Former President Barack Obama will headline a fundraiser for Senate Democrats in the Washington, D.C., area on Oct. 7, 2026, his first appearance at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser this midterm cycle, with the aim of handing his party a financial boost.
A DSCC vice chair, Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, will sit down with Obama for a conversation centered on “the importance of flipping the Senate and the stakes of the election,” a DSCC spokesperson said. The event falls in the closing stretch before the Nov. 3 elections.
Obama remains a popular and influential figure among Democratic voters.
Seven Seats Rated Tossups
Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats to Democrats’ and allies’ 47, and 35 seats are on the ballot Nov. 3. Democrats need to flip four seats to take control of the upper chamber in November.
As of Oct. 2, the Cook Political Report lists seven Senate seats as tossups — Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas — with North Carolina leaning Democratic and Kansas leaning Republican.
Democrats have grown increasingly optimistic as several red states move into play. Democrat James Talarico leads Trump’s endorsed candidate, Republican Ken Paxton, in multiple polls in Texas. A Talarico victory would make him the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas since 1994, and the first to win a U.S. Senate seat there since 1988.
President Donald Trump and GOP leaders have launched what CNN described as an “Iowa rescue mission” in a state Trump won by 13 percentage points. On Monday, Sept. 28, Trump announced in the Oval Office plans for Mesabi Metallics to build a $15 billion steel plant in Iowa. The state’s Senate race features Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democrat Josh Turek.
Obama’s Pull With Voters
An NBC News poll conducted in September found that 43 percent of registered voters — 77 percent of Democrats among them — would be more likely to support a candidate he endorsed. His party will likely treat his involvement as a lift at a moment when voters are becoming more engaged in the midterms.
Obama headlined a Nov. 1, 2025, rally in the New Jersey governor’s race, and the dedication ceremony for the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on June 18 drew him as well.
Not every indicator favors his party. Democrats face a staggering spending disadvantage in Georgia’s tight race for governor.
Republicans Keep Their Distance
Trump is recording near-record-low approval ratings. His job approval “has slipped below 40%,” below his numbers at the end of September 2018 and similar to former President George W. Bush’s in September 2006, according to a syndicated column published Oct. 2. The same column notes that Republicans trail in the generic ballot by about as much as they did in 2018 and by wider margins than in 2006.
Distance from the 80-year-old could help them in November, multiple GOP lawmakers have concluded, and they have scrubbed references to him from their campaign websites while publicly criticizing his unpopular policies. Less than 1 percent of Republican political ads that aired in the first half of September mentioned Trump at all, compared with 20 percent of Democratic ads, CNN data analyst Harry Enten reported.
Backlash to Trump’s policies, his handling of the economy, his war with Iran and the party’s razor-thin majority in the lower chamber are cited as the factors behind the widespread prediction that the GOP will lose control of the House. If the Senate follows, Trump would spend his final two years in office with Democrats running Congress.
Republicans had won the White House and both chambers when, on Nov. 10, 2016, then-President-elect Trump arrived at the Oval Office at Obama’s invitation for the symbolic start of the transition.
A Quiet Push on AI
Within his party, Obama plays a role that extends well beyond the fundraiser, its most visible piece. Nearly 10 years out of the White House, he is still his party’s standard-setter, and he is regularly in touch with the rising generation of Democratic leaders.
Artificial intelligence is the subject he has been pressing on likely 2028 presidential candidates, and he tells them what he has seen so far is nowhere near enough for the scale of the issue or its politics. The emerging field is also facing demands for more from Democratic figures including former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
Sam Altman of OpenAI and executives at Google and Anthropic are among the leaders of all the major AI companies Obama has talked with, along with outside experts and informal advisers. One of them, Jason Goldman, is the former Twitter executive who ran his Office of Digital Strategy. His reading on the subject has gone deep, and he favors articles by writers Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Charlie Warzel and Casey Newton.
Trump hosted several AI leaders at the White House on Tuesday, Sept. 29, announcing a new industry commitment to police itself. He signed an executive order that day renaming artificial intelligence “super intelligence.” Most Republicans in Washington have taken their cues from the president and pushed back against broad federal regulation of AI.
On the Democratic side, no consensus plan has emerged — not even from Obama. Some 2028 hopefuls are wary of landing on the wrong side of the industry’s enormous campaign spending.
