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The 2026 Senate Map and the Kansas Sleeper: Jim Pfaff on Real America’s Voice | Sep 10, 2026

Published: September 10, 2026
Network: Real America’s Voice — live GOP Midterm Convention coverage with Grant Stinchfield
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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Seven Senate races inside two percentage points, and Democrats need a net of four. On the September 10 edition of Real America’s Voice live coverage from the GOP midterm convention — Grant Stinchfield with co-hosts Bo and Michelle, broadcasting from the American Airlines Center — Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff walked the 2026 Senate map race by race from The Conservative Caucus media suite at the RNC Midterm Convention in Dallas. He named a sleeper the anchor desk had not put on the board, gave an incumbent the hosts said they do not like a real chance of surviving, and explained why he expects the polls to miss again in the same direction they have missed before.

Topics Covered

• The 2026 Senate Map Inside Two Points
• New Hampshire Is the Sleeper
• Maine, Alaska and Ohio: Three Races, Three Different Problems
• The Kansas Senate Seat Nobody Is Watching
• Texas, Georgia, Michigan and the Turnout Model Problem
• From the RNC Midterm Convention: The $8 Million Turnout Question
• Key Takeaways

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The 2026 Senate Map Inside Two Points

The question came from the anchor desk with the math already done. Michigan, Iowa, Texas, Alaska, New Hampshire, Ohio and Maine are all inside about two percentage points on the RealClearPolitics average. Five of them could flip blue and two could flip red, and that still may not cut it. Ken Paxton against James Talarico in Texas is the marquee race, but it is not the only one. So which race on the 2026 Senate map does Pfaff have his eye on, and where can Republicans actually gain?

Pfaff did not start with any of the seven states on the board. He started with the one he thinks the rest of the 2026 Senate map is underrating.

New Hampshire Is the Sleeper

“One sleeper is New Hampshire. After those polls that are showing up so far, after Sununu got his bid — he’s a strong candidate. By the way, we’re really conservative, so he’s not the most conservative of them all, but he’s a competent, capable candidate, and he knows how to do politics against someone who’s been pretty radical left.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That is the whole argument, and it is a practical one rather than an ideological one. Pfaff is not claiming John Sununu is the most conservative name on the 2026 Senate map. He is claiming Sununu can win a general election in a state that normally goes blue, against an opponent who has been pretty radical left — and that New Hampshire is not all radical left, which is why a race like that stays winnable. Later in the segment, when he ran through where Republicans could actually pick up ground, New Hampshire came back as a potential pickup rather than a hold. TCC has been tracking the same terrain in our running analysis of the November elections and the Senate map.

Maine, Alaska and Ohio: Three Races, Three Different Problems

Maine came next, and Stinchfield got there by way of a disclosure: he does not like Susan Collins, but he would rather have Susan Collins than the candidate she is running against. He has money on it too — he invests on the prediction market Kalshi, which he said was paying big odds on Collins — and he wondered whether an incumbent who has been in office a long time could hold off the radical in Maine one more time.

Pfaff thinks she can. People are starting to say she has done it over and over again but not this time, he said, and he does not buy it. He said it is possible she loses, but that there is a decent chance she just might pull this out, and that it is not a bad bet because the odds are in her favor. His reason was not ideology either.

“Momentum is a really important thing. And momentum comes from that longstanding relationship that she’s got with people, Mainers.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Alaska looks close in the polling for a reason Pfaff says will not survive Election Day: there are two candidates named Dan Sullivan. That confusion is really the reason the poll is tight. He thinks people are going to figure out who is who, and that the Republican is going to be okay.

Ohio is the one on this part of the 2026 Senate map that worries him, because the mismatch is a matter of skill. Jon Husted is not flashy. He is a good guy, Pfaff said, but he is not a one-on-one kind of person. Sherrod Brown is. Brown is a radical leftist, in Pfaff’s description, but he is also a good campaigner who has always proven himself good at it. The one crack: Brown does have a chink in his armor, having lost last time, and Pfaff hopes that holds.

The Kansas Senate Seat Nobody Is Watching

“There’s a sleeper though that no one’s talking about, which is Kansas. Roger Marshall is in danger when you look at the current polls.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Asked why, Pfaff gave three reasons and opened with a disclosure he volunteered himself: he was chief of staff for Tim Huelskamp, the congressman Marshall beat in the first district, and he wanted to be honest about that before saying the rest.

The rest was that Marshall is not a very good campaigner and, in Pfaff’s word, not a connector. And voters are raising his residency — the exchange Pfaff quoted runs, do you really live in Kansas? Well, I have a home in Florida. That debate, he said, is getting at people. The third reason is the opponent.

“Plus, his candidate, who’s a James Talarico type but doesn’t talk like James Talarico, is a pastor in Overland Park, Kansas, is a really solid campaigner. This is the one to watch, really, in my mind.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That is the specific danger of a race nobody is polling hard: a Democrat with the same politics as the Texas candidate everyone is watching, delivered in a register that does not set off the alarms. When a co-host pointed out that Democrats only need to net four seats and asked whether Kansas therefore constitutes a real problem, Pfaff did not soften it. It is a real problem, he said. It is a very big problem.

Texas, Georgia, Michigan and the Turnout Model Problem

Then he worked the other direction on the 2026 Senate map. Texas, he thinks, holds: Talarico ultimately gets beaten fairly, the tension in that race is there and people are going to get it, and there are too many evangelical Christians in Texas who will decide at the end of the day that this is not what they want. Georgia he still counts as a possibility, because Jon Ossoff has made a couple of big mistakes. New Hampshire is the potential pickup. And Michigan, oddly, he moved almost into the safe column: Mike Rogers may end up being close to a shoo-in, because the money is there after the MAGA PAC announcement and because Rogers has the infrastructure to use it. Pfaff also thinks the DSA factor — the Democratic Socialists of America problem inside the Democratic Party — is starting to register with the country.

Stinchfield brought up Harry Enten on CNN, whose assessment was that if the polls underestimate Republicans by two to four points, as they have the last few elections, Republicans take the Senate at 53 seats and hold the House as well.

“He had an assessment which may help you feel a little better: that if the polls underestimate Republicans by two to four percent, which they have the last few elections, we take the Senate 53 to X — and we win the House if that underestimation comes true.”
— Grant Stinchfield, Real America’s Voice

So why would anyone expect the polls to be accurate this time? Pfaff said he thinks the underestimation is actually real, and then separated two different causes. There is a combination of pollsters wanting to do evil, so to speak, in twisting it. That is not the main one.

“I think a lot of pollsters, though, have really not figured out turnout models. And that is the key factor, because there’s an art to polling and it’s finding the turnout model.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

They mess that up a lot, he said, and the error runs in the Republican direction, which is where his hope comes from. But the hope is conditional, and he attached the condition immediately.

“Listen, if people listen to what Donald Trump said and then these candidates take his message, not just in his name, but also in their name, I think that Republicans can make history this time.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

It is not given, he added. Asked flatly whether Republicans retain the House and the Senate, even by a razor-thin margin, his answer was that he cannot predict it but he is leaning more and more in that direction, with the post-Labor Day polls still coming. Asked whether everyone ends up $5,000 richer in November, his answer was shorter: we will have to ask Congress if they will pass that legislation.

The betting markets came up because Stinchfield is in them — sixteen cents on the dollar to win a dollar on Republicans holding both chambers, which he called an unbelievable bet and said he is fully invested in. Pfaff treats those markets as decent predictors with a caveat about what they are measuring.

He expects the numbers to close up very quickly now that Labor Day has passed, because there is a lot of truth to the fact that polls move once people start engaging, and the country is about to get a good sense of where the races actually stand. Two structural facts sit under that for him: Democrats are at the lowest approval rating they have been at in modern polling, and the DSA factor is settling in. There are reasons this can flip fast, he said, if the right work happens after this event.

From the RNC Midterm Convention: The $8 Million Turnout Question

The right work is the last third of the segment, and it is the part of the 2026 Senate map that no poll measures. Asked for his overall sense of turnout this November — good, bad, the same — Pfaff went straight to the category that decides it.

There are Trump voters who do not typically show up, and those are the ones his organization works.

“There are Trump voters who don’t typically show up that we’ve got to work. We do independent expenditures. We did $8 million in independent expenditures in 2024. We’re on track to do the same.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

TCC puts its effort into getting the Trump voters who do not normally come out, and Pfaff said he knows a lot of people in the hall are doing the same thing. That is where the key is. It is also, he said, going to be hard — these are by definition the voters hardest to motivate.

The convention helps — Pfaff called the first-of-its-kind midterm convention a key, a stroke of genius, and said it may just pay. TCC broadcast the whole event from its media suite across the hall from the Real America’s Voice set, and the full run of interviews is in our coverage of the RNC Midterm Convention in Dallas. A co-host would not let the room flatter itself. To be fair, the co-host said, some of the people you need to come to the polls are not at these events — so what is the catalyst, and is TCC going to be doing door knocking? Pfaff’s answer was one line: these people walking out and doing the work, always the way to do it.

The segment closed on the gap around that work. Stinchfield said he is not convinced CNN, MSNBC and CBS News are covering this event the way they would cover a normal convention, and that the bump coming out of Dallas may be smaller because the coverage is not there. The floor energy in the American Airlines Center does not convert itself. On the 2026 Senate map Pfaff had just described — New Hampshire live, Maine holdable, Kansas in danger, Ohio a campaigner mismatch, and Democrats needing four — the conversion is the whole election.

Key Takeaways

1. Seven races inside two points – Michigan, Iowa, Texas, Alaska, New Hampshire, Ohio and Maine were all within about two percentage points on the RealClearPolitics average, and Democrats need a net of four seats.
2. New Hampshire is the sleeper – Pfaff says Sununu is not the most conservative candidate on the 2026 Senate map but is competent, capable and knows how to run against a radical-left opponent, which turns New Hampshire into a potential pickup rather than a hold.
3. Kansas is the race nobody is watching – Roger Marshall is in danger in current polling: not a strong campaigner, not a connector, a live residency question, and an opponent who is a pastor in Overland Park and a really solid campaigner.
4. Ohio is a campaigner mismatch – Jon Husted is a good guy but not a one-on-one person; Sherrod Brown is a radical leftist who has always proven himself a good campaigner. His only weakness is that he lost last time.
5. The polls are probably wrong in the Republicans’ favor – Not mainly because pollsters twist results, Pfaff says, but because a lot of them have not figured out turnout models, and turnout modeling is the art of polling.
6. Turnout is the part no poll measures – TCC spent $8 million on independent expenditures in 2024 and is on track to do the same, chasing Trump voters who do not typically show up. The convention helps, but the people who most need to vote are not in the hall.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast Sep 10, 2026 live from the RNC Midterm Convention in Dallas on Real America’s Voice, during live GOP Midterm Convention coverage with Grant Stinchfield.