough to force actions by the GOP, whether that be by spending in states not expected to be competitive or by pulling out of contests expected to be headline races.
Factional Success. What has this candidate done to help provide an electoral proof-of-concept for their ideological faction? How important is said proof-of-concept to said faction, and how much of their strategy came from their own ideas as opposed to an already-crafted playbook? This will privilege candidates coming from more marginal factions who have succeeded while trying new things this year.
Personal Success. How much has this candidate succeeded in building up their own personal political profile among national liberals while also succeeding in their own state? This doesn’t apply to every candidate—not every politician is an aspiring 2028 contender—but the ones it does apply to represent some of the most impressive political efforts in recent history.
Who has run the sole best campaign of 2026? Who has run the worst? What does it even mean to be a “good candidate” in a massive wave year? All of these questions and more will be answered below.
Hell Tier
Graham Platner
Faction: Outsider Left