Josh Kraushaar is the editor in chief of Jewish Insider.
With poll-obsessed pundits working to measure the size of a looming Democratic midterm wave, it’s easy to undervalue what could be a decisive factor: Which party’s bad and/or underperforming candidates will succeed despite their obvious shortcomings? How the defective-candidate issue plays out may be especially telling in the battle for Senate control, with Democrats needing a four-seat pickup.
In these hyperpartisan times, candidate quality is barely factored into the political equation, given how even some of the more personally flawed or ideologically intemperate candidates have managed to win elections in past cycles by playing to political tribalism.
But in the midterms, some Senate candidates from both parties are so politically problematic that they’re putting otherwise winnable races in jeopardy. These not-ready-for-prime-time candidates are testing the limits of how far party identification alone can carry them in pivotal contests.
For the Republicans, the solidly red states of Texas, Kansas and South Carolina are now all competitive because of the party’s dubious nominees. In Texas, state Attorney General Ken Paxton is saddled with personal scandal, ethical improprieties and a far-right record as he faces off against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico.
Sen. Darline Graham (R-South Carolina), who was tapped for the Senate in July to fill out the term of her brother, the late senator Lindsey Graham, is badly underperforming in a red state that President Donald Trump carried by 18 points in 2024. She famously acknowledged in a GOP runoff debate in August that she’s “not that informed” on national security — a subject her brother championed in the Senate. Graham is clinging to a polling lead of a point or two over Democrat Annie Andrews.
Another Republican candidate, Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, has been an unusually weak campaigner, struggling to raise money and facing fierce headwinds thanks to Trump’s tariffs on Kansas farmers. Democratic candidate Adam Hamilton has attacked Marshall, a physician, over revelations in a New York Times article about his history of suing hundreds of patients over unpaid bills.
A sign that the issue is hurting Marshall: He is demanding Hamilton take down an ad featuring one of his former patients and is threatening litigation. Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in Kansas since 1932, but the Cook Political Report now rates the race a toss-up.
With a trio of Republican candidates putting solidly red-state Senate races in play, Democrats hardly have reasons to gloat. Their fortunes may hinge on flawed, ideologically extreme nominees — in Maine, Michigan and Minnesota — who are struggling to win races in much bluer territory, even in a year when anti-Trump sentiment is boiling across much of the country.
The biggest underperformer is Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, whose harsh anti-Israel rhetoric and unwillingness to condemn far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with him during the primary, is turning a favorable pickup opportunity into a neck-and-neck race. Along with struggling to win support from many Jewish Democratic voters, El-Sayed faces a challenge to win over the Black community, which overwhelmingly voted for his primary opponent, Haley Stevens, and is a critical constituency for any Michigan Democrat.
Polls show El-Sayed holding a slender lead against former GOP representative Mike Rogers, with Real Clear Politics rating the race as a toss-up. El-Sayed’s resistance to moderating his views or reaching out to skeptical constituencies was summed up in a comment last week to CNN: “I’m not the Democrat the Democrats want, but I am the Democrat that Democrats have.”
Democrats also are facing a challenge in Maine, where nominee Troy Jackson, their replacement for scandal-plagued Graham Platner, shares much of the oyster farmer’s left-wing worldview without any of the charisma that propelled him onto the national scene. A recent New York Times-Siena College poll showed Sen. Susan Collins (R) holding a three-point lead over Jackson — one of the few battleground Senate races where the pollsters found a Republican ahead. Democrats are betting that even this less-than-ideal progressive candidate can ride a blue wave to victory, but Collins has defeated stronger opponents in similarly difficult environments before.
In Minnesota, where Republicans haven’t won a statewide race since 2006, former sportscaster Michele Tafoya is running surprisingly competitively against the state’s progressive lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, who is facing fire for her role in one of the nation’s largest welfare fraud scandals. It would be hard to imagine a Republican winning a reliably blue state where Trump is deeply unpopular — and Tafoya remains a distinct underdog — but it’s striking that polls consistently show the race statistically tied.
It should be a well-worn political maxim: Candidates matter. Republicans badly underperformed what was a favorable midterm environment in 2022 because they nominated extreme and flawed Senate candidates, including Herschel Walker, Blake Masters and Mehmet Oz. Despite Democrats’ riding a wave to the House majority in 2018, candidates lost very winnable races in Nebraska and New York because of their hardcore progressivism.
History would suggest a bipartisan phenomenon of deeply flawed candidates underperforming in this year’s midterms. Indeed, the midterms will be a test of whether the laws of political gravity remain intact, or whether the lesson of Trump’s second term is that the typical tests of character and moderation don’t mean all that much anymore.
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