GQ’s AOC to TMZ Guide to the 2026 Midterm Elections

Featuring Abdul El-Sayed, James Talarico, Jennifer Welch, and more.Ocasio-Cortez: Tom Williams; Ossoff: HUM Images; Moore: Taylor Hill; Gill: Tom Williams; Talarico: Callaghan O’Hare; Paxton: Anna Moneymaker; Rubio: Stefano Costantino; Trump: Yuri Gripas; Vance: Roy Rochlin. All: Getty Images. El-Sayed: Jeff Kowalsky/Shutterstock. Welch: Courtesy of Kiley Josey. Levin: ZUMA/Alamy.If Washington, DC, is just a big high school, then this year’s midterms are like watching a rising class of seniors try to figure out the new pecking order. Both parties are without a clear line of succession, are racked with existential debates, and are increasingly driven by outsider media. GQ correspondents fanned out across the country, dropping in on the most interesting, influential, and popular players of this campaign season to capture the freaky, vulgar, and absurd spirit of 2026.Testosterone, Divorce, and Big-Ass Trucks: On the Trail With James Talarico and Ken PaxtonZohar LazarFew things unite Texans like the aggravation of watching the rest of the country periodically try to parse our state politics. This year’s US Senate race in Texas is a shining example. The Republican on the ticket is Ken Paxton, the state attorney general. He is backed by President Trump and comes with a surplus of local baggage (derailed felony prosecution, impeachment by his own party ending in acquittal) and a spectacular deficit of charisma. When the Democratic-primary winner emerged—a progressive, Christian state legislator who managed to hang with Joe Rogan—it was clear that Paxton had a fight on his hands. The conservative movement arrived to help carry him, coalescing around a single message: Didn’t his opponent, James Talarico, seem kind of unmanly?He is “clearly transitioning into a female,” reported White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller. He was a “gay vegan,” Fox News host Jesse Watters added. A Republican National Committee spokesperson charged that he “might still sleep in a kid’s-sized bed with sheets from his favorite Disney princess.” Paxton himself, 63, called his opponent “Low-T Talarico.” Reporters dutifully took this to the state legislator: Did he have low testosterone? “I don’t think guys my age are really concerned about that kind of thing,” Talarico, 37, said.Picking through this distraction campaign is mostly counterproductive, but I’m going to try, because of the obvious ignorance on display about Texas manhood.Abdul El-Sayed Just Wants American Democracy to Get SwoleCourtesy of Abdul El-Sayed; GQIn another cosmic timeline, Abdul El-Sayed would put up numbers in the manosphere. He’s comically buff (Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham refers to him, disparagingly, as “gym boy”) and he’s a dexterous trash-talker. When we speak, a few days after he’s won Michigan’s Democratic nomination for US senator, I ask him to lay out his platform for the general election. Over the course of 2 minutes, he manages to mention that his opponent, Republican Mike Rogers, is “generationally corrupt and incapable” and “nothing more than a beta character and a sock puppet for the insertion of whatever hand is going to make him talk.” Currently, he’s engaged in a back-and-forth with Vice President JD Vance, with the two exchanging "evil” accusations— all while fending off volleys over his association with political streamer Hasan Piker, whose controversial soundbites continue to dog El-Sayed on the campaign trail.His actual platform can be summed up by the catchy, Mamdani-esque call-and-response slogan he deploys at rallies. Money out of? Politics! Money in your? Pockets! And Medicare for? All! Unlike the New York Mayor, El-Sayed isn’t cheesing in Suitsupply. He’s in a fitted black V-neck t-shirt that hugs his bicep pump, and he’s exuding, as his friend, the former New York congressman Jamaal Bowman puts it, “righteous indignation for justice.”Advice for Men From Jennifer Welch, the Profane ‘Mother’ of the Dirtbag LeftCourtesy of Michael Frost; GQIt’s been 10 years since Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high,” and about nine and half since America’s dirtbag left emerged saying, Fuck that. Now, Democrats from progressive upstart Abdul El-Sayed to establishment prince Gavin Newsom have tried to match the insult-comic tone of the second Trump administration. But the person who comes closest is not a politician or a brocialist streamer: It is Jennifer Welch, the Oklahoma interior designer turned Bravo star and cohost of the progressive-liberal political-interview-and-commentary podcasts I’ve Had It and IHIP News.A few days after Lindsey Graham died, Welch drew listeners’ attention to one of the Republican senator’s last known photographs: Graham holding an upright model of a Ukrainian SkyFall drone interceptor and grinning. “He liked cock, as we all know,” Welch said. “The worst-kept secret in Washington, DC. And he liked killing, you know, the biggest war hawk on the planet. And there he is with a black cock that kills, right before he dies.” There is no way that any political PR person lets their candidate talk to her now, I thought when I heard it. And yet the interviews kept coming.TMZ’s New DC Outpost Brings Chaos to the CapitolZohar LazarLate on the evening of July 21, as Michigan congresswoman Haley Stevens walked through the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, a reporter from the celebrity news site TMZ rushed toward her. “Jacob with TMZ,” he shouted, his phone camera filming. Stevens is a middle-of-the-road Democrat and had been campaigning in a heated primary for a Senate seat against Abdul El-Sayed, a public health official running to her left. Like other centrists from her party, she criticized Donald Trump and played up her working-class bona fides. In one video making the rounds on social media, Stevens said she would be “workin’ on our behalf” and “doing it with a little bit of joy, a little bit of enthusiasm…and a little bit of stick it to ’em.”Jacob Wasserman started the interview by saying he wanted to applaud Stevens. “I saw that video, which was legendary,” the TMZ reporter told her. “I think it’s widely considered, like, a legendary video.” He asked about her choice to clip the legendary “stick it to ’em” and stick it in a campaign video. TMZ published the interview the next day, marking its first foray into congressional campaign reporting. Since April, when Wasserman and an Australian transplant named Charlie Cotton had moved to DC to cover politics for TMZ, they’d mostly published inconsequential takes from politicians like Representative Suhas Subramanyam, who said it’s okay for Democrats to own Teslas, and Representative Chuck Edwards, who explained why he’d given young female staffers guns as gifts.The State of the SuitToday’s politicians explore the full range of sartorial storytelling. Just kidding, it’s mostly still suits.Sign up for Manual to receive useful advice on style, health, and more, five days a week.