Michael Baro: 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 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.

Annie Carney: Here we come.

Michael Baro: Or I guess here we are. This episode is going to be a road map 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 much time at all and there's a lot 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.

Annie Carney: 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 large part because their party has failed to fix what ails the American economy right now.

Michael Baro: Namely high prices.

Annie Carney: High prices, high utility bills. Americans can look at their receipts and they are not doing well right now.

Michael Baro: Right, the receipts for the failure are literally the receipts.

Annie Carney: 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, healthcare, that has for years been their biggest weakness politically.

Michael Baro: And explain why Republicans are going to be kicking off 2026 on healthcare. 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 stronger when it comes to healthcare.

Michael Baro: 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 and has been for a decade. And you're suggesting that they're going to reinforce that approval for the ACA in the coming days.

Annie Carney: 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 felt 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 in the next couple days?

Annie Carney: 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.

Michael Baro: 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 probably will 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.

Annie Carney: Right? I have to say that Tony Fabrizio, 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.

Annie Carney: 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.

Michael Baro: Well, put this fight over healthcare into the 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.

Annie Carney: So this is the latest chapter in a 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.

Michael Baro: Right? By literally writing Democrats and their voters out of these congressional maps?

Annie Carney: 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.

Michael Baro: So, it's basically set off an arms race that is adding up to pretty much a wash.

Annie Carney: It's not clear that the redistricting battles across the country have given Republicans anywhere near the margin that they would need to feel confident about keeping the House.

Michael Baro: Right? Which means Republicans have to try to win the old-fashioned way, running on their record.

Annie Carney: Right? And they don't have a lot to run on.

Michael Baro: They've had full control in Washington for a year now, and they've really only passed one bill, the big beautiful bill.

Annie Carney: Which is something.

Michael Baro: It's something. And they want to highlight the tax cuts, but that bill also included deep cuts to Medicaid that affect their voters.

Annie Carney: Right?

Michael Baro: So, it was an unproductive Congress. They've basically said yes to everything that the White House wants or 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 completely in the dark about. They've given up their power and they've just become miserable in the process.

Annie Carney: So, the morale in the House is terrible. And when Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she was resigning and leaving early, a lot of her colleagues privately felt jealous, they would tell me 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?

Annie Carney: So what she did is, 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, your voters elected you to serve out your term. So I don't think anyone else will follow her out early. But a lot of people are choosing not to run again.

Don Bacon: Today, I am announcing I'm not running for reelection. One of the biggest examples this year would be Don Bacon.

Don Bacon: Suddenly I feel emotional. It's been a great 10 years.

Annie Carney: He's an old-fashioned Republican, a moderate from Nebraska. And he announced that he will retire. That's a huge blow to Republicans chances of keeping the House.

Michael Baro: Why?

Annie Carney: Because that seat will likely go to a Democrat in the next election.

Michael Baro: Right?

Annie Carney: But it's not just moderates like Don Bacon who are leaving Congress. We've seen some lawmakers who call themselves ultra maga head for the exits. Elise Stefanik in the days before Christmas said she's going to retire at the end of her term.

新闻记者: 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 Stefanik said is just unheard of.

Annie Carney: 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.

Mike Johnson: I don't exactly know why Elise won't just call me. I texted her yesterday. She's upset.

Annie Carney: Privately. She's been frustrated with Donald Trump and his treatment of her. You have Nancy Mace.

新闻记者: Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina has an op-ed in the New York Times entitled, "What's the point of Congress?"

Annie Carney: 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 reelection, trying to run for governor of South Carolina instead." So, those two women really speak to how demoralized a lot of Republicans, even those who have fashioned themselves after Trump, are feeling right now.

Michael Baro: 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 Stefanik retiring and I assume the seats will 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?

Annie Carney: 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, I think for Republicans in competitive districts, the strategy will 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."

Michael Baro: Right?

Annie Carney: 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 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 Mamani 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, 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 really bad?

Michael Baro: Right. 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 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 serious investigations and demanding information from all 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.

Annie Carney: Right. Thus the Republican dread.

Michael Baro: Correct.

Michael Baro: Well, Annie, thank you for that. I appreciate it.

Annie Carney: Thank you for having me. Happy New Year.

Michael Baro: Cheers.

Michael Baro: After the break. Shane Goldmacher 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?

Shane Goldmacher: 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 the Democrats were hoping for at the end of Donald Trump's first year.

Michael Baro: 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...

Shane Goldmacher: Trump Kennedy Center.

Michael Baro: Yeah, Trump Kennedy Center, 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, right?

Shane Goldmacher: 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, historically, the party in power loses seats in the midterms, right? And the margins Republicans have are so small and so slim that even a non-wave year should give Democrats a majority.

Michael Baro: 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.

Shane Goldmacher: And so the environment is the reason for optimism right now for Democrats. But the anxiousness comes from some of the other factors which is 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 overperform 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.

Michael Baro: 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 tossup 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 the extension of the conversation we've been having with you for years? The fact that there's been so much partisan gerrymandering, there really aren't any purple seats left.

Shane Goldmacher: It's partly partisan gerrymandering. It's also 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 jerrymander people, they've self-selected into...

Michael Baro: Right, we talked about this, the self gerrymandering.

Shane Goldmacher: 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.

Michael Baro: What else beyond a map that makes it hard for anybody to pick up all that many seats will make Democrats anxious about 2026?

Shane Goldmacher: 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?

Shane Goldmacher: 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 an important factor. We said the Democrats have a good chance to take the House. It's hard for them to take the Senate at the same time. Why? Republicans have 53 seats in the Senate, and there aren't 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 even if they won all three of those states, Democrats are still not back in the majority. That would only get them back to 50.

Michael Baro: Right? And 50 is not enough when the president is Republican because JD Vance would break the tie in favor of Republicans.

Shane Goldmacher: 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.

Michael Baro: 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 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 like Maine?

Shane Goldmacher: There's a number of lanes 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 or the next generation? And one of the places that that is playing out is in Maine.

Janet Mills: You know, my father was a seventh generation mayor who stood up for people who couldn't stand up for themselves.

Shane Goldmacher: You've got the two-term Democratic governor who's seen as a moderate. Janet Mills, the perfect vision of what a traditional top recruit is.

Janet Mills: Trump rips away health care from millions of Americans and drives up costs on everything from groceries to housing to trucks and cars.

Shane Goldmacher: 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.

Shane Goldmacher: And yet, she's facing a stiff primary challenge from a guy named Graham Platner, who's gotten a lot of attention.

Graham Platner: When I tell people around here that I'm running for Senate, sometimes the initial reaction is, "What the?" But right there,

Shane Goldmacher: An oyster farmer, a veteran.

Graham Platner: I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps in the Army. I'm not afraid to name an enemy and the enemy is the oligarchy.

Shane Goldmacher: But also has gotten in much controversy over a tattoo that he tattooed over that had Nazi symbolism over a bunch of Reddit posts that he made in the past. And there's a lot in the party 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."

Shane Goldmacher: And guess who held one of the first big rallies for him? Bernie Sanders, who's playing in a number of these Senate primaries. And so, who emerges in these states is a real focus and concern for both sides of the party. Right? There are people who point at Janet Mills say, "Okay, sure, she looks like a great recruit, but guess what? She would be the oldest freshman senator in American history." Hm. So, right after Joe Biden, do you want to go back to that or do you want to take a risk at this young, potentially inspiring guy, but who has said things that are easily clippable in Republican attack ads, self-escribing themselves in ways that cast him as a radical and Republicans love to use that kind of term, especially when candidates have used it in their own words.

Michael Baro: Right? This is what Annie described as the fantasy of Republicans that they can turn the entire 2026 Democratic slate of candidates into far-left out of the mainstream Zora Mamani, Platner on and on.

Shane Goldmacher: Yes, exactly.

Shane Goldmacher: 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 and have a check on Trump. So let's do that. Whoever in each state looks like they are likeliest to win, do that. And let's hold off on this conversation of populist versus progressive versus institutionalist. Let's not have that fight in 2026.

Michael Baro: Reminder, not having that fight in 2024. Pretty problematic.

Shane Goldmacher: Ended up with Trump, right? And so they say that fight's will happen in the presidential primary in 2028. 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.

Shane Goldmacher: 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 and so important and real proxy tests for the direction of the Democratic Party beyond the midterms.

Michael Baro: 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.

Shane Goldmacher: I mean, how much fun can we have with this?

Michael Baro: That's entirely up to you, Mr. Goldmacher. 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.

Shane Goldmacher: Um, that's the best case.

Michael Baro: That's the best case scenario, right? Politically, there is 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 quite extreme.

Michael Baro: Okay. Well, speaking of worst case scenarios, what is it for the Democrats?

Shane Goldmacher: 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 casts ballots. He releases oil from the strategic petroleum reserve and gas prices plummet. His new Federal Reserve chairman 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 4-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.

Michael Baro: Well, Shane, thank you very much and happy new year to you. Happy new year.

Michael Baro: 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.

Michael Baro: 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 adviser, Steven 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 interest, obviously Greenland should be part of the United States. And so, that's a conversation that we're going to have as a country. That's a process. 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, OA Cherved, and Caitlyn O'Keefe. It was edited by Rachel Quester, contains music by Dan Powell and Alicia Etub, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Baro. See you tomorrow.