Members of Congress prepare to face angry, dissatisfied primary voters in 2026

The first round of primaries on March 3 includes examples of the type of incumbent challenges both parties will be dealing with all midterm year.

Lawmakers in both parties face a reckoning from within their own ranks this year — and the first major primary day of the midterm elections puts all of those pressures on full display.

Three high-profile Texas Republicans face spirited primary challenges from their right flanks, with challengers questioning their conservative bona fides and their commitment to President Donald Trump’s cause, while a Democratic incumbent in North Carolina’s Research Triangle faces a significant challenge backed by key progressive groups who argue this pivotal political moment needs new faces.

And the March 3 primaries are just the start of a flurry of pivotal primaries set to run through the summer. It remains overwhelmingly difficult to oust sitting members of Congress, who benefit from many trappings of incumbency. But these races typify the pressure incumbents in both parties may face this year — as MAGA purity tests roil the right while the left debates whether to turn over leadership to a new generation and whether their current leaders are rising to the political moment.

“This race is about what so many races are about across the country — an affordability crisis and an anger toward establishment politicians who are continuing politics as usual when it’s time to fight back and reject corporate greed. And it’s time to meet the moment,” Maya Handa, a senior adviser for Democratic congressional challenger Nida Allam in North Carolina, told NBC News.

The big prize on the ballot for insurgent Republicans is the Senate primary in Texas, where Sen. John Cornyn is in the fight of his political life against state Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt. Both challengers frame Cornyn as a creature of Washington and not conservative enough to represent Texas. Cornyn has pushed back furiously, unleashing a massive ad campaign casting himself as being in lockstep with Trump — who has, so far, refused repeated entreaties to endorse anyone in the race.

Cornyn’s opponents have also seized on past immigration and gun votes that have long frustrated conservatives in the state, while Paxton continues to be dogged by personal vulnerabilities and allegations of misuse of office that led to his 2023 impeachment — even though the state Senate acquitted him. Hunt has faced criticism in the raucous three-way race, too, about skipping votes in the House.

But while other issues in state Republican politics play a role, attacks on Cornyn over his past criticism of Trump are at the center of the race. That dynamic is also shaping two House races in which Texas Republican incumbents face primary challenges in a preview of things to come in other races later on this year.

Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents a sprawling district that spans San Antonio all the way west to El Paso, is set for a rematch against Brandon Herrera, a hard-right gun activist who fell just a few hundred votes short of upsetting him in 2024. Herrera continues to hammer Gonzales for his vote in favor of a bipartisan gun bill Cornyn championed in 2022, a month after the deadly shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, in Gonzales’ district. Gonzales’ votes on border security, privacy and creating a bipartisan committee to investigate the 2021 Capitol riot have also been at the center of Herrera’s challenge.

Herrera said in an interview that it is “a totally different race” now after his narrow defeat in 2024, when Herrera was running as a first-time candidate.

“We need somebody that’s not going to lead from the pockets of special interest, somebody who’s actually going to vote with the Constitution, with what the voters want — you know, the actual conservative that Republicans of West Texas have been looking for,” he said.

And he argued that the campaign against Cornyn, an establishment-backed incumbent being challenged from the right, could be “synergistic” for downballot Republican challengers like him.