It Wouldn’t Take Much for 2026 to be a Big Year for House Incumbent Primary Defeats

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— The primary season begins Tuesday night, and several sitting House members are facing credible primary opposition.

— Typically, only a handful of House incumbents lose renomination in a given year.

— In the postwar era, only about an average of 6.5 incumbents have lost renomination each cycle, and the renomination rate for House incumbents who seek another term is greater than 98%.

— However, that also means that it would not take many incumbent losses for 2026 to rank as a big year, historically, for incumbent primary defeats.

How many House incumbents could lose?

In his recent preview of Tuesday night’s Texas primaries, Crystal Ball Associate Editor J. Miles Coleman noted that several House incumbents in Texas face a real possibility of losing their renomination bids. At least one House Democrat—either long-serving Rep. Al Green or just-elected Rep. Christian Menefee—will lose, because they are running against each other in TX-18. Beyond that, Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R, TX-2), Tony Gonzales (R, TX-23), and Julie Johnson (D, running in TX-33) all face serious challenges themselves. Additionally, in one of the other states holding a primary on Tuesday, Rep. Valerie Foushee (D, NC-4) faces what appears to be a significant challenge from Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam (D), who is running to Foushee’s left in a dark blue district. Foushee defeated Allam 46%-37% in what was then an open seat 2022 primary.

We doubt all of these incumbents will lose. But if they did, five House incumbent primary losses in the first primaries of 2026 would already place 2026 at close to the average number of total incumbent primary losses in post-World War II House election cycles.

Table 1 shows the success rate for House incumbents seeking renomination from 1946-2024, a span that covers 40 election cycles.

Table 1: House incumbent renomination rates, 1946-2024

Sources: Vital Statistics on Congress, Crystal Ball research

Over that timeframe, House members won renomination more than 98% of the time when they sought another term. On average, only about 6.5 House incumbents lost in any given year, and many years do not even hit that average—the median number of losses over that timeframe is 5, and several recent cycles have finished under that number, as you can see on Table 1. In only 9 of the 40 election cycles did the number of incumbent primary losses number in the teens. So one can see how 2026 could end up ranking highly in incumbent losses if we get off to a fast start in Tuesday night’s primaries (or in subsequent runoffs).

Some of the biggest years for incumbent primary losses are in years that end in 2, which are national redistricting years. While this is not a national redistricting year, new districts will have an impact. That is the case in the aforementioned TX-18 primary as well as in at least one other race so far: Republican Reps. Young Kim and Ken Calvert are running against each other in CA-40. Redistricting may also end up prompting member vs. member primaries in Florida, Utah, and Virginia.

The largest number of primary losers in any cycle was 19 in 1992. That was a national redistricting year in which the George H.W. Bush administration Justice Department aggressively pushed for the creation of majority-minority districts as an indirect way to knock out moderate white southern Democrats by consolidating the Black vote in a smaller number of districts (more than three decades later, the U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering what to do about Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which protects the existence and promotes the creation of such districts). Additionally, the House banking scandal—in which hundreds of members wrote overdrafts on House banking checking accounts—outraged the public, likely contributing to some incumbent losses. Beyond the high number of incumbent losses, 1992 also had the smallest number of members seeking reelection in the postwar period, so there was a ton of turnover in the House overall. The second-highest year, 1946, was not a national redistricting year, but it was the first election after the end of the Second World War, which along with economic dislocation may have contributed to an antsy electorate. That year, voters gave control of Congress to Republicans for the first time since the Great Depression (perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, 1992 also was the first election after the breakup of the Soviet Union and, thus, the end of the Cold War).

We doubt 2026 matches 1992 for incumbent primary losses. However, beyond the aforementioned races in Texas and North Carolina on Tuesday, there will be several other significant primaries to watch later in the cycle. Just to name a few that currently stand out, Rep. April McClain Delaney (D, MD-6) is facing a challenge from her predecessor, David Trone, after Trone lost a Senate primary in 2024 (this is similar to 2024 Democratic Senate nominee and former Rep. Colin Allred running against the aforementioned Julie Johnson in TX-33). Rep. Thomas Massie (R, KY-4), a thorn in the side of House Republican leadership, is facing a Trump-backed challenger, military veteran Ed Gallrein (R), in his primary. Rep. Dan Goldman (D, NY-10) faces a left-wing challenge from Brad Lander (D), a former New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate who became allies with now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani. On Monday evening, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a state-level court action that could’ve made the strongly Republican Staten Island-based district held by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R, NY-11) much more competitive. Had that actually happened, Goldman could have run there.

Given the long-term track record of incumbent success in primaries, one generally wouldn’t pick an incumbent to lose unless that incumbent has huge, obvious problems (Gonzales in TX-23 certainly qualifies). But when incumbents do lose, these losses can be huge, flashbulb moments: in recent years, the defeats of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R, VA-7) in 2014 and the then-no. 4 House Democrat, Rep. Joe Crowley (D, NY-14), in 2018 both qualify. Cantor likely would have eventually become Speaker of the House had he not lost his primary; Crowley, meanwhile, might be the leader of the House Democrats right now if he was still in Congress. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY-14), who unseated Crowley, is now one of the biggest names in American politics. Former Rep. Dave Brat (R, VA-7), who vanquished Cantor but who is not a big name in politics, was defeated in 2018 by now-Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), who just gave the Democratic response to last week’s State of the Union.

Incumbent primary losses can also tell us something about where a party is going, although the longer-term trends can be contradictory: A few House Democrats lost in 2020 to left-wing opponents, although two of those that sprung primary upsets that year, former Reps. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, were in turn defeated in 2024 primaries by candidates positioned closer to the center, Reps. Wesley Bell (D, MO-1) and George Latimer (D, NY-16), respectively, even as both Bush and Bowman had liabilities that were not directly related to ideology. Bush is running for her old seat against Bell in another primary to watch for 2026. In 2022, four Republicans who had supported the impeachment of Donald Trump following the events of Jan. 6, 2021 lost their primaries, a sign of Trump’s enduring power over his party even when he wasn’t in office.

One other thing to consider is that beyond any incumbent primary losses, there’s also already a lower-than-average number of House incumbents seeking reelection (and, thus, renomination), which we looked at a couple of weeks ago. So it’s possible that a few members who are retiring might have lost primaries had they run again.

We’ll of course be looking for big-picture trends in this year’s primary season, particularly as it relates to incumbents losing primaries. History suggests that very few will lose. But some will, and it would not take that many losses for 2026 to rank among the highest years in the postwar era.

Kyle Kondik is a Political Analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the Managing Editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball.

See Other Political Commentary by Kyle Kondik.

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Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Comments about this content should be directed to the author or syndicate.