The midterm elections are a month away and the candidate pool has never been more WIRED. Races are being run—and likely decided—on Silicon Valley funding, data center debates, AI regulation, extremism, and more. From the contests that will decide the Senate to less attention-grabbing ones that will decide who controls voting in key swing states in 2028, these are the candidates and races we think are most worth watching closely in the weeks to come, and which we'll be keeping an eye on.

Former America PAC lawyer Chris Gober is running to represent Texas’ newly gerrymandered 10th district. Gober served as counsel for the Texas Republican congressional delegation for the 2025 redistricting effort that saw a new, gerrymandered map created for the 2026 midterms—one that was meant to create five new Republican congressional districts.

In addition to representing Musk’s PAC, Gober’s law firm, Lex Politica, has also represented Elevate New Mexico, a limited liability company that ran an advertising campaign supporting a controversial data center project in the state, as well as the Danube Institute USA, a think tank aligned with Hungary’s former right-wing leader Viktor Orban.

According to reporting from The New York Times, Gober was one of several lawyers who advised on the structure of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the weeks leading up to President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The 10th district also includes Grimes County, where SpaceXAI and Tesla have said they plan to open a 100-million-square-foot “terafab” facility to manufacture semiconductors. In addition to his legal work, Gober’s LinkedIn lists him as general counsel for a lobbying group called Maven Advocacy Partners, the client base of which includes several defense tech startups. (Its name appears to be a reference to the Department of War’s Project Maven, which is supported by tech companies like Palantir and Anduril.)

Gober also appears to run another company called Maven Defense Solutions. Both the company and the lobbying group share an address with his law firm, Lex Politica, and his campaign office.

Gober’s campaign has received $747,550 from the American Mission PAC, a right-leaning super PAC that has itself received funding from Leading the Future, a PAC focused on promoting AI-friendly candidates and policies. Leading the Future has raised over $140 million from Silicon Valley billionaires like OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, as well as the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

This race will be the first in which someone directly involved with Musk and/or DOGE attempts to enter Congress.

A September poll showed Gober leading Rourk 48-41.

Former Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb ran on a “God, family, freedom” platform and won the GOP primary in Arizona’s 5th congressional district with Trump’s endorsement. He also has ties to paramilitary groups, anti-immigration organizations, and the far-right constitutional sheriffs movement.

Though he may not self-identify as one, Lamb appeared to, at one time, be a constitutional sheriff who gained national notoriety for his refusal to enforce Covid restrictions. He has worked with the election-denial group True the Vote to get sheriffs to investigate elections and has also boosted the role of private militias. He even authorized the formation of a civilian posse while serving as sheriff of Pinal County, in response to Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. He regularly appears on right-wing podcasts, including those hosted by white nationalists and conspiracy theorists.

While sheriff, he was accused of sexual misconduct and racist remarks, though he has denied the allegations.

Arizona’s 5th District is solidly Republican, meaning Lamb is likely to become the first constitutional sheriff in Congress. Lamb will be the heavy favorite. No polls available yet.

Before launching her congressional campaign, Democratic nominee Lauren Reinhold was a human resources administrator in the Social Security Administration. Like thousands of federal employees, she left her job in 2025 when DOGE and the Trump administration fired government workers, cut programs, and encouraged employees to resign en masse.

Now, she’s running for Congress in Kansas’ 1st district, which encompasses the mostly rural, western half of the state, against three-term incumbent Tracey Mann. The district has long been a Republican stronghold, and Reinhold faces an uphill battle. Though several former federal workers have attempted to run for office in the wake of DOGE’s mass firings of federal workers, Reinhold is one of few that have made it through the gauntlet of the Democratic primaries.

Her race may showcase whether the destruction that DOGE wrought in the first year of the Trump administration will be a real, long-term political liability for Republicans.

Democratic nominee for Wisconsin governor David Crowley will be facing off against Republican nominee and congressman Tom Tiffany, who has spent the past six years trying to undermine the democratic process in the US.

In December 2020, as a member of Congress, Tiffany signed up for a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. He also voted against certifying the results in Pennsylvania and Arizona after the Capitol riot on January 6 and has suggested he would have overturned Wisconsin’s results. This year, he has warmly welcomed the FBI’s baseless investigation into the state’s elections.

If Tiffany wins, as governor he would have the power to appoint some of the state’s top officials on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, giving him the ability to install election deniers to oversee voting for the 2028 presidential election.

A Marquette Law School poll at the end of September found that Crowley led Tiffany by just 3 percentage points, 49-46.

Former Atlanta mayor and Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms and billionaire health care executive and Republican nominee Rick Jackson face a tight gubernatorial race in a pivotal swing state that has continued to be the focus of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Jackson has aligned himself with several of Trump’s agenda items. In ads run by his campaign during the primary, Jackson attacked immigrants, trans people, and DEI initiatives. He also ran ads attacking primary opponent and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger for refusing to cave to the Trump administration’s pressure to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Jackson has supported Republican efforts to redraw Georgia’s congressional map, which would eliminate majority-Black districts, thus favoring Republicans.

Jackson, who said he is invested in a data center in Texas, has also advocated against a moratorium on data centers, instead saying that local communities should choose for themselves whether to allow them.

Bottoms has said she would consider a moratorium and has made health care and expanding Medicaid central to her campaign.

Georgia will likely continue to be a central focus for the Trump administration, both as a place to relitigate the results of the 2020 election and as a critical swing state in 2028. Whoever wins the governor’s race here could determine the certification of future elections and the level to which the state participates in the administration’s national agenda, both with regards to issues like data centers and the erosion of trust in elections.

A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that Jackson is leading Bottoms, 48-45 percent.

Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed is running against Republican nominee and former congressman Mike Rogers for Michigan’s crucial Senate seat.

Following a bruising primary, El-Sayed's main controversies have surrounded his criticisms of the war in Gaza and US military aid to Israel. This led to accusations he was too soft on antisemitism and too progressive a candidate for the general election. To secure the fractured Democratic base, El-Sayed has announced he will rally with former president Barack Obama in an effort to court Black voters, according to progressive operatives.

He has also sought to cast Rogers as the face of intrusive government surveillance, WIRED previously reported, at a time when voters have expressed privacy concerns around AI and Flock cameras.

Rogers has denied that characterization and, notably, has backed a one-year moratorium on new data center construction in the state, proactively taking steps to insulate himself from the other major tech issue on the trail.

Rogers, who has gone from refuting Trump’s election conspiracy theories to boosting them, has benefited from Elon Musk–affiliated America PAC funding, which has dumped more than $4 million into this race, mostly in negative ads against El-Sayed.

Michigan is a critical battleground state for both parties this midterm cycle because a path for Democrats to take the Senate majority largely rests on retaining this seat. If Democrats lose Michigan, they would need to flip a total of five Republican seats elsewhere.

A recent report from Hill/Emerson College Polling found that El-Sayed is leading Rogers by a narrow margin, 48-46 percent.

Republican nominee and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is running against Democratic nominee and Ohio’s former director of department of health Amy Acton in the state’s gubernatorial election. So far, Big Tech has been bankrolling Ramaswamy’s campaign, through his super PAC.

Elon Musk, Jeff Yass, and Bill Ackman have all donated in the millions. Ramaswamy, who was part of the early vision of Musk’s DOGE, has also been endorsed by Trump. Besides his Silicon Valley bona fides (Ramaswamy’s view on data centers amount to give everyone with a data center in their community “free electricity”), Ramaswamy has also espoused many of the Trump administration’s views on elections and other electoral policies.

Ramaswamy has suggested that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was an “inside job” and, just this year, called on the Ohio legislature to add a constitutional amendment to the ballot that would enact restrictive voter-suppression measures. The governor of Ohio would be in a position to have more power over elections and could deeply impact the 2028 presidential election.

Polling suggests the race is extremely tight. A September poll from YouGov found that Acton maintains a slight lead over Ramaswamy, 48-45.

A number of secretary of state races across the country could heavily impact what happens for elections in 2028. In most states, the secretary of state is the chief election official; they run and certify elections, from county officials all the way up to the Senate. Now, a number of election deniers across the country are running for their state’s top election job.

In Nevada, Republican nominee Jim Marchant is running against Democratic nominee and current secretary of state Cisco Aguilar. Marchant, a former Nevada state representative, is an avowed election denier who was among the most ardent boosters of election denial in the wake of the 2020 election, going so far as to help arrange a QAnon-associated coalition of candidates for the 2022 midterms.

In 2022, Marchant lost out to Aguilar in the race for the secretary of state, but after winning the GOP primary in June, he’ll once again face Aguilar in November. Critically, Aguilar has stood up to efforts to undermine trust in elections over the course of the past four years, but the winner in November will oversee the 2028 presidential election in Nevada, a swing state that went for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024.

This race is a battle between one of the biggest boosters of election denial and one of the strongest defenders of election integrity.

While data centers have been a topic for voters across several key midterm races, nowhere is the debate more relevant than the Ohio Senate race.

Former senator and Democratic nominee Sherrod Brown is running against Republican nominee and former GOP lieutenant governor Jon Husted in one of the most contested races this election season. Husted, who has previously championed data center investments, has become a target statewide for his views.

Trump, who has endorsed Husted’s campaign, is adamantly pro–data center and went out of his way to express his opinions at a recent joint rally in Vandalia, Ohio. "We want them," Trump said. Husted’s campaign quickly issued a statement clarifying that Husted believed data centers were best left as a “local decision.”Husted has been boosted by the Musk-affiliated America PAC, which has poured over $5 million into the Ohio Senate race, mainly in negative ads targeted at Brown, WIRED has previously reported.

The only race in which Musk has spent more, according to federal campaign filings, has been the Senate race in Texas, a battleground state seen as a litmus test for Republicans this cycle.

Meanwhile, Fairshake, a super PAC funded by the crypto industry, is also planning to spend at least $30 million against Brown. (In 2024, when Brown lost his Senate reelection race, Fairshake spent $40 million against Brown, who then served as chair of the Senate Banking Committee and was a big crypto critic.) According to a Bowling Green University poll, Brown leads Husted by three points, 48-45.

Texas has become a bellwether state for the midterms this November: If Democratic candidate James Talarico defeats attorney general Ken Paxton, the Democrats have a much better chance of taking the Senate majority. The state has been ruby-red for decades, and Democrats would not have dreamed of this just months ago. But in a perfect storm, and with an unpopular Republican candidate besieged by scandal, Democrats have the best chance in decades of flipping the seat.

Recent approval polls put Paxton at negative 16, a number worse than every other Republican who is running in a close Senate race. Meanwhile, Talarico has been ahead in every public poll since mid-August.

The problem for Paxton is that he cannot exactly rely on Trump to boost his numbers, since the president is also experiencing negative approval ratings both in Texas and nationally. Paxton has been in lockstep with Trump for years, however. Paxton is an OG election denier, having led a failed multistate effort to overturn the 2020 results.

The silver lining for Paxton has been the colossal outside support that Republicans have marshaled to defend the seat. America PAC's biggest spending has focused on the race, pouring millions into defending the Republican’s seat.

Paxton isn’t universally beloved by Silicon Valley, however: Musk's SpaceX is suing Paxton in his role as state attorney general to stop information about its “terafab” operation being released under public records requests.

Talarico has maintained a narrow but consistent lead in polling; dating back to early June, he’s been ahead in all but two of 24 polls tracked by Silver Bulletin.

Republican nominee Riley Owen is running against Democratic nominee Ben McAdams for Utah’s 1st congressional district. Owen briefly served as a White House policy analyst during the first Trump administration and later worked for a startup using drones for conservation efforts. McAdams served as the representative for the state’s 4th Congressional district between 2019 and 2021 but lost to current representative Burgess Owens.

This little-known race has some fascinating funding implications: McAdams has received $1,128,697.73 in donations from Think Big, a PAC that describes itself as supporting “Democratic candidates dedicated to advancing AI innovation in America.”Think Big, in turn, is financed by Leading the Future.

McAdams also has a small stake in a data center project being built in rural Utah that, when completed, is expected to have a much larger power capacity than a controversial nearby project in Box Elder County.

Photo credits: Getty Images; AP Images (Chris Gober); Reuters (Elizabeth Lee, Lauren Reinhold); Shutterstock (Riley Owen); Courtesy of Caitlin Rourk (Caitlin Rourk)