5 Things To Watch In The First Primaries Of The 2026 Midterms

The first primaries of the 2026 election cycle kick off in North Carolina, Texas and Arkansas on Tuesday, with both Democratic and Republican primary voters getting first crack at saying where their parties should go in the second Trump era.

The biggest races are in Texas, including two competitive Senate primaries. On the Democratic side, state Rep. James Talarico and Rep. Jasmine Crockett are battling in a match-up of two politicians whose online profiles dwarf their offline power. On the GOP side, incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is expected to be forced into a runoff against state Attorney General Ken Paxton. 

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Republicans fear they will end up with a battle between the populist Talarico and Paxton, a far-right Trump ally whose numerous scandals might make him weak enough to give Democrats their best shot at winning the state in three decades. 

Elsewhere in Texas, mid-decade redistricting has led to a host of incumbent members of Congress – Democrats Al Green and Julie Johnson, along with Republican Tony Gonzales and Dan Crenshaw – facing surprisingly tough battles to reclaim their party’s nomination.

And North Carolina, a super PAC backed by the artificial intelligence industry is shaping the next marquee battle in the ongoing war between progressives and centrists in the Democratic Party.  

What about Arkansas? Well, there’s not a lot interesting happening in Arkansas. Sorry, Arkansans.

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Here are five things HuffPost is watching today: 

The AI Wars Start In North Carolina

The first time Rep. Valerie Foushee defeated Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam in a primary, it was in part because of support from super PACs closely linked to AIPAC. If she repeats the feat in 2026, it will be in part because of super PACs linked to the artificial intelligence industry. 

The battle between the more establishment-aligned Foushee and Allam, a progressive, is shaped by both a longstanding Democratic Party divide on Israel and a more recent one over how to regulate artificial intelligence and data centers. 

Foushee disavowed support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last year. But that wasn’t enough to stop a new anti-AIPAC super PAC, American Priorities, from spending over $1 million to support Allam’s challenge. At the same time, Jobs and Democracy PAC – which is part of a network of super PACs funded by the AI firm Anthropic and is backing candidates who support some level of regulations on the technology – is spending heavily to boost Foushee.

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Allam has made much of Foushee’s support from Jobs and Democracy, and released an ad on Monday noting Anthropic was used in Trump’s attack on Iran over the weekend. 

“As Election Day approaches, you will see nearly $2 million of ads for my opponent, funded by AI-backed super PACs – the same AI corporation who powered Trump’s attacks on Iran – while my opponent takes donations from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics,” Allam says in the ad.

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Progressives feel they got off to a strong start in 2026 with Analilia Mejia’s victory in a special election primary in New Jersey last month. An Allam win would continue their momentum.

The race between Foushee and Allam isn’t the only contest where AI industry-backed PACs are spending money ahead of Tuesday ― another PAC backed by OpenAI is supporting Republican candidates in Texas ― but it will be a vivid early test of their political power.

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Electability Test In Texas

During the first Trump presidency, Democratic primary voters prioritized the ability to beat Republicans in general elections above almost everything else. This led to moderates and establishment-backed candidates nearly sweeping key primaries throughout 2018 and 2020, culminating in Joe Biden’s come-from-behind victory for the Democratic nomination.

Republican voters have long had a different view. Since the Tea Party era, the party’s voters have ignored their leaders’ claims about who can win and who can’t, and have only had their instincts backed up by President Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory.

These broad dynamics are driving GOP worry about the race, as they fear those two things coming to a head: That Talarico will be able to convince voters Crockett’s brashness will be a general election liability, even as Cornyn struggles to convince Republican voters that Paxton – who has already won statewide three times – would potentially lose the Senate race.

Talarico has avoided making direct claims about Crockett’s electability. A super PAC backing him has been less shy, airing ads highlighting the GOP’s desire to face Crockett in November.

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Crockett has pushed back with her own arguments about turning out Black and Latino voters who don’t normally vote in the state, an approach many Democrats felt they tested out extensively in 2018 to 2022 with little success – see Stacey Abrams’s losses in Georgia.

“The goal has consistently been to go and get people that aren’t a part of the base,” Crockett said in an interview with Vox, describing her view of past Democratic campaigns in the state. “And then what happens is: The base feels like they are not getting courted, and instead they’re being ignored. And there’s an assumption that they will come out.”

But with Democratic voters’ opinions of the party establishment in tatters, a Crockett victory would send a strong message that primary voters no longer value Washington leaders’ judgment about who can win general elections.

Republicans Find Their Red Line

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales is facing a strong challenge from Brandon Herrera, a YouTube gun nut known as “The AK Guy,” amid allegations that Gonzales had an affair with a staffer who set herself on fire and died.

Several of Gonzales’ House Republican colleagues have said he should suspend his campaign, and some have even said he should resign, but the third-term moderate has soldiered on, insisting he had no affair, even as text messages show he asked the staffer for a “sexy pic” and made advances in late-night messages.

Gonzales has claimed he’s the target of a coordinated political attack, and even cast an attempt by his late staffer’s surviving family to reach a workplace misconduct settlement as “blackmail.”

In an interview with HuffPost, an attorney representing the family called the blackmail claim “a last act of desperation of a politician who’s going down the toilet.”

But Gonzales’ troubles didn’t start with his alleged philandering. Herrera first ran against Gonzales in 2024 after he voted for a bipartisan gun reform bill in 2022 in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, which is in the 23rd district. Gonzales also voted against a hardline immigration bill.

So while Herrera is now favored, it wasn’t actually a scandal that got Gonzales in trouble. It was voting against the party line.

Identity Politics After Biden

More explicitly than most candidates in recent years, Crockett has used her identity to bat away criticism. Arguments about her ability to win in a general election, she has said, are a “dog whistle” aimed at “tearing down a Black woman.”

For a significant segment of the party, defeating this worldview is mission critical heading into the 2028 election. “If James wins, it will show that 2028 can be about something other than race and gender,” said one Talarico ally, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But Crockett supporters argue D.C. Democrats want to move past identity politics because they have limited political imaginations.

“She’s not fiery just because that’s her personality. She is articulating the sentiments of people who are being discriminated against on a daily basis in our society,” said Steve Phillips, a Democratic strategist and donor who supports Crockett. “The Democratic Party elite doesn’t grasp or appreciate that energy and that force, and by extension, they just don’t appreciate the political potential of tapping into that energy.”

At the same time, the possibility of seeing Crockett and Foushee defeated on the same day is alarming Black political leaders, who feel the party’s prioritization of Black candidates during the first Trump and Biden administrations is pivoting, giving way to new emphases on age, ideology and outsider status.

“There’s a feeling of being threatened. From Obama to Clinton to Biden to Kamala, you’ve had either Black candidates or candidates with very strong ties to the Black parts of the Democratic establishment leading the party,” said Adam Carlson, a Democratic pollster based in New York. “There’s a feeling we need a seat at the table, and that we’re not going to have generational change at the expense of Black political representation.”

Beyond Democrats’ Ideological Wars

Beyond the battle between Foushee and Allam, most of the Democratic primaries on Tuesday don’t neatly match up with the party’s standard center vs. left ideological battle. A race between Reps. Christian Menefee and Al Green for a Houston-based seat, for instance, is much more about the generational gap between the two men – Menefee is 37, Green is 78 – than it is about any policy difference.

And notably, the race between Talarico and Crockett has scrambled ideological lines. The moderates and progressive political professionals who fill their days arguing with each other on social media have reached an unexpected point of agreement: They’re almost uniformly supporting Talarico.

This reflects, in part, Talarico’s combination of left-wing and centrist messaging: He emphasizes populist economic messaging while disavowing pure partisan conflict and using his faith – he’s a seminary student – to reach out to right-of-center voters.

“Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, whether you’re a progressive or a conservative, the real fight in this country is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom,” Talarico says in his stump speech.

But it also reflects a distrust of Crockett’s worldview, which tends to dismiss criticism of the Democratic Party as either the plotting of a biased media or evidence of racism and sexism among the electorate, while showing little desire to reflect on the party’s shortcomings.

Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said his group endorsed Talarico because the race will be a “table-setter” for both 2028 and for Democratic Senate primaries later this election cycle.

“We will get an early harbinger of whether bold, inspiring economic populous will defeat merely anti-Trump figures in future primaries,” Green said. “If he wins, it will put a bounce in the step and money in the pockets of other populists.”

But Crockett’s intense partisanship did power her to social media fame and strong fundraising, indicating it has at least some appeal to the Democratic Party’s base. A victory for her could indicate the path to the 2028 nomination will involve more ferocious attacks on the GOP than innovative policy ideas.

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