Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast for Monday, February 9th, 2026. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, a midterms temperature check. We are just somehow only a month away from the first primary elections of this midterm season.
And already a record number of House lawmakers have decided that they are not running again. So, Domenico, I want to start big picture here. Lay out the landscape for the Senate and the House right now as we see it.
Well, you know, there are, you know, about a third of the Senate is up every two years. They have six year terms, but only about 10 seats this year that are truly competitive seats. And because of some Democratic recruiting targets, they feel a little bit better about their potential capability of being able to take over the Senate.
But it's really a long shot at this point because Republicans have a three-seat majority and Democrats would need to pick up a gain of four seats to be able to take control of the Senate. because Trump is president and J.D. Vance as vice president comes in to break ties.
OK, so they would need to win basically every seat they currently have and then pick up four other Republican seats to pick up the Senate. Is that right?
They need a net gain of four. So between wins and losses of their own and wins and losses of Republicans, they need a net gain of four. And what about the House? Well, the House, you know, it's a razor thin majority for Republicans right now. You know, Republicans can only afford to lose two seats before they're looking at being back in the minority.
And that goes a lot more with the national mood. Republicans have had a huge advantage because of gerrymandering over the years where a lot of the districts in the country lean a little bit more toward the right. But that gap has actually been closing in recent years. So that gap is not quite as big, but we have fewer and fewer competitive districts.
So the universe of competitive seats is smaller than it ever has been. But long story short, things are starting to tip in Democrats direction because midterm elections are usually a referendum on the president.
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Chapter 2: What is the current landscape of the Senate and House races?
Trump has had a really bad month. He's been under. 40% for his job approval rating in our NPR PBS News Marist poll since November. Affordability still a big issue in the country. People feeling like Trump is not focused on that as much as he should be. That has a tendency to depress the base. So you don't get as many people to turn out to vote.
And Republicans have had issues turning out conservatives when Trump's not on the ballot. And independents are lining up with Democrats on almost every issue in very strong ways. So that makes it really hard when in those swing districts, Independence are so important. And they're, you know, Trump is really proving toxic to independence.
Right. So there's all these indicators pointing seemingly towards Democrats right now. And another one of those indicators, right, Stephen, is retirements, because more Republican incumbents at this point have announced that they're going to not seek their seat in 2026. Can you tell us more about that?
Yeah, so I, one of many spreadsheets that I have, have a retirement tracker that you can look at online that I keep updating every day, it almost feels like. Right now we're up to 63 current members of Congress who say that they don't plan to return to their seat next year.
Some of them are retirements, some of them are people who are in the House trying to run for Senate, and some of them are people trying to go back to their states to run as governor. And you have also one House member running for Attorney General of their state. But this is notable for a few reasons. One, this is a record number of people who say they're not coming back.
They are announcing it a record early amount of time before Election Day, and that doesn't even account for the fact that many of these incumbents might lose in the primaries or in the general election. It's important to note, though, Miles, there's always turnover, especially in these midterm years when, as Domenico mentioned, the party in power tends to have a rough time.
There are more Republicans planning to leave than Democrats, and many of those are notable names in Congress, longtime party leaders like Democrat Nancy Pelosi, Republican Mitch McConnell. So it's not just some of these minor players that we're talking about here.
Can you dig in a little bit more on the reasons for why people say they're not running for reelection? I mean, is this just I feel like I've talked to congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt a lot about like, this also just currently in the current moment feels like a bad job. Like, is a lot of this just members of Congress aren't having very much fun right now? Or what are the reasons?
Well, I can't imagine being in Washington right now is a very, very fun place to be. Like Domenico mentioned, it's a narrow majority in the House, narrow majority in the Senate. With the lack of competitive races, that's not likely to change even if who's in charge changes hands.
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Chapter 3: What factors are influencing voter turnout in the upcoming midterms?
Then Alaska and Ohio, where Democrats got pretty good recruits that are leaning toward Republicans at this point, but could be ones that Democrats hope to play in.
Domenico, the podcast gods have given you the second pick in the first annual Midterms What to Watch for draft. Where are we going?
Well, right now, at least this point in the calendar, I'm really interested in Texas. And not just because I'm married to a Texan and I hear a lot about what's going on in Texas, but Texas is also interesting because there's four House seats that are competitive, likely toss-ups or leans.
Three of those are Democratic-held seats, so Democrats are going to have to hold on to some of those and be able to then try to go on offense. some of those places, not to mention redistricting in Texas and seeing how those districts shake out, how new people come in or don't. And also the Senate race, because there's a primary coming up in that Senate race very shortly next month. And that's
John Cornyn seat, the longtime senator who is mostly seen as like, you know, a traditional George W. Bush kind of Republican has never been a real like bomb throwing, you know, pro Trump candidate. But he's found a different issue this time around that has really taken the entire state by storm, focusing not on affordability, but on Sharia law.
In fact, here's some of the ad that he's been running quite widely.
No organization that supports terrorists should receive taxpayer benefits. And Sharia law has no place in American courts or communities.
Feels like a 2003 kind of throwback post 9-11. And he's not the only candidate in the state who's running these ads that are, quote, anti-Sharia law. And a lot of it. It just comes down to the fact that there's a planned development in Plano, North Dallas, where you are going to have a mosque built and several homes that will be built around this mosque.
The developers say that anybody's allowed to be there and anybody's allowed to be in that development. But Republicans have really run with it and are running on it in multiple races.
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Chapter 4: How many incumbents are retiring and what does it mean for the elections?
where the race stands in November.
And it's a state, like you said, with an open Senate race that's held by a Democrat, Gary Peters, retiring in that race. And there's four competitive House races, which is among the most for any state. So, you know, that's going to be a real key place to see how the country has moved, especially since Trump won the state in 2024.
Stephen, you're on the clock again with the fourth pick.
My fourth pick is North Carolina. It has the first primary of the year, along with Texas, like we talked about. So it's going to be a key place to really get a sense of where the electorate is in the early part of 2026. You have a House primary in the Research Triangle area where you've got a younger generation Democrat trying to challenge an existing Democrat from the left.
You have the gerrymandering aspect to it with what they've done with Don Davis, the Democrat in the northern part of North Carolina. And you also have a sleeper pick in western North Carolina where there's a very localized issue of Hurricane Helene recovery that is kind of shaping things up under the hood that you wouldn't necessarily think about looking at just top level data.
OK, a really good pick. Domenico, fifth pick. Go for it.
Well, I'm going to pick one here that I think I'm stealing from someone else, and that's from Stephen because he lives in Georgia. Well, I'm going to take Georgia and that Senate race because I think that Senate race is probably the top one to watch whether or not there could be a Democratic chance at all. They probably have to hold on to that Senate seat.
That's with John Ossoff, the current senator in that state. And I'm also watching that race – because of AI and this whole new sort of use of deep fakes and campaigns.
There was an ad that was run by Mike Collins, who's a congressman currently, and he ran an ad with a deep fake of John Ossoff with a really tiny disclosure in the bottom that a lot of people probably missed that said that this was generated by AI. But it had Ossoff saying, you know, I don't understand farming because The only time I've ever seen a farm is on Instagram. And it looks kind of hokey.
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