We tracked every candidate in the 2026 primaries. Here's who voters are nominating.
Our original dataset tracks endorsements across every congressional and gubernatorial race to reveal how party leaders and ideological groups are faring.
Graphics for this article were edited by Katie Marriner.
All eyes are turning to the 2026 midterms, but while November is still months away, some of the most important battles of this year’s election cycle are already underway in the primaries. These intraparty contests tell us not just which candidates will appear on the ballot this fall, but which ideological factions, political figures, and interest groups are influencing the future direction of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Through June 30, nearly 2,000 people have appeared on the ballot this year in Democratic and Republican primaries for Senate, House and governor across 31 states. Carrying on the tradition of FiveThirtyEight’s endorsement-tracking primary project that began in 2018 and ran through the 2024 election cycle, we are compiling primary race endorsements from several key endorsers — President Donald Trump, progressive leaders and organizations, party committees, women’s groups, and Israel-focused advocacy groups — to examine what types of candidates each party is actually nominating, and what that might tell us about where the parties are headed.
So far, our data tells us that both parties are being pulled by several highly energized factions. As Democrats have duked it out over Israel policy and generational change, progressives are winning primaries in numbers rivaled only by their banner year in 2018, challenging moderate and longstanding liberal members alike. Among Republicans, Trump’s backing has become his party’s gold standard — though his endorsement strategy helps explain his nearly bulletproof record. And women’s groups on both sides of the aisle are seeing success, but partisan gaps remain large, as female candidates continue to consolidate gains in the Democratic Party, while Republican women struggle to keep pace.
The table below summarizes primary win rates among all candidates endorsed by each of the groups and individuals we are tracking, through the primaries held on June 30.
Of course, there are still hundreds of primary contests yet to come. We’ll continue tracking every endorsement and every outcome to check in on how each group does at the end of the primary cycle, so stay tuned.
Paid subscribers to 50+1 get access to premium analysis, plus sortable tables and complete data access on our polling website. If you want to follow the 2026 cycle with the best data at your fingertips, become a paid subscriber.
Progressive candidates are on a heater
There’s no question that it’s been a good year for progressive candidates. Well-funded and little-known challengers alike have toppled Democratic incumbents or bested competitive primary fields across the country, sparking comparisons to the 2018 progressive wave that ushered “The Squad” into Congress. Across most progressive organizations and politicians we track, around two-thirds of their non-incumbent endorsees have prevailed in primaries so far this year. Of course, there was some overlap in who each group endorsed, but all in all, 51 non-incumbent candidates have been endorsed by at least one progressive group we tracked, and 28 of them won or advanced to the general election, for an overall success rate of 55 percent.
These numbers are roughly in line with the success rates of progressive endorsees in recent cycles going back to at least 2018. More notable, though, is the number of progressive candidates that are winning primaries. Every endorser we track has already seen a higher number of its non-incumbent endorsees win just halfway through the 2026 primary season than the total number of candidates they endorsed in 2024, and many are right on the heels of their total numbers from the last midterm cycle in 2022. That means more progressives will appear on general election ballots in November and, most likely, in Congress next year.
One major story surrounding the progressive movement this year has been the number of aggressive challenges to longstanding Democratic incumbents, including not only moderates but older progressive-leaning members too. Three Democratic incumbents have lost their primaries to progressive challengers this year: Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman in New York, and Diana DeGette in Colorado. Notably, all three are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; instead of attacking them broadly from their ideological left, their challengers focused specifically on each incumbents’ support for Israel — we’ll talk more about those dynamics later — as well as Espaillat and DeGette’s ages. Another CPC member, North Carolina Rep. Valerie Foushee, narrowly fended off a similar progressive challenge by just one point, and almost certainly benefitted from an early primary that took place in March, before the momentum behind progressive candidates really began to build.
California also saw a wave of generational challengers this year, and some of the most successful were progressives: Three incumbents in California — Jimmy Gomez, Doris Matsui, and Mike Thompson — each advanced through their nonpartisan top-two primaries with less than an outright majority of the vote and will still have to go head-to-head with notable progressive challengers in the November general election.
Progressives also saw their share of high-profile losses, but even some of those made a splash and helped shape the party narrative in safe-blue seats. In Colorado’s Senate primary, for example, Julie Gonzales received less institutional support from progressive groups in her longshot bid against Sen. John Hickenlooper, but overperformed by earning 47 percent of the vote despite being outspent more than 10 to 1. And in a slew of crowded open-seat races in Illinois, multiple progressive candidates helped define races and draw big spending, but also frequently split the vote, yielding some wins for more moderate candidates with only a plurality of the vote.
Most of progressives’ activity took place in deep-blue territory, where their candidates tend to have the best chance at winning a general election: Around 80 percent of progressive-endorsed candidates on our list were running in districts rated as “solid Democratic” by the Cook Political Report. However, progressive groups did go head-to-head with the party campaign apparatus to notch a couple key wins on moderate territory.
The DCCC faced intense intraparty criticism for putting money behind Jasmeet Bains in California and David Baldacci in Maine, who both lost to progressive opponents. These swing-seat faceoffs stood alone in our dataset by pitting notable progressive candidates directly against the DCCC, which endorsed exclusively in “tossup” and “lean” seats. Bains was the only DCCC endorsee to date who’s faced a progressive on our list, Randy Villegas, while Baldacci also faced two more progressive candidates, though not ones endorsed by organizations we track. (Elsewhere, all of the committee’s other endorsed candidates won in primaries through June 30, including 18 incumbents and 9 who are vying for open or Republican-held seats.)
Looking ahead to the second half of the primary season, one of the biggest progressive vs. establishment battles of the season will play out in Michigan’s Senate primary, where progressive favorite Abdul El-Sayed faces Rep. Haley Stevens, who’s earned a rare primary endorsement from Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. (His only other endorsee was Gov. Janet Mills in Maine.) Meanwhile, a bounty of House Democrats remain at serious risk of losing to notable progressive challengers.
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Trump’s endorsement is the GOP golden ticket
As we’ve found in the past, Trump has endorsed more primary candidates in each election cycle since his first term as president. As he continues to tout his reputation as a GOP kingmaker, his activity this year continues that trend. Altogether, the president has already endorsed 178 Republicans in primaries held through June 30 — almost as many as the total number he endorsed in 2022 and 2024. Of these, 173 endorsees have won, representing a 97 percent success rate.
As in past cycles, that number is arguably inflated by who Trump chooses to endorse: Most of his picks are incumbents (72 percent of his endorsees), who tend to win primaries at extremely high rates regardless of endorsements, or candidates with no primary opponent at all (41 percent).
Among the 128 incumbents he endorsed, only one lost: Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, who was forced into a runoff but dropped out amid an affair scandal, handing the nomination to Brandon Herrera. Trump endorsed Gonzales before the scandal broke, but seemed to informally back off the endorsement shortly ahead of the election. (After Gonzales dropped out, he endorsed Herrera ahead of the general election.)
Even if we narrow the list to non-incumbents running in a contested primary, Trump’s record drops to a still-strong 41 out of 45 wins, or 91 percent. In two of these races, Trump technically neutralized his losses by endorsing twice: After his pick in Oklahoma’s 1st District advanced to a runoff, the candidate’s campaign collapsed amid (another) affair scandal; Trump then switched his endorsement ahead of the runoff. He also hedged his bets by endorsing both runoff candidates in the South Carolina governor’s race. Interestingly, Trump’s only two other primary endorsement losses also came in gubernatorial races: Iowa and Georgia.
But in Congress, Trump’s endorsement reigned supreme. Campaign committees traditionally play a leading role in recruiting congressional candidates and consolidating support around an eventual nominee, but a look at how the president’s endorsements map onto those made by the committees points to Trump’s dominance there.
The National Republican Congressional Committee has endorsed far fewer House candidates than Trump — just 23 — and boasts a 100 percent success rate. Notably, the committee didn’t endorse against Trump in any instance, and all but three of its endorsees also had Trump’s backing. (Two of those, Reps. David Valadao and Brian Fitzpatrick, were moderate incumbents in uncontested primary races. The other, Laurie Buckhout, won a contested five-way race that saw candidates jockeying to align themselves with Trump.) In one indication of how closely the committee has aligned itself with Trump, earlier this year it rebranded its longstanding “Young Guns” candidate development program, which supports GOP candidates in key battleground districts, as “MAGA Majority,” promising to provide support to candidates who “embody the Trump agenda.”
On the Senate side, the National Republican Senatorial Committee did take a couple swings against Trump, but lost in both cases. NRSC leadership formally endorsed eight candidates — six in open races and two incumbents. The six non-incumbents were also endorsed by Trump and won, while the two incumbents, Sens. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana and John Cornyn in Texas, lost to Trump-backed challengers Julia Letlow and Ken Paxton, respectively.
The circumstances of both Cassidy’s and Cornyn’s losses demonstrate how Republicans have increasingly looked to Trump, not party committees or congressional leaders, for public signals of who the party should rally behind. In both cases, the NRSC endorsed its incumbents in mid-2025, but that did little to head off challengers: In Louisiana, Trump publicly encouraged Letlow to enter the race in January 2026, and in Texas, party leaders reportedly worked for months to convince Trump to back Cornyn, before being snubbed by a late endorsement that seemingly sunk the incumbent’s chances.
Women continue to overperform in Democratic primaries
As we’ve done in cycles past, we took a look at how female candidates are doing in primaries, tracking endorsements by women’s groups and digging into what kinds of races and seats women are running and winning in.
Endorsements by women’s groups — who recruit, train, and support female candidates — were once again a reasonably strong predictor of success for endorsees in both parties. On the Democratic side, EMILYs List has endorsed 34 candidates in primaries held so far this cycle, and 79 percent of them (27 candidates) won their primaries, much higher than the 47 percent win rate for Democratic women overall.
Republican women’s groups did even better. Candidates backed by Winning for Women won or advanced in 92 percent of their races (22 of 24), and Maggie’s List-endorsed candidates won 83 percent of theirs (24 of 29). That’s more than double the 35 percent baseline win rate for all women running in Republican primaries so far this year.
Looking specifically at open primaries — where endorsements tend to have the most value as candidates seek to stand out from the field — EMILYs list endorsees have seen somewhat lower success rates than in recent years, while GOP endorsees have rebounded from a poor showing in 2024. Of course that could change, as many contests remain and these groups endorse selectively. In races so far, EMILYs List has endorsed 22 candidates in open primaries, and won 16 of those (73 percent), Winning for Women endorsees have won six of eight open primaries (75 percent), and Maggie’s List endorsees have won nine of 14 (64 percent).
That endorsement math is one thing. The candidate math is another. And on the candidate supply side, the GOP is still trailing Democrats. So far, 321 out of 983 Democratic primary candidates have been women (33 percent), compared with 168 out of 842 Republican primary candidates (20 percent). Democratic women are even better represented among primary winners, making up 44 percent of their party’s general election nominees so far, compared to just 18 percent of Republican nominees.
That share is fairly stable for both parties compared to the last several congressional election cycles, as shown in the table below, with one exception: Women are just 27 percent of Democrats’ nominees for Senate seats thus far.
Not only are more Democratic women winning primaries; they are also winning in districts where their chances of winning the general election are better. Notably, 54 percent of Democratic nominees in races for congressional tossup seats are women, compared with just 15 percent for Republicans, which is just two candidates. Both of those Republican women are incumbents (Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowa’s 1st District, and Sen. Susan Collins in Maine), while Democrats have so far nominated six non-incumbent women to challenge sitting Republicans in tossup races.
There’s a big partisan gap in women running in safe seats as well. Women are 44 percent of Democratic nominees in solid-blue congressional seats, but just 14 percent of Republican nominees in solid-red seats. That pattern isn’t new: It reflects a much older pattern in how parties recruit women. Historically, women have been tapped to run as “sacrificial lambs” in less winnable races, while the most-winnable seats go to men. Democratic women have broken from that mold in recent cycles, while Republican women still seem stuck in it.
A lack of coordination and broader institutional support from the party could be another reason that Republican women’s success lags behind Democratic women’s. For instance, in Texas’s 34th District, both GOP women’s groups we’re watching backed former Rep. Mayra Flores, who Trump had endorsed in her earlier bid; this time, he endorsed against her, and she lost. Women’s groups also clashed with Trump in two other Texas districts: the 38th, where Winning for Women and Maggie’s List backed different women, and the 10th. Trump’s pick won in these contests, too. This dynamic was present in 2024 as well, when Trump endorsed against notable female candidates in primaries for North Carolina’s 13th District, Kansas’s 3rd District, and Indiana’s race for governor.
On the Democratic side, EMILYs List has also had some endorsement clashes. While they’ve only endorsed against the DCCC once so far in this cycle, they’ve endorsed against at least one progressive group in six races. They’ve also backed the same candidate as a progressive group in four races, and the same candidate as the party committee in 12 contests.
Pro-Israel groups are playing both offense and defense this year
One of the biggest dividing lines among Democrats in this year’s primary cycle this year has been over support for Israel. Pro-Israel groups like AIPAC (and its super PAC, the United Democracy Project), Democratic Majority for Israel, and J Street have each been major players in the primaries so far.
Pro-Israel groups in the last primary cycle made big moves to unseat progressive incumbents, but they’ve found that script flipped on them in at least a few races this year. Much of these groups’ activity has focused on shoring up existing allies in Congress: Each group has endorsed at least 50 incumbents so far, and saw at least a 95 percent success rate. That said, as we mentioned in our discussion of progressive endorsements, pro-Israel groups were on the losing side of some high-profile upsets, with several incumbents that they backed falling to progressive challengers who hammered them for their pro-Israel stances.
Beyond this, all three groups have seen mixed success in backing non-incumbent candidates. But they’ve also taken steps that have made it difficult to draw a clear and cohesive conclusion about the success of their endorsees this year.
That’s perhaps most true of AIPAC, one of the biggest spenders in the entire primary cycle to date and a leading force in opposing progressive candidates. According to our endorsement-tracking system — which counts AIPAC endorsements that are posted directly on its website or direct spending by UDP in support of a candidate — the group has only endorsed two non-incumbent Democrats so far this cycle: Adrian Boafo, who won in Maryland, and Melissa Conyears-Ervin, who lost in Illinois. But AIPAC and UDP support and oppose candidates in lots of other ways, including spending money against a candidate without explicitly endorsing another.
Back in February, for example, the group started off the cycle with a high-profile loss: the special election primary for New Jersey’s 11th District, where it spent over $2 million to oppose Tom Malinowski, largely through ads completely unrelated to his stance on Israel. That strategy is widely seen to have backfired and helped push a more progressive candidate across the finish line.
In other cases, AIPAC’s activity isn’t captured in our dataset because the organization and its allies often funnel their money through shell PACS that can receive funding from other sources besides AIPAC, making it difficult to track.
That was the case for multiple congressional races in Illinois, where AIPAC funneled money into multiple shell PACs with varying degrees of success. In Illinois’s 9th District, the AIPAC-affiliated Elect Chicago Women and Chicago Progressive Partnership PACs each spent millions to unsuccessfully support Laura Fine and oppose more progressive candidates Daniel Biss and Kat Abughazaleh. They also spent a small sum supporting another progressive, Bushra Amiwala, in the same race, in an attempt to split the progressive, pro-Palestinian vote. In the 8th and 2nd districts, Elect Chicago Women and another shell PAC, Affordable Chicago Now, successfully spent huge sums to push Melissa Bean and Donna Miller across the finish line, respectively. But their money couldn’t quite elevate their pick, Melissa Conyears-Ervin, above a crowded field in the 7th District.
AIPAC has also endorsed 66 incumbent Republicans in primaries so far this year, and all but four of them won. The group only backed one GOP challenger, Ed Gallrein in Kentucky’s 4th District, contributing to one of the most expensive primaries to date: the effort to unseat maverick Rep. Thomas Massie, who notably earned the ire of President Trump.
But AIPAC isn’t the only pro-Israel organization playing an active role in primaries this cycle. DMFI has been very successful, with seven of their 10 non-incument endorsees winning in contested races. A smaller organization focused solely on Democratic candidates, DMFI has often overlapped with AIPAC since its founding in 2019, but usually hasn’t played the same role of political boogeyman in primaries, even though it too is a major participant in the shell PAC game.
The third group we tracked, J Street, often breaks from the others. A more liberal pro-Israel group that supports a two-state solution and an end to war in the region, J Street has cast a broader net with its endorsements rather than going all-in on select candidates. In the first half of the year, J Street endorsed multiple candidates in the same race eight times. That’s not necessarily a new strategy for the group, though, and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them this year, even if it muddles their overall success rate. While half of their non-incumbent endorsees won in contested primaries, one of their preferred candidates won all but five of the 22 races of this type that they endorsed in.
J Street-endorsed candidates also performed well when directly up against AIPAC- or DMFI-backed candidates. While several candidates won with both J Street and another group both backing them, candidates endorsed solely by J Street beat out an AIPAC or DMFI pick in four contests. The group’s only loss in these head-to-heads was in California’s 32nd District, where J Street endorsed against incumbent Rep. Brad Sherman, while AIPAC and DMFI supported the congressman.
In the latter half of this primary season, pro-Israel groups will face big tests, particularly in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary where AIPAC is spending heavily to boost Rep. Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed, and in Missouri’s 1st District, where pro-Israel groups played a major role in ousting former Rep. Cori Bush in 2024, and are now opposing her comeback campaign.
We’ll be tracking all of these storylines throughout the rest of the primary season, and we’ll be back in the fall with more comprehensive rundowns for each. We’ll also make our full dataset available for download and reuse at that time.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in accessing our partial data through the June 30 primaries, reach out to us here.
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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article inadvertently classified Julia Letlow as a candidate running in an open primary, but she ran against incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy. The table “Women’s group endorsees tend to do well in primaries” and corresponding text has been updated to reflect this.
Methodology
Endorsement data for this article was pulled from the official websites of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, the Sunrise Movement, Indivisible, Winning for Women, Maggie’s List, EMILYs List, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Democratic Majority for Israel, J Street, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. We also sourced endorsements from Donald Trump on Truth Social, and from Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren on X, Instagram and from news reports. (The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has not formally endorsed any candidates in 2026.)
For this project, we considered an endorsement to be any statement made by Election Day in a race supporting a candidate’s campaign and/or urging people to vote for them. We included endorsements made after an initial primary but before a runoff election with a note.
Additionally, we considered spending in support of a candidate by the United Democracy Project as an endorsement of that candidate by AIPAC, since the UDP explicitly bills itself as the super PAC of AIPAC, and AIPAC rarely, if ever, formally endorses non-incumbent primary candidates.
Candidate information and certified election results were sourced from official state election websites. We did not include races that went to a primary runoff that has not yet been decided. When calculating primary success rates, we generally included candidates who won their partisan primary or advanced to the general election. In California, the top two primary finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general election. Race ratings for individual seats were sourced from the Cook Political Report. Gender for candidates was sourced from the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University.
Historical endorsement data was sourced from FiveThirtyEight’s public datasets.
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