Of the many, many, many embarrassing and self-defeating things that one can do as an elections analyst, there is nothing that makes one look as consistently foolish as attempting to call the defining moment of an election before the votes are counted. Every cycle brings about a new class of journalists who hope to do such a thing, and they always end with the vast majority of them failing spectacularly. In 2016, we were presented with a new scandal or report judged to be the official end of Trump practically every week. 2020 saw both sides stockpile anecdotes and ads to be forever remembered as encapsulating either a shock Trump win or a shock Biden landslide. 2024 was all about the first debate and Trump’s near-miss assassination until it wasn’t, then about Brat Summer and the final debate until it wasn’t that either, then finally about the they/them ad and Joe Rogan until Trump actually came into office and his new coalition collapsed as quickly as it came. Far from providing us with any larger cultural-political understanding, this increasingly popular practice of self-conscious navel-gazing has only impaired our collective ability to understand the world we live in, consistently lifting up memorable one-dimensional stories over those with actual explanatory power.
I say all of this to let you know that I am fully aware of the risks of what I am about to do. At this moment, several weeks before Election Day, 2026, I am here to officially declare the defining moment of the entire 2026 election cycle. That moment was when Chuck Gray, the GOP nominee for the open at-large Congressional seat for Wyoming, was forced to fund, shoot and air a general election ad that emphasized poll-tested, inoffensive issues of affordability and Congressional stock trading.
Chuck Gray will not lose his race in November. He may very well not even underperform by all that much. But the fact that he feels the need to do something like this—the fact that at least one big-name forecaster has chosen to hedge its bets by listing the race as Likely Republican instead of Solid Republican—is the story of this election. Across the country, across the board, from races expected to be highly competitive to those that had been completely written off at the start of Trump 2.0, the vast majority of individual Democratic candidates in the most important races have put on absolute clinics in 2026. These candidates come from different backgrounds, hold different beliefs, and have employed different strategies, but they have collectively pushed Republicans to the complete brink. To determine which of this collection of stellar campaigns has been the absolute best of the best, we will once again evaluate these campaigns 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.
So, once and for all: who has run the absolute best Democratic campaign of 2026?
B Tier
Abdul El-Sayed
Faction: Outsider Left