Throughout the 2026 primary season, we’ve been tracking how President Donald Trump’s endorsees fared in their primary elections. And we aren’t the only ones. In today’s political landscape, few endorsements draw as much attention as Trump’s, and that’s in no small part due to the president’s own obsession with his win record. Throughout the cycle, he has taken to Truth Social to celebrate his successful picks. For example, after the primaries in Mississippi and Georgia on March 10, he posted an image touting a perfect win record for his endorsees in those states. On July 22 he wrote, “A BIG NIGHT FOR MAGA IN ARIZONA. ALL WINS!!!” And on August 23 he wrote, “My endorsements are stronger than ever,” sharing stats about his endorsements over the last five election cycles.
Of course, there’s more to glean from Trump’s endorsement record than just those topline victory tallies. Some of his endorsees suffered high-profile losses this year, prompting speculation about whether his endorsement carries the same weight as it once did — particularly in governor’s races. In some races, like the Senate contests in Texas and Georgia, Trump ultimately sided with candidates that many in his party viewed as riskier picks in the general election. And as has long been the case, Trump’s win rate was boosted by a high number of endorsements in less competitive or uncontested races.
To better understand Trump’s endorsement record and what it tells us about his influence within the Republican Party, we analyzed his endorsements across every U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial primary race in 2026. Building on several years of work tracking endorsements by Trump and other key political figures at FiveThirtyEight, we examined not just Trump’s win rate this year, but what kinds of races he weighed in on and where his endorsees won and lost.
This is the third story in our series examining the 2026 primaries. We began with a mid-season update in July, followed by an analysis of progressive groups and their endorsements earlier this month. Now, we turn to Trump’s influence on the GOP primaries.
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Trump is endorsing more than ever
A look at Trump’s endorsement record over the last decade suggests that his political capital has grown along with his willingness to spend it. In each election cycle since 2018, Trump has endorsed more candidates than he did in the cycle before. This year, his role as GOP kingmaker seems more prominent than ever, as candidates actively courted his endorsement and party leaders looked to him to help clear primary fields.
Altogether, Trump made 267 endorsements in 2026 congressional and gubernatorial primaries, 64 more than in 2024 and 77 more than in 2022. And in every year since 2020, at least 94 percent of his primary endorsees have won or advanced.1 Of Trump’s 2026 endorsees, 96 percent won their primaries — just 11 of them lost. That win rate is similar to what we saw in 2024, 2022, and 2020. (It was somewhat lower in 2018, at 88 percent, though he only weighed in on 17 races that cycle.)
As we’ve written before, Trump’s primary win rate is somewhat inflated by his many endorsements of uncontested and incumbent candidates. This cycle, 41 percent of his endorsees faced no opponent in their primaries. Meanwhile, 72 percent were incumbents. And while 2026 saw an unusually high number of incumbent primary losses overall — including three for Trump endorsees — backing incumbents was still a relatively safe bet. Among the 191 incumbents Trump endorsed this year, less than half of them (88) faced at least one challenger, and 85 of those won.
A truer test of Trump’s endorsement power comes by zeroing in on the most competitive category of races: endorsements of non-incumbent candidates in contested primaries. Trump’s win rate in those races was around 8 points lower than his overall record: 61 of 69 won, for a win rate of 88 percent.
Trump tightened his grip on Congress, but his Midas touch was weakest in races for governor
After Trump’s first term ended, the value of his endorsement came into question as he openly clashed with party leaders over key picks. But Trump is now back in office and, at least when it comes to Congress, he’s back in the driver’s seat on his party’s nomination process. As we wrote back in July, Trump’s role as GOP kingmaker has overshadowed some of the traditional roles of congressional campaign committees in recruiting and consolidating support around the party’s eventual nominees. Trump’s team reportedly coordinated closely with party leadership on endorsements this year, including to help shape races seen as critical to maintaining the Republican majority.
Trump also endorsed incumbent members early and often this year, signaling a firm commitment to defending his party’s majority. A whopping 173 of 179 GOP House incumbents who appeared on primary ballots in our dataset earned the president’s backing in their primaries, as did 13 of 16 incumbent GOP senators. Trump weighed in early in almost all of these races: On average, he endorsed incumbent House candidates more than seven months before their primaries, and endorsed Senate incumbents around a year beforehand.
Of the six House members and three senators he didn’t endorse, two were running against each other due to redistricting (Young Kim and Ken Calvert in CA-40) and three were moderates facing no primary challengers: Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, Brian Fitzpatrick in PA-01, and David Valadao in CA-22. Meanwhile, Trump’s decision not to endorse in safe-red TX-02 likely hampered the prospects of incumbent Dan Crenshaw, who’d had previous run-ins with Trump and his allies and lost his primary to Steve Toth.
In the remaining three cases, Trump endorsed directly against congressional incumbents by backing challengers, and he was on the winning side in all three. Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy lost to Trump endorsees Ken Paxton and Julia Letlow, respectively, while Thomas Massie, a frequent Trump critic in the House, lost to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein.
A look at the endorsement records of congressional campaign committees offers another measure of how closely the party’s traditional power centers aligned with — or were forced to defer to — Trump this cycle.
While the National Republican Senatorial Committee clashed with (and lost to) Trump twice by backing both Cornyn and Cassidy, they made both endorsements in mid-2025, before Trump had weighed in on either race. Some Senate Republicans shot back at Trump for his role in unseating their colleagues, but the NRSC didn’t formally endorse against him in any subsequent contests. Beyond those two losses, all 12 of the committee’s other endorsees won, giving it an overall win rate of 86 percent. Ten of those candidates were also backed by Trump, and two ran in races he didn’t weigh in on: Collins in Maine and Michele Tafoya in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Trump’s Senate endorsement record was a perfect 25 for 25.2
In House races, all but three of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s primary endorsees were also endorsed by Trump. The committee endorsed in far fewer races than Trump (just 33) but explicitly aligned its efforts with the president, rebranding its longstanding “Young Guns” candidate development program as “MAGA Majority,” and it didn’t endorse against any of his picks.3 The NRCC and Trump each ended with a 97 percent success rate for their House primary endorsements (32 of 33 for the NRCC).
But Trump’s weak spot this year was in governor’s races, which accounted for only 8 percent of his primary endorsements but 45 percent of his losses. There are 36 governor’s mansions up for grabs this year, and Trump endorsed 22 gubernatorial candidates in 21 states (including a double endorsement in South Carolina). Of those 22 candidates, five lost, giving him a win rate of 77 percent. (Narrowing it to contested races, it was 14 of 19, for a win rate of 74 percent.) Those who did not advance were Burt Jones in Georgia, Randy Feenstra in Iowa, Pamela Evette in South Carolina, Mike Lindell in Minnesota, and Megan Degenfelder in Wyoming.
Trump also had a particularly shaky record when it came to supporting GOP women in gubernatorial primaries this year: Both women he endorsed who made it onto primary ballots lost. And in a few cases, his actions seemed to undercut female candidates — including his own endorsees. In South Carolina, Trump initially endorsed Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, who led in the first round of primary voting — but in the runoff, Trump endorsed her opponent state Attorney General Alan Wilson as well, and Wilson went on to win by more than 35 points. In Arizona, Trump initially backed Karrin Taylor Robson in December 2024. But Trump decided to also back Rep. Andy Biggs when he entered the race in early 2025; Robson isn’t included in our dataset because she dropped out of the race before the primary happened, clearing the field for Biggs.
Meanwhile, Trump declined to endorse frontrunner and eventual winner Sen. Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee, who faced a fellow Trump ally in Rep. John Rose (Trump didn’t endorse either candidate). In another case where a female and male Trump ally faced off, Trump declined to back early favorite Rep. Elise Stefanik in New York’s gubernatorial primary. There, he waited until Stefanik withdrew to immediately endorse Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who advanced to the general uncontested.
Beyond the disproportionate number of governors on this short list of unsuccessful primary endorsements, it’s worth noting that many of them came with some unusual circumstances. Several of Trump’s losing House endorsees, including all three incumbents, faced personal controversies or ethics investigations. Others received Trump’s backing unusually late: He endorsed both Rep. Randy Feenstra in Iowa’s gubernatorial race and former Trump administration official Catalina Lauf in FL-19 within a week of their primaries, prompting speculation that his support came too late to make a difference. Meanwhile, four of the 11 losses came in races that went to runoffs, including SC-Gov, where Trump endorsed both candidates, and OK-01, where Trump switched his endorsement and his initial endorsee, scandal-plagued pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, withdrew before the runoff was held.
How does Trump’s endorsement play in November?
While Trump’s endorsement undoubtedly helped propel some candidates to wins in the 2026 GOP primaries, even a strong primary win doesn’t guarantee success in the general election — and the backing of a deeply unpopular president may actually be seen as a liability.
Two key Senate races offer high-profile test cases for controversial Trump endorsees. Many Republicans objected to Trump’s backing of Ken Paxton in Texas and Mike Collins in Georgia, as both came with political baggage. Paxton has been dogged by longstanding allegations of corruption during his time as Texas attorney general, including a nine-year legal battle over securities fraud and a 2023 impeachment by the Texas House following a whistleblower lawsuit by his former deputies. Polling shows Paxton locked in a tight race with Democrat James Talarico in a state Trump carried by double digits in 2024. And in Georgia, polls suggest Rep. Mike Collins faces an uphill battle against Sen. John Ossoff, whose campaign has repeatedly called attention to Collins’ history of inflammatory rhetoric and associations with white nationalists, as well as a House ethics investigation against him.
Meanwhile, Trump-backed candidates in races across the country are now walking a political tightrope by subtly distancing themselves from Trump, with some downplaying his general election endorsement, breaking with him on key policies, or removing references to him from their campaign sites. Ultimately, GOP candidates largely viewed Trump’s endorsement as a golden ticket in the primaries, but as the general election nears, many seem wary it could turn into golden handcuffs come November.
If you’re interested in digging into the data used in this analysis yourself, you can access and download our complete primary endorsements datasets for both Republicans and Democrats here.
Cooper Burton contributed research for this piece.
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.
Methodology
Endorsement data for this article and the accompanying dataset was sourced from Donald Trump’s posts on Truth Social; the official websites of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Campaign Committee, Winning for Women, Maggie’s List, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and news reports.
For this project, we considered an endorsement to be any statement made by Election Day supporting a candidate’s campaign and/or urging people to vote for them in the primary election. We included, with a note, endorsements made after an initial primary but before a runoff election. We did not include any endorsements made after primaries (i.e., general election endorsements).
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 and AP certified election results. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire, results were not yet certified, and the dataset includes pre-certified results as of Oct. 3, 2026. The dataset excludes Louisiana’s all-party primaries for U.S. House, which are held on the same day as the general election (Nov. 3, 2026). The dataset includes one special election: South Carolina’s Aug. 11 Republican primary for U.S. Senate, which was precipitated by the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham. That special election determined the GOP candidate for the Nov. 3 general election.
When calculating primary success rates, we included candidates who won their partisan primary or advanced to the November general election. In California and Washington, the top two primary finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general election. In Alaska, the top four finishers, regardless of party, advance. In those states, we considered a candidate to be “uncontested” if no other Republican was on the ballot in their primary; candidates who were the only Republican to advance out of the primary to the general election were classified as having “won” their primary, while those who advanced as one of multiple Republicans were classified as having “advanced.” Primary percentages in Maine reflect the results of the first round of ranked-choice voting.
We classified candidates as incumbents if they were actively serving in the same position they were running for at the time of their primary, including U.S. House members who ran in a different district than their current one.
Race ratings for individual U.S. House and Senate seats reflect FiftyPlusOne’s forecast ratings, while gubernatorial race ratings were sourced from the Cook Political Report, both as of Oct. 1, 2026. 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.
Footnotes
We define winning as a candidate winning their partisan primary or advancing to the general election. In California and Washington state, the top two vote-getters regardless of party move on to the general election. In Alaska, the top four vote-getters move on, regardless of party. Our dataset excludes Louisiana’s all-party primaries for U.S. House, which will be held on Nov. 3, 2026.
This includes the South Carolina Aug. 11 Republican special primary, which was precipitated by the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham. That special election determined the GOP candidate for the Nov. 3 general election.
NRCC endorsees who didn’t also have Trump’s backing were Fitzpatrick, Valadao, and Laurie Buckhout — who won a five-way contest in NC-01 where candidates all broadly aligned themselves with Trump. The NRCC’s only losing endorsee was Amir Hassan, who was also endorsed by Trump in MI-08.