--- title: "In 2026’s Closest Races, the Hottest Ticket Is a Debate That Never Happens" description: "Five weeks out, zero debates are booked in five governor races, six Senate races and nine House contests, the Globe finds" author: "Sterling Vance" published: 2026-09-28T09:37:05.105Z modified: 2026-09-28T14:18:56Z url: https://rews.cc/a/in-2026-s-closest-races-the-hottest-ticket-is-a-debate-that--9d6bdf language: en tags: ["politics", "elections", "debates", "media", "turnout", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # In 2026’s Closest Races, the Hottest Ticket Is a Debate That Never Happens *Five weeks out, zero debates are booked in five governor races, six Senate races and nine House contests, the Globe finds* By Sterling Vance · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/in-2026-s-closest-races-the-hottest-ticket-is-a-debate-that--9d6bdf ## In brief - The Globe found zero debates scheduled in 5 governor races, 6 Senate races and 9 competitive House races, five weeks out - Texas toss-up Senate and governor races have no debates because Republicans refuse; Democrats refused in OH, AZ and FL - Husted and Brown never scheduled an Ohio Senate debate; Warner cited a busy schedule; Cotton will skip Arkansas’s debate - The Globe cites falling local TV viewership, base-turnout strategy, campaign cash and the fade of presidential debates - New Hampshire’s John E. Sununu became the first competitive-race candidate in decades to refuse a WMUR debate Five weeks to Election Day. Early voting already creeping open across the map. And in race after race the entire country claims to be watching — toss-up Senate seats, governor’s mansions dangling by a thread, House districts drawn to a razor’s edge — what has the voter been offered? Nothing. No stage, no lecterns, no moderator shuffling index cards under the hot lights. Call it the Ghosting Season: according to a Boston Globe analysis, this is the first cycle in which skipping the televised debate has stopped being an ad-hoc dodge and hardened into strategy — a strategic default across a whole slate of major gubernatorial, Senate and House contests. And these are not the sleepy blowouts no station bothers to air. The Globe counted close, some nationally watched races — five governors’ races, six Senate races and nine of the most competitive House races — with precisely zero debates scheduled, and the clock bleeding out. Start in Texas, where both the Senate and governor’s races are rated toss-ups — the Senate contest is [one rews has tracked as a genuine coin-flip](https://rews.cc/a/forty-days-out-the-senate-map-tilts-and-the-republicans-edge-a15ad6) — and there will be no debate in either, because the Republican candidates won’t debate. Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico’s latest gambit is to propose a Fox News debate. *Fox News.* A Democrat, hat in hand, begging to walk into the other side’s cathedral just to get on a stage. But don’t hang this on one party. In Ohio, Arizona and Florida, it is the Democratic candidates for governor who have refused to debate. In Nevada, Democratic nominee Aaron Ford has built a whole line of attack on incumbent Republican Joe Lombardo over the missing debate — an attack slightly complicated by the inconvenient fact that Ford himself declined to debate a credible challenger in his own primary. The Senate roll of silence goes on. Ohio: Republican Senator Jon Husted and former Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, neck and neck, and somehow no debate ever got scheduled. Open seats in North Carolina and Minnesota: silent. Virginia: Democratic incumbent Mark Warner pleads a packed Senate schedule — the same Senate, the Globe notes, that is scheduled to be on recess for a month before Election Day. Down in Arkansas there actually will be a televised Senate debate, in a race one recent poll found competitive — but Republican incumbent Tom Cotton will not be gracing it. Up in New England, the heresy has reached the cathedral of retail politics itself: former senator John E. Sununu became, in decades, the first candidate in a competitive race to refuse a WMUR-TV debate in New Hampshire, ducking the ritual in his Republican primary against former senator Scott Brown. The precedent, such as it is, runs in the family — his brother Chris skipped the same debate a few years back, though that was a noncompetitive primary. The House? At least nine competitive races from New York to California will go forum-less, the Globe found. The most conspicuous: Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, a toss-up, where Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke declined two invitations to debate Republican incumbent Derrick Van Orden, saying the hosting organizations were biased against her. Why has the podium gone so quiet all at once? The Globe’s list reads like an autopsy of an institution. One: local television viewership — the historic home of these debates — has withered, so the stations press less and the payoff shrinks. Two: the modern midterm is no longer about persuading undecideds; it is about dragging your own base to the polls, which makes a debate about as useful as a screen door. Three: the money. There is such an absurd torrent of cash in these races that campaigns no longer need a free-TV moment to drive a message — and there is ever less local media left to amplify one anyway. Four: the rot started at the top. For decades, a commission staged three presidential debates a cycle. In 2020 the candidates simply skipped the planned third. In 2024 both parties walked away from the commission altogether, leaving one Trump–Biden debate (remember that one?) and one Trump–Harris debate. The institution didn’t die; everyone just stopped showing up to its funeral. Hovering over it all is the old maxim every campaign manager recites like a bedtime prayer: you cannot win a debate in a way that changes the race, but you can certainly lose one that way. Why book the one room where everything can go wrong at once? Where this leaves 2028, nobody knows. The Globe notes some of these forces are structural and unlikely to reverse in two years — though what the terrain looks like with Trump about to exit the stage is anyone’s guess. What is not anyone’s guess: a public that never sees its candidates stand on one stage and answer for themselves has lost something, and nobody in either party seems in much of a hurry to give it back.