Midwest red states are back in play for Democrats

The heartland Democrat is making a comeback.

Democrats this year are seriously contesting more races for governor and senator across the industrial Midwest and Farm Belt than at any point since the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The party still faces substantial skepticism from many heartland voters, especially on cultural issues, but frustration over the high cost of living has loosened the GOP’s grip on the middle of the country. The two parties are locked in competitive governor and/or Senate races not only in traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan and Wisconsin, but also in states that moved solidly red since Obama’s era — including Ohio, Iowa, and maybe even Nebraska and Kansas.

“These states are all on the playing field,” says David Kochel, a longtime GOP strategist who has worked in Iowa and elsewhere across the region.

Each race presents some unique local dynamics. But the common theme is the erosion of President Donald Trump’s support in states that almost all went in his favor in 2024 — including a notable decline among the working-class White and rural voters who represent such an outsize share of the electorate in these places.

“They were sold a bill of goods in 2024 that their life was going to get easier — and it’s got a hell of a lot harder,” says Eva Kemp, director of paid media and partnerships at American Bridge, a Democratic advocacy group that focuses on recapturing working-class voters.

Across this broad battlefield, the key races may turn on whether Republicans can remind conservative-leaning voters of why they have grown so skeptical of Democrats since Obama’s day — or if Democrats can keep them focused on their immediate disenchantment with Trump and the economy.

“In the first Trump term what you would see in rural areas is people whispering to you, like, ‘I don’t want anyone to know I’m a Democrat,’” says Heidi Heitkamp a former Democratic Senator from North Dakota and founder of the One Country Project, a group promoting the party’s revival in rural America. “Now there are more and more people willing to say, ‘This is not normal, this is not right, and you know better.’”

When Barack Obama took office, the industrial heartland and the Farm Belt remained highly competitive between the two parties.

Different analysts use different boundaries when describing which states fit under those headings. But one definition, running from West to East, might include North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas; Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri; Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania (which emphatically does not like to be classified as part of the Midwest, but usually behaves like it politically.)

In 2009, Democrats controlled 18 of the 26 Senate seats from those 13 states, and eight of their 13 governorships. It might seem unimaginable today, but Democrats then held both Senate seats in North Dakota, as well as single seats in South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Indiana. Obama carried eight of those 13 states in 2008. At that point, “people were less tribal and more willing to reward performance,” says Heitkamp.

What followed was a decade of decline for Democrats. The big blow was the 2010 midterm backlash against Obama’s tumultuous first two years. In 2010, Democrats lost Senate seats in North Dakota, Indiana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and even Illinois, Obama’s home state. Republicans simultaneously flipped control of governor’s mansions in Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Obama rallied to run well across the region in his 2012 reelection. But Democrats then suffered further Senate losses there in 2012, 2014 and especially 2018 (when Heitkamp and incumbents in Missouri and Indiana were ousted).

Today, after all these shifts, the partisan balance in the Senate has inverted from 2009: Republicans now hold 18 of these states’ 26 Senate seats. Republicans also control 7 of the 13 governorships, compared to five when Obama took office. Heitkamp says the growing willingness of Republicans to support federal farm subsidies, and the Democratic Party’s turn left on social issues, both accelerated the reversal.

At the presidential level, Democrats have fallen just as hard. In 2024, Kamala Harris lost all these states except reliably blue Illinois and Minnesota, with Trump’s share of the vote soaring to 55% or more in the former battlegrounds of Ohio and Iowa. For dazed Democrats emerging from 2024, the heartland looked more like a wasteland.

Two years later, Democrats have their best opportunity in years to regain a foothold in the Midwest.

In governor’s races, Democrats are strongly favored to hold seats in Pennsylvania and Illinois (behind incumbents Josh Shapiro and J.B. Pritzker) and Minnesota (where Sen. Amy Klobuchar is heavily favored to succeed Tim Walz, who has been weakened by the state’s welfare fraud scandal.) In Michigan, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is favored over Republican John James in an open seat race.

After David Crowley’s dramatic comeback primary victory over socialist Francesca Hong last week, Democratic strategists believe the Milwaukee County executive holds a better hand than Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany for Wisconsin’s open seat. Democrats haven’t elected a governor since 2006 in either Iowa or Ohio. But in Iowa, Democrat Rob Sand, the state auditor, is in a strong position against Republican Zach Lahn. In Ohio, Democrat Amy Acton, the former state Health Department director, is locked in a tight race with former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Democrats believe they remain competitive in the race to succeed outgoing Democratic Gov. Laura Kelley in Kansas and consider Nebraska a “sleeper” opportunity against GOP Gov. Jim Pillen.

In Senate races, the Democrats’ best opportunities to flip Republican seats are in Ohio (where former Sen. Sherrod Brown may have established an edge over Republican Jon Husted) and Iowa (where Republican US Rep. Ashley Hinson is considered a slight favorite over Democratic State Rep. Josh Turek). Democrat Adam Hamilton, a Methodist minister, and independent Dan Osborn, a populist Navy veteran and former union official, remain viable, if longer-shot, possibilities against low-key Republican incumbents in Kansas (Sen. Roger Marshall) and Nebraska (Sen. Pete Ricketts.)

In contrast with the governors’ contests, heartland Democrats face two serious challenges to hold Senate seats in states where they have chosen nominees much more liberal than their typical Midwestern candidates. After a divisive primary in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed must broaden his appeal against Republican Mike Rogers; after another ideologically divisive primary, Democrat Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor, is in a better position in more reliably blue Minnesota, particularly after the backlash against the killings of two local residents by federal agents — but she will likely be hurt by her proximity to the state’s Covid-era fraud scandal.

The two parties are battling as well over four highly competitive House seats in Pennsylvania; three each in Iowa, Ohio and Michigan; and one in both Nebraska and Wisconsin. In all these ways, the middle of the country is at the center of 2026’s political struggle.

For all their inevitable local variation, these races present each party with several similar dynamics, starting with the nature of the campaign debate. “At the end of the day, Democrats are hoping what (matters) is people’s lived reality on the economy and that they are going to say, ‘the Republicans are in charge and I blame them,’” says Kochel, in a view echoed by many Democrats. “If Republicans are successful, it’s that ‘I don’t want to go back to what Joe Biden was doing.’”

The common demographic challenge for Democrats is that White voters without a four-year college degree — Trump’s core group — cast half or more of the votes in 2024 in many of these states, including Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan, and just under half in most of the rest, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, according to census data analyzed by demographer William Frey of the Brookings Metro think tank. And apart from Illinois, all these states also rank above the national average in the share of their population that lives in rural areas, according to census figures.

The key to the Republican consolidation of the heartland states since the early 2000s has been the Democrats’ collapse with these overlapping constituencies of White working-class and rural voters. Amid this retreat, Democrats have held their own — and even gained ground — in population centers. Harris, for instance, won Ohio’s prosperous Franklin County, around Columbus, by an even larger margin in 2024 than Obama did in 2008, and ran only 2 points below his total in Polk County, which revolves around Des Moines.

Yet, while Obama comfortably carried both states in 2008, Harris lost each by double digits. In both states, Democrats have suffered death by a thousand cuts — relentless Republican gains in mid-sized and smaller places.

In 2026, Democrats can reasonably expect to recover with minority voters across the region who moved toward Trump in 2024, given the sharp decline in his national approval among nonwhite adults. And Democrats are on track to run better than in 2024 among college-educated White voters. Public polls in the past few months have shown Trump’s disapproval rating rising past 60% among White voters with at least a four-year degree in Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa and Pennsylvania.

Those attitudes mean that, in competitive races, Democrats will be well positioned if they can show almost any improvement among the GOP’s best constituencies. In these culturally conservative states, Democrats remain highly unlikely to win most blue-collar White or rural voters. But, given their likely gains elsewhere, it may be enough for the party just to lose by less in the GOP’s small-town strongholds.

Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist with extensive experience across the region, points to that dynamic as the key to Democratic chances in Iowa and Ohio, the two biggest heartland prizes that have drifted away.

What’s brought Ohio and Iowa into play is that “the dark red parts of (them) are going to be light red, and that’s a big deal,” Giangreco says. “When you are losing counties by 50 points, instead of 60 to 70, it’s a different ballgame.”

The economy is, by far, the best lever for Democrats hoping to regain ground with blue-collar Whites and rural residents in the heartland states. In 2024, Trump posted huge margins among Whites without a four-year college degree in all these states where exit polls were conducted. But disappointment in his economic record has depressed his approval rating with them to around 50-50 in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and the upper 50s in Ohio.

Likewise, farmers across the heartland are being squeezed between rising costs for fuel and fertilizer and disruption of export markets in the international tussling over Trump’s tariffs. One recent Iowa study calculated one-fifth of the state’s farms were “finally vulnerable,” well over double the level in 2022.

Trump’s ratings are suffering not only because voters are broadly unhappy about the economy, but because so many believe his policies have compounded their problems — with the Iran war, for instance, directly linked to rising gas prices. “This is not like people need a University of Chicago economics paper to explain why gas prices are high,” Giangreco says. Medicaid cuts in the 2025 GOP tax-and-spending bill that disproportionately stress rural hospitals add another pain point.

And while many elected officials and political strategists in both parties have long considered tariffs attractive to working-class voters, Kemp says even blue-collar White men have reluctantly turned against them because of their impact on prices. “Much as they might want manufacturing to come back to the US, what they say in focus groups is that their day-to-day lives are hurting because of it,” she says.

Against all these headwinds, Republicans are not defenseless. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a $50 billion fund specifically for rural hospitals. Trump wants to channel another $50 billion in federal subsidies to farms this year, a breathtaking sum that would provide roughly one-third of all income for farmers, according to a recent analysis by the Environmental Working Group, an environmental analysis and advocacy group. Usually, federal payments account for only about one-tenth of farm income, says Anne Schechinger, the group’s senior director of agriculture and climate research.

Mark Graul, a longtime GOP strategist in Wisconsin, says the key for Republicans, especially in the gubernatorial elections, will be to try to decouple from the discontent about Washington. “You have to localize the election and do your best not to allow Democrats to make this a referendum on what’s happened in Washington DC,” Graul says.

But as Graul notes, that’s not easy to do. He learned that when he ran the Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign in 2006 for GOP Rep. Mark Green, who lost amid pervasive discontent with another Republican president (George W. Bush) over another Mideast war (Iraq). “I’ve lived it,” Graul said with a sigh. “I know how hard it is.”

Still, for all the doubts polls across these states register about Trump, they also make clear that Democrats have hardly repaired their own dents, especially among the key non-college and rural constituencies. “You can talk all day about how Trump has taken some hits with some of these populations, but the only thing less popular is the Democratic Party,” says Kochel.

In many of the heartland states Democrats are contesting this year, they will still need a perfect storm to win. But it no longer seems impossible that high gas prices, depressed farm incomes, an unpopular war, an erratic president, and some strong candidate recruitment can produce exactly that.