The Daily - The 2026 Battle for Control of Congress

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

This year, the 2026 midterm elections will decide which party controls Congress, and whether Republicans can hold on to every lever of influence in Washington.Annie Karni and Shane Goldmacher, who cover politics, discuss the opportunities and perils for both parties.Guest:Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent at The New York Times.Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Both President Trump and the Democrats are floating unusual midterm conventions.Here are six big political questions for the new year.And here are the latest polls for the 2026 elections.Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesFor more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babarro. This is the Daily. As 2026 gets underway, so does a midterm election year for control of Congress, a campaign that will determine whether Democrats can operate as a check against the extraordinary power of President Trump, or whether Republicans can hold on to end. every lever of influence in Washington. Today, my colleagues, Annie Carney and Shane Goldmacher, on the opportunities and perils for both parties.

It's Wednesday, January 7th. Annie, 2026 elections, here we come. Come. Here we come. Or I guess here we are. This episode is going to be kind of a roadmap and a primer for this year ahead in American politics. Because while a lot of eyes are on Venezuela right now, in Congress, which you cover, the focus is on the reality that it is an election year, a very big midterm election year coming up in November. And November sounds very far away, but as you know, well, in politics, that really isn't very much time at all. And there's just a ton at stake in this election.

So we are turning to you to talk about the Republican side of that election and how Republicans in Congress are now thinking about planning for or perhaps dreading this coming election. I think that dreading is the correct word here. Republicans ended last year feeling very pessimistic about their chance of holding on to control of the House. And that's in a really large part because their party has failed to fix what ails the American economy right now. Namely, high prices. High prices, high utility bills. Americans can look at their receipts and they are not doing well right now. Right. The receipts for the failure are literally the receipts.

Correct. And nothing better illustrates the dire situation the Republicans are walking into this election year than the fact that Republicans set themselves up to start the year on an issue, health care, that has for years been their biggest weakness politically. And just explain that. Why Republicans are going to be kicking off 2026 on health care? Because in the final weeks of 2025, congressional Republicans were so despondent about their overall failure to confront affordability that a handful of them actually break with their party leadership and join with Democrats to force a vote on extending subsidies to the Affordable Care Act. So this vote is coming to the floor against Mike Johnson's wishes and highlighting an issue where voters by and large think Democrats are much. much stronger when it comes to health care. Right. And just as a political matter, what the Republicans did in the final weeks of December was enormous because they basically voted to endorse, in a real sense, the Affordable Care Act, which is public enemy number one for many congressional Republicans.

It has been for a decade, and you're suggesting that they're going to reinforce that approval for the ACA in the coming days. Yeah, Republicans have been divided about what to do about the ACA for years. But this is how much swing district moderate Republicans are feeling the heat, that they feel like they needed

to join Democrats and to fight for these extensions or risk losing their seats. And just because we're on the subject, will the Republicans breaking with their party help pass the extension of these Affordable Care Act subsidies

in the house? House in the next couple days? It could pass in the House, but it doesn't seem that Republicans are going to pass it in the Senate. And the president would never sign this into law. He would not want to reward Democrats who have made this ACA extension the central message of their entire political strategy. Right. So we're going to begin this year in the next couple days with Republicans having a big public battle among themselves, one that's going to probably create a spectacle that reinforces the

Democratic strategy that Republicans don't get it on affordability, especially the affordability of health care. That's how Republicans are starting this election year. Right. I have to say that Tony Fabizio, Republican pollster who works for Trump, put out a memo last summer warning Republicans at all levels that if they did not get behind these ACA tax credits, it would be political malpractice and a disaster for the party. Now, some Republicans will say it's still early.

There's a long way to go to November. They have plenty of time to change the conversation. But this is most definitely not how they wanted to start off this election year. Well, put this fight over health care into the larger, much larger context of dread that Republicans, seem to be feeling right now heading into the midterms, even if, as they say, they have plenty of time in theory to try to recover their footing. So this is, you know, the latest chapter and a much bigger story about an incredibly

frustrated demoralized party right now. All year the White House has been driving this strategy of doing redistricting across the country, starting with Texas. And this was always viewed as something that you do. if you are worried about winning, the regular maps as they are drawn now. You would only bother to redistrict if you thought it would give you a political edge. So the White House pushed this in states across the country where they thought they could gain a few seats. Right, by literally writing Democrats and their voters out of these congressional maps.

Right. But here is where a Democratic leadership that has widely disappointed voters for a long time, really showed some backbone and pushed back. Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and Minority Leader, was very aggressive in supporting tit-for-tat on redistricting. If they're going to do Texas, we're going to do California. So it's basically set off an arms race that is adding up to pretty much a wash. It's not clear that the redistricting battles across the country have given Republicans anywhere near the margin that they,

they would need to feel confident about keeping the House. Right, which means Republicans have to try to win the old-fashioned way, running on their record. Right, and they don't have a lot to run on. They've had full control in Washington for a year now, and they've really only passed one bill, the big, beautiful bill. Which is something. It's something, and they want to highlight the tax cuts, but that bill also included deep cuts to Medicaid that affect their voters. Right. So it was an unproductive Congress.

they've basically just said yes to everything that the White House wants or just been totally cut out of the White House's decision-making process, whether it's shutting down federal agencies or carrying out last week's military operation in Venezuela, which Congress was kept totally in the dark about. They've given up their power, and they've just become miserable in the process. So the morale in the House is just terrible.

When Marjorie Taylor Green announced that she was resigning and leaving early, a lot of her colleagues kind of felt jealous, probably, they would tell me. Like, that sounds great, was how a lot of House Republicans felt when they heard that news. And are many of them thinking about or deciding to follow her out the door? So what she did is, you know, announced that she's leaving early before the end of her term, which really doesn't happen unless you have a health issue or a huge scandal. I mean, it's, you know, your voters elected you to serve out your turn. Right.

So I don't think anyone else is going to follow her out early. But a lot of people are choosing not to run again. Today, I am announcing I'm not running for re-election. One of the biggest examples this year would be Don Bacon. So I feel emotional. It's been a great 10 years. He's kind of an old-fashioned Republican, a moderate from Nebraska. and he announced that he's going to retire.

That's a huge blow to Republicans' chances of keeping the House. Why? Because that seat will likely go to a Democrat in the next election. Right. But it's not just moderates like Don Bacon, who are leaving Congress. We've seen some lawmakers who call themselves Ultramaga head for the exits. Elise Stefonic and the days before Christmas said she's going to retire at the end of her term. Having a member of the leadership team come out and suggest that the Speaker

was a liar, that he was a political novice, that he was all sorts of things that Elise DeFonix said is just unheard of. She's been incredibly fed up with Speaker Johnson's leadership of the House, has been criticizing publicly and saying she's felt mistreated by him. I don't exactly know why Elise won't just call me. I texted her yesterday. She's upset. Privately, she's been frustrated with Donald Trump and his treatment of her. You have Nancy Mace. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina has an op-ed in the New York Times entitled,

What's the Point of Congress? Who has also been publicly critical of Mike Johnson. She writes in part, quote, Nancy Pelosi was a more effective House Speaker than any Republican this century. She's not going to run for re-election, trying to run for governor of South Carolina instead. So those two women really just speak to how demoralized a lot of Republicans, even those who have fashioned themselves after Trump are feeling right now. So with House Republicans being both unable to conquer the affordability issue and becoming miserable in their jobs in the House,

some of them retiring and making the seats very getable for Democrats, others like Nancy Mace, Elise Tephanic, retiring, and I assume the seats will just be filled by other Republicans. What is the strategy for the Republicans in the midterms? What are they saying their message is going to be if they don't really like the message that's attached to them at the moment? Look, a lot of them think that affordability will be the strategy and they have time to talk about it in a convincing way to their constituents,

even if the president is calling it a hoax. We'll see if that's going to work for them. Then, you know, I think for Republicans in competitive districts, the strategy is going to be saying, I stood up to my party. I forced this vote on Affordable Care Act subsidies extension. That will be their case they're making. Right.

Which will be a hard sell because at the end of the day, the subsidies will not pass. So, I mean, what they did amounts to a little more than messaging, which can only take you really so far if the lives of your constituents are still worse off while you were in office. And then they're left with this hope that Democrats run people like Zora Mamdani, who are far left and progressive and socialist and convince their voters

that that's the alternative, broadly speaking. And brand Democrats as radicals, even when in some districts, you know, they're absolutely not. So what do you think the best case scenario for congressional Republicans, especially in the House, will be over the next 10 months or so? I mean, I'm not asking you to guess numerically what's going to happen in November's election, but in the Republicans' minds, how does this go really well and how does it go real, real bad? Right. I mean, I'd say that the best case is that they buck conventionalism and hold the House. They lose a few Senate seats, but hold the Senate.

And I guess the worst case scenario, which I think is the one that more Republicans are really entertaining. is this bad blood between Republican rank and file members and Speaker Mike Johnson could lead to, you know, ousting their own speaker before the midterms, that's a possibility, could mean a loss of the House by a wider margin than anyone even thinks. And then Democrats controlling all of the key committees in the final years of Trump's presidency, which would mean the Oversight Committee and the Judiciary Committee, potentially doing real investigations and demanding information from all of these agencies that are not sharing information with Congress,

they would have subpoena power. So it would change the dynamic in Washington dramatically for Democrats to regain control of the House. Right. Thus, the Republican dread. Correct. Well, Annie, thank you for that.

I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Happy New Year. Cheers. After the break, Shane Goldmocker on The Democrats. We'll be right back. Shane. Michael.

Thank you for representing the Democratic side of the ledger in our conversation here. If, as Annie Carney just told us, Republicans are filled with dread about their prospects, especially in the House in this year's upcoming midterm elections, doesn't that almost certainly mean that Democrats are filled with whatever the opposite of dread is? And what would that be? I would say that Democrats are broadly filled with an anxious optimism. And the reasons to be optimistic are pretty clear. They see overperformances in special elections victories in November

and Trump's slipping approval ratings on the most important, issues to voters, prices, and the economy, and they say, this is the kind of political environment that the Democrats were hoping for at the end of Donald Trump's first year. One where he seems to be openly fumbling on the economy and mocking the idea of affordability. Not just mocking it at times, but showing that he is focused on other things that are personal to himself, whether it is... Trump Kennedy Center. Yeah, Trump Kennedy said, gilding parts of the Oval Office, building a ballroom

while the government was shut down. That was his focus at the end of 2025, and 2026 began with a focus on foreign affairs, on Venezuela, with the arrest of Nicholas Maduro, and it doesn't exactly fit with the America-first branding that he ran on. This is hardly a kitchen table issue for most Americans. And I think all of these things have fed into this image

of a president who is focused on himself, on his reputation in history rather than the personal finances of the Americans who voted to make him president. And so I think that Democrats are starting to think that that image of a president who is distracted, who is self-indulgent, that that is starting to break through

and the trust that voters have had recently and historically in the Republican Party to fix the economy is waning. And plus just historically, the party in power losing. seats in the midterms. Right. And the margins Republicans have are so small and so slim that even like a non-wave year

should give Democrats a majority in the House. And when you say margins, what you simply mean is, of course, that there are literally only a handful of Republicans in the Republican House majority. So even if they lose, what, three, four, five seats, Democrats suddenly control the United States House of Representatives. And so the environment is the reason for optimal. right now for Democrats. But the anxiousness comes from some of the other factors, which is, well, what are those seats and what does the map actually look like? And historically,

there have been a ton of seats that have been up for grabs in the House of Representatives. And that number is shrinking and shrinking. And it's really important because it means even if there is a quote unquote blue wave, let's say Democrats overperformed by seven or eight percentage points from what they did in 2024. Well, that doesn't capture as many Republican seats. as it might have a decade ago. And if you take all the seats that are in the toss-up category and the leaning Democratic seats, and you give them all to the Democrats, right?

All the most competitive seats, they end up in, like, the low 220s. And you need 218 seats in the House for a majority. So even sweeping these toss-up seats just gets the Democrats over the line. And is this reality that even a blue wave won't get Democrats that many seats? Is that just the extension of the conversation

we've been having with you for years, the fact that there's been so much partisan gerrymandering, there just really aren't any purple seeds left? It's partly partisan gerrymandering. It's also sort of a broader trend in America, which is self-sorting by voters. The blue areas are getting bluer, and the red areas are getting redder.

And so even if you're not intending to gerrymander people, they've self-selected into... Right, we talked about this, the self-jerrymandering. Yeah, into their own communities. And so it's that combination that's led to a shrunken map that leaves less margin for error for Democrats.

What else be on a map that makes it kind of hard for anybody to really pick up all that many seats will make Democrats anxious about 2026? The candidates, right? The Democratic Party

has an unusually large number of intense primaries that they're facing next year because when you're tossed from power you have some introspection. What did you do? Where did you go wrong? And who do you want to represent you

in the future. And across the map, there are these primaries that are testing some of the disagreements that the Democratic Party has. And so who emerges in those races is also going to be a pretty important factor. You know, we said the Democrats have a pretty good chance to take the House. It's really hard for them to take the Senate at the same time. Why? Republicans have 53 seats in the Senate.

And there just aren't very many opportunities for the Democrats to win the Senate. in 2026. There's Susan Collins, who is the only Republican senator in a state that Donald Trump lost in 2024. You've got North Carolina. It's an open seat. You've got Sherrod Brown, the former Democratic senator from Ohio, running again. But like, even if they won all three of those states, Democrats are still not back in the majority. They would only get them back to 50. Right. And 50's not enough when the president is Republican, because J.D. Vance would break the tie in favor of Republicans. And Democrats have, by the way, their own vulnerable seats up, too, right?

They have to win all those and hold their own seats. And there's real fear in House races and in Senate races that the party will end up nominating people who are either outside the mainstream, who have bad baggage, and end up costing them potentially winnable races. Let's talk about some of these primaries. And what you're hinting at is a fight. that both parties have been having for such a long time, which is, is it healthier for a party to have primaries

where candidates sort out which kind of Republican, which kind of Democrat they want to be in the general election, or is it just distracting and costly and does it damage the candidate for the general election? It sounds like Democrats have kind of made that decision for themselves. You're saying there are a lot of primaries. What are the main lines of conflict in these primaries, in a place, for example, like Maine.

There's a number of lanes that the Democratic Party has disagreements over. The first is ideological. Are you a progressive? Are you a moderate? The second is a generational fight. Are you from the old guard?

Are you from the new guard of the next generation? And one of the places that that is playing out is in Maine. You know, my father was a seventh generation Mainer who stood up for people who couldn't stand up for themselves.

You've got the two-term Democratic government who's seen as a moderate, Janet Mills, sort of the perfect vision of what a traditional top recruit is. Trump rips away health care from millions of Americans and drives up costs on everything from groceries to housing to trucks and cars. She's a proven winner. She's the kind of person you would exactly want to run in that kind of place. This election will be a simple choice.

Is Maine going to bow down or stand up? I know my answer. And yet, she's, He's facing a pretty stiff primary challenge from a guy named Graham Platner, who's gotten a lot of attention. When I tell people around here that I'm running for Senate, sometimes the initial reaction is what the fuck, but... An oyster farmer, a veteran. I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps and the Army. I'm not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy.

But also has gotten in a lot of controversy over a tattoo that he tattooed over that had Nazi symbolism, over a bunch of Reddit post that he'd made in the past. And there's a lot in the party to say, so what? He's unvarnished. He's real. He looks like he solves all the problems that we've identified that the Democratic Party had in 2024. I truly do believe that we can build a system

that is going to represent working people. The number one response has been, well, thank God somebody's going to do it. And guess who held one of the first big rallies from Bernie Sanders? who's playing in a number of these Senate primaries. And so who emerges in these states is a real, real focus and concern for both sides of the party, right?

There are people who point at Janet Mill say, okay, sure, she looks like a great recruit. But guess what? She would be the oldest freshman senator in American history. So right after Joe Biden, do you want to go back to that? Or do you want to take a risk

at this really young, potentially inspiring guy, but who has said things that are easily clippable in Republican attention? ad, self-describing themselves in ways that cast them as a radical, and Republicans just love to use that kind of term, especially when candidates have used it in their own words. Right. This is what Annie described as the kind of fantasy of Republicans that they can turn the

entire 26 Democratic slate of candidates into far left, out of the mainstream, Mamdani, Platner, on and on. Yes, exactly. But we have no idea whether the reality is that these Democratic primary challengers might end up winning the primary and winning the general election. I would think about it as there are two competing wings strategically in the Democratic Party. Wing one wants to focus entirely on who on paper is the most electable candidate in 2026 because it is so urgent to take back power. And have a check against Trump, right? And have a check on Trump. That let's do that.

Whoever in each state looks like they are likely as to win, do that. And let's hold off on this conversation of populist versus progressive versus institutionalists. Let's not have that fight in 2026. Reminder, not having that fight in 2024, pretty problematic. Ended up with Trump, right? And so they say that fight's going to happen in the presidential primary in 2020. Right now, we don't want that fight. And there's a whole wing that says,

Actually, the primaries in 2026 are the appetizer to a main course in 2028 that have this fight. These populist, these lefty candidates, we need to prove that we can win in the midterms in order to have a chance to sell the broader Democratic electorate that the left can win in 2028. And so that's why all of these primaries for the Senate have become so interesting. so important and real proxy tests for the direction of the Democratic Party beyond the midterms. Right. Okay. So with all of this extremely useful context that justifies the term, anxious optimism, I wonder if you can give us the best case scenario for Democrats in these midterm elections, House and Senate, and then the worst case scenario for them.

I mean, how much fun can we have with this? That's entirely up to you, Mr. Goldmacher. I mean, I think the best case scenario for Democrats is that Donald Trump continues remodeling bathrooms and focusing on things that voters don't care about, that they beat Susan Collins, that they have a wave of these new recruits, they win dozens of seats in the House, and they take power entirely in the Congress next fall. That's the best case. That's the best case scenario, politically.

Like, there is just so much that could go wrong for both parties still that the extremes of what is the best case scenario for Democrats and for Republicans, they're pretty extreme. Okay, well, speaking of worst case scenarios, what is it for the Democrats? It's that Donald Trump starts focusing on the economy, that he sends checks to everybody in the country and he calls them Trump checks and they come in October just as everyone's casting ballots. He releases oil from the strategic petroleum reserve and gas prices plummet. his new federal reserve chair cuts interest rates, everyone buys homes, things suddenly seem cheaper, and people credit Donald Trump for fixing all of these things all at once. And Republicans don't just hold all those Senate seats we're talking about. They flip Democratic seats and grow their Senate majority.

Democrats somehow come up short in the House, despite all of the strategic benefits, and they have a four-year term for Donald Trump and complete Republican control in Congress. I don't think either of those extremes are the likeliest outcome, and I think that the Republican outcome is even less likely between those two. But there's a big range of possibilities for 2026. I'll say. Well, Shane, thank you very much, and happy New Year to you. Happy New Year.

On Tuesday, in a speech to congressional Republicans, President Trump beseeched them to try to keep control of Congress in this year's midterm elections in order to protect himself from a Democratic majority. You've got to win the midterms. Because if we don't win the midterms, it's just going to be, I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me. I'll get impeached. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to another day. On Tuesday, European officials expressed alarm over the Trump administration's suggestion made in the days since they ousted Nicholas Maduro, that the United States could next take over Greenland. The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?

What is the basis of their territorial claim? That suggestion was reinforced by Trump's top advisor, Stephen Miller, who told CNN that as a matter of national security in its own hemisphere, the United States has a rightful claim to Greenland. For the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously Greenland should be part of the United States. And so that's a conversation that we're going to have as a country.

In an unusual joint statement, signed by leaders from Denmark, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Poland, European officials rejected Miller's logic and declared that Greenland's future should be determined only by Denmark and the people of Greenland. Today's episode was produced by Jessica Chong, Astha Chothervedi, and Caitlin O'Keefe. It was edited by Rachel Quester,

contains music by Dan Powell and Alicia Baitube, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Babaro. See tomorrow. on.