THE PRIMARY LESSONS FROM 2026 SO FAR…

We’re getting close to the halfway point of the primary season.

At this stage of the calendar, I always find it useful to take inventory. Not because enough has happened to know what November looks like. We aren’t there yet. But enough has happened that you start noticing things. Sometimes those things disappear by Labor Day. Sometimes they end up being the story of the election.

The thing I keep coming back to is how similar the campaigns sound.

Everybody is running on change.

And while that may not seem surprising, the fact that it’s across the board is still noteworthy.

When I say everybody, I mean EV-RY-BUH-DY.

Republicans. Democrats. Incumbents. Challengers. People who have spent years in office and people trying to get there for the first time.

Fight.

Disrupt.

Shake things up.

Take on the establishment.

Take on Washington.

Take on Trump.

Stop socialism in its tracks.

Take on the woke left.

Different targets. Similar tone.

The more races I watch, the more it feels like both parties have arrived at the same conclusion about the electorate. Voters are frustrated. Voters are impatient. Voters want change they can actually see.

That’s not entirely new. We’ve been living through change elections for a while now. You could argue we’ve been in one long change-election cycle since 2014.

But there is something different this time.

Most of the previous change elections still had a restoration argument somewhere in the mix.

“Make America Great Again” was a restoration argument.

“Restore the Soul of America” was a restoration argument.

Different politics. Same basic direction. Something had been lost, and the goal was to get it back.

I don’t hear much of that right now.

What I hear are candidates talking about what comes next.

Build something new.

Break something that isn’t working.

Reform an institution.

Challenge an establishment.

The future is the focus, not the past.

Maybe that’s a subtle distinction. Maybe it isn’t. But I think it’s real.

A Tough Year To Have “Congressman” As Your First Name

Last week saw two sitting members of Congress fail in their attempts to secure gubernatorial nominations.

Randy Feenstra in Iowa.

Dusty Johnson in South Dakota.

And it got me thinking that it’s been a tough year to have “Congressman” as your first name.

Maybe that’s overstating it.

Maybe not.

Looking back through the first half of the cycle, you can add Jasmine Crockett in Texas.

Chip Roy in Texas.

And then Illinois.

Illinois may be the cleanest example that this isn’t simply a Republican phenomenon.

Raja Krishnamoorthi had every traditional advantage.

Money.

Name recognition.

Years of preparation.

A seat in Congress.

And he still lost.

Now, before I get carried away, there are counterexamples.

Ashley Hinson won her Senate nomination in Iowa.

Andy Barr secured the Senate nomination in Kentucky without much drama.

And there are still a handful of House members sitting in runoffs who may ultimately win.

So this isn’t some sort of extinction-level event for congressional ambition.

But the losses are still striking.

Not because they happened.

Because of who they happened to be.

Feenstra.

Dusty Johnson.

Krishnamoorthi.

These weren’t long-shot candidates trying to catch lightning in a bottle. These were candidates who looked, on paper, exactly like the kind of politicians who usually get promoted.

At some point, you stop looking at these races as isolated events and start wondering whether there’s a broader pattern.

So I went looking.

I pulled together every cycle this century and tracked House members who left Congress to run for Senate, governor, attorney general, or another statewide office.

I was looking for evidence that weak promotion years might tell us something about the electorate.

The results were mixed.

Mixed enough that I wouldn’t pretend to have found a predictive indicator.

But interestingly enough, I don’t think this is a coincidence either.

Two of the weakest promotion years this century were 2006 and 2010.

Both ended with a change in House control.

Then 2018 came along and blew up the theory.

Members of Congress actually did pretty well winning nominations that year, and Democrats still took back the House.

So if you’re looking for a neat historical relationship, I didn’t find one.

What I did find was enough evidence to keep watching.

Because there does seem to be something happening with the value of congressional experience.

There was a time when congressional service was almost automatically viewed as preparation for higher office.

Now I’m not so sure.

Washington experience doesn’t seem to carry the same value it once did.

In some places, it may even be a mild liability.

That’s probably because the electorate keeps coming back to the same place. People don’t seem particularly interested in hearing that you know how the system works. They’re more interested in hearing how you’re going to change it.

Which brings me back to the larger point.

Everybody is running on change.

There’s one place where I do think Democratic and Republican primary voters are behaving a little differently.

Republican voters seem drawn to candidates who project a willingness to fight.

Not necessarily the most conservative candidate.

Not necessarily the most pro-Trump candidate.

The candidate who seems most willing to challenge somebody.

Sometimes everybody.

There is still a premium on disruption.

Democratic voters are a little harder to pin down.

Illinois cuts against a lot of easy theories.

So does Texas.

So does Iowa.

What I’ve noticed is that Democratic voters seem somewhat more willing to have a conversation about who can actually emerge from a primary and hold a coalition together.

Sometimes that’s an electability conversation.

Sometimes it’s a consensus conversation.

They’re related, but they’re not exactly the same thing.

Texas felt like an electability conversation.

Iowa did too.

California looked a little different.

After a series of higher-profile candidates stumbled, Xavier Becerra increasingly became the acceptable choice for a lot of Democratic voters. Not because he generated the most excitement. Because he became the candidate most factions could live with.

Good enough is sometimes a powerful argument in a primary.

That’s a different instinct than what we’ve seen in many Republican contests so far.

Of course, we still have a lot of primaries left.

August alone could change some of these impressions.

But the more I look at the first half of the season, the more convinced I am that we’re headed toward our seventh straight change election.

Everything I’ve seen so far points in that direction.

The difference this time is that both parties seem to know it.

The argument isn’t over whether change is needed.

The argument is over who gets to define it.

And then there’s the question that follows every change election.

What happens after the election?

Because voters have been sending roughly the same message for more than a decade now.

Shake things up.

Fix what’s broken.

Do something different.

Washington, meanwhile, has shown a remarkable ability to absorb new members, absorb new movements, and eventually recreate many of the same power structures voters thought they were voting against.

In some ways, that’s been the story of the last decade.

Control of Congress changed.

Movements came and went.

Insurgents arrived.

And yet many of the same leadership structures survived.

Maybe that’s the real question hanging over 2026.

What happens in January?

Do the people elected on promises of disruption actually disrupt anything?

Or does Washington do what Washington usually does and slowly absorb them too?

At some point, voters are going to answer that question.

Maybe that’s when this era of change elections finally ends.

Voters that it represents change too.

What I’m Watching: Star City

As many of you already know, I’ve been a huge fan of alternative histories in general and the TV show For All Mankind specifically. But I haven’t written much about this most recent season of For All Mankind for a reason: I didn’t love it. And after watching Star City, the new spinoff, I now feel better about explaining why.

Frankly, I’m relieved by how much I’m enjoying it.

And I say relieved because it has also reminded me how much I did not enjoy where For All Mankind went.

I know some people loved the last season.

I wasn’t one of them.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out why, because I love the show. Or at least I loved the first few seasons of the show.

And I think I’ve finally figured it out.

I never bought the premise of this past season.

I never bought the idea that enough people would want to stay on Mars that it would become a cause.

That people would fight for the right to stay there instead of living on a planet where you didn’t need a spacesuit to walk outside.

That life on Mars would somehow become preferable to life on Earth.

Every time the show came back to that conflict, I found myself thinking: really?

That’s the hill we’re dying on?

Maybe that’s a failure of imagination on my part.

Maybe some viewers bought it completely.

I didn’t.

And because I didn’t buy the central conflict, I found myself less invested in everything built around it. I do wish this last season of For All Mankind focused more on the Titan mission than the Mars riots, but I digress.

What Star City has reminded me of is what I loved about the early seasons of For All Mankind in the first place.

The competition.

The politics.

The engineering.

The national pride.

The institutional decision-making.

The race itself.

The early seasons worked because I believed in the motivations.

Of course, the Soviets wanted to win.

Of course, NASA wanted to catch up.

Of course, governments would spend money to gain an advantage.

The incentives all made sense.

Star City has taken me back to that version of the universe.

Only a few episodes in, but it feels like the old show again.

Which is funny because the spinoff has actually helped me understand the original.

I don’t think For All Mankind lost me because it became unrealistic.

It’s science fiction. Unrealistic comes with the territory.

It lost me because I stopped believing what the characters wanted.

And once that happens, it’s hard to stay emotionally invested.

The good news is that Star City has me hooked again.

Hopefully that’s a sign the larger franchise can find its way back too.

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