How confident can we be that the 2026 midterms will run smoothly? When will we know which party has secured House and Senate majorities? Should we expect any meddling, foreign or domestic?
Steve Hayes was joined by election experts Stephen Richer and Mark Sawyer for answers to those questions and many others. Then a panel including Jonah Goldberg and Mike Warren dove deep on the races most likely to decide congressional majorities and take a look at how candidates in competitive races are making their closing arguments.
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Add Us as a Preferred SourceSteve Hayes is CEO and editor of The Dispatch, based in Annapolis, Maryland. Prior to co-founding the company in 2019, he worked at The Weekly Standard for 18 years, covering Washington, politics, and national security. Steve is the author of two New York Times bestsellers. He also worked as a contributor at CNN and Fox News, and currently serves as a political analyst at NBC News. When Steve is not focused on The Dispatch, he’s probably traveling with his family, grilling, or riding his mountain bike.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things.
Michael Warren is politics editor at The Dispatch and is based in Washington, D.C. A former on-air reporter at CNN and a senior writer at The Weekly Standard, he has spent more than 15 years covering lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the White House and the executive branch, the conservative movement, and political campaigns. When Mike is not reporting, writing, editing, and podcasting, he is probably spending time with his wife and three sons.
Stephen Richer is the CEO of Republic Affairs, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona.
Mark Sawyer is a reporter for The Dispatch based in Washington, D.C., and the inaugural Journalism Excellence Fellow through The Fund for American Studies. He previously worked as an investigator and open-source intelligence analyst focused on a range of issues including election integrity, national security, and Russia's use of disinformation and the internet to pursue its foreign policy goals. His favorite professional experiences have been serving as an election observer in Ukraine and Moldova. When Mark is not going down rabbit holes for his latest article, you can probably find him experimenting in the kitchen, birdwatching in the city, or convincing his unsuspecting friends to play a complicated board game.
The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings.
Steve Hayes
[upbeat music] Hey, everybody. Welcome to "Dispatch Live." Uh, we are doing a livestream "Dispatch Live." Uh, happy to have you joining us tonight, and I'm especially pleased to be joined by our august panel here, and we will invite a second august panel in, uh, about halfway through the show. We are gonna focus tonight on two main aspects of the 2026 midterm elections. We are two weeks and one day out tonight. Uh, when we put this in the "Dispatch" podcast, um, stream tomorrow, it will be two weeks exactly from election day. Of course, people are voting, uh, across the country in states and districts that are likely to be competitive. And I wanna spend our time tonight chiefly focused on two things. We'll cover, uh, a number of different things, and of course, we'll let the conversation go, uh, in whatever direction our, our panelists wanna take it. But I wanna focus for this first part of the conversation on election integrity, uh, here with Stephen Richer and Mark Sawyer. And then when I invite Jonah Goldberg and Michael Warren in, I really wanna focus on corruption as, um, a driving, uh, issue in this election. Sur-sur-surprising, it's something that's happened-
Stephen Richer
Yep
Steve Hayes
... uh, in, in recent weeks. Um, so let's start with, with Stephen and Mark. Stephen, welcome back. Mark-
Mark Sawyer
Thank you
Steve Hayes
... welcome to your first "Dispatch" podcast. We're thrilled to have you. Stephen, people who are regular, uh, listeners or viewers of the "Dispatch" podcast know Stephen. He's a "Dispatch" contributor. He's been with us for a long time. He's now affiliated with the Cato Institute, Harvard Kennedy School. He was a, uh, election practitioner, uh, deep experience in the bowels of elections, knows election security inside and out, has been attacked by election, uh, conspiracy theorists and many others. Uh, Stephen, welcome. Mark, uh, is the inaugural Fund for American Studies fellow-
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