A Look Ahead to the 2026 State AG Elections From DAGA President Sean Rankin

Podcast: Regulatory Oversight
Episode: A Look Ahead to the 2026 State AG Elections From DAGA President Sean Rankin
Hosts: Ashley Taylor and Clayton Friedman
Guest: Sean Rankin
Aired: October 21, 2026

Ashley Taylor:
Welcome to another episode of Regulatory Oversight, a podcast that focuses on providing expert perspectives on trends that drive regulatory enforcement activity. I’m Ashley Taylor, one of the hosts of the podcast and the co-leader of our firm’s State Attorneys General team and a member of our Regulatory Investigations, Strategy, and Enforcement practice. This podcast features insights from members of our practice group as well as guest commentary from business leaders, regulatory experts, and current and former government officials. We cover a wide range of topics affecting businesses operating in highly regulated areas. Before we get started today, I wanted to remind all of our listeners to visit and subscribe to our blog at regulatoryoversight.com so you can stay up to date on developments and changes in the regulatory landscape. Today, my colleague and co-leader of our State AG practice group, Clayton Friedman, joins me as we welcome Democratic Attorneys General Association President Sean Rankin to talk about the upcoming 2026 state AG elections. Sean has spent a decade with the Democratic Attorneys General Association, joining as its first full-time executive director. Since then, he has been promoted to president of the organization where he works with his staff across campaigns, recruiting, involving data analysis, communications, policy, politics, and fundraising for the Democratic Attorneys General. I know this is a busy time of year for you and your staff with November elections quickly approaching. So, Sean, I want to thank you for joining us today during your busy time.

Sean Rankin:
Thank you, sir. Ashley and Clay, it’s always fun to come on and talk about elections with you. So once again, thank you for having me. I love working with you on this, but I also just love working with you guys generally. So it’s always good to have you in the room and to visit with you. So thanks for having me.

Ashley Taylor:
Great. Well, let’s jump right in. Sean, the 2026 elections will bring one of the largest incoming classes of new attorneys general in recent years. What stands out to you most about this year’s landscape?

Sean Rankin:
Well, for starters, this is our big map. And what we mean by that is we’ve got 32 elections this year for state attorney general. We have three states that also appoint their attorney general. So truly, this is that moment where we see pretty sizable shifts when it comes to the number of AGs or those who are serving. So we’ll see, for our end, we see five who are term-limited. We feel pretty good about some pickups. So it’s going to make a sizable difference in the room in terms of chemistry. For us right now, in terms of the greater landscape, the wind is at our back for the most part. We are seeing voters respond to our candidates. People are upset at the Trump administration. And just so we’re clear, I’m talking Republicans and independents who are either not coming out to vote or who are looking at alternative choices and are actually looking at our AGs and our AG candidates, for example. So we feel really good about that. I think this is built on the work that our AGs have been doing in the last two years, looking at ’25 and ’26. We’ve got more than 140 lawsuits against the Trump administration. I’m raising that because this administration has frozen funds and not allowed monies that are owed to the states back out to the states.

And our AGs, by suing, have gotten relief for their states, and we’ve seen tens of billions flowing back to our states. Our friends on the other side that did not join these suits have not seen money flow back in. The two exceptions are Kentucky and Pennsylvania, and that’s only because our former AGs, who are current governors, Andy Beshear in Kentucky and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, have joined the suits to make sure that the constituents of their states have actually gotten the monies that they’re owed and due from the federal government. But it was only by suing that we actually saw those monies flow. So in those states where we have Democratic AGs right now, we’re seeing that support manifested as a result of making sure you’re taking care of the constituents. In those states where AGs, being Republican AGs, have not gotten on board, it’s hurting them. That’s laying out a really strong case for us this year, and that really is the frame for the 2026 elections.

Clayton Friedman:
Sean, it’s always good to see you as well, and I appreciate those kind comments. And it’s just one of my favorite opportunities whenever we get to talk about elections. This one’s different, though. This is a cycle that you lived through eight years ago, obviously, and it’s a little bit different than the one four years ago. The potential numbers are bigger. It triggers, obviously, a lot of change. And I remember going through this eight years ago and 16 years ago, 24 and 32 years ago. What makes this large changeover different, though, if you compare it to eight years ago and four years ago as well?

Sean Rankin:
Well, I think we’ve seen a map that’s continued to evolve. The states that are in play this year do have some resemblance to 2018, but in 2018, we picked up four states and we’ve held onto them. So now, at least in a few of those, Nevada and Michigan, for example, we’re now defending them as open seats and holds as opposed to protecting our incumbents. So that’s a shift. The map is moving again. We see the map moving to benefit us. The number of states that we’re playing in, quite frankly, has continued to grow through the course of this year. Let me start with 2022, though, and move forward. In 2022, we had to play defense. It was… We had to go protect seven incumbents. It was a hard cycle. In terms of protecting those incumbents, we were six and one, but then we also picked up Arizona. So we were really lucky from a numeric standpoint in holding where we were before the election. But Arizona was a state we only won by 280 votes. In the last four years, Kris Mayes, our AG in Arizona, has done an incredible job of making sure that she’s done the work on behalf of the constituents. And now we’ve got Arizona up outside the margin, high single digits.

So if we’re going to look at where we were in 2022, barely squeaking through, and Arizona is still a tough state, but now we see that AG Mayes is up, again, high single digits and moving, that tells you where we’re just getting started. So at the beginning of this year, end of last year, I was saying Arizona was probably my toughest fight. Right now, we are ahead in Kansas. Now, I did talk about Kansas last year and predicted this one because our candidate, Chris Mann, ran a great race four years ago. Again, he was a little bit out of reach for us. This year, we’ve made sure that this has been our top pickup opportunity. We have him up outside the margin of error now in Kansas. The sitting incumbent, Kris Kobach, has negatives that are in excess of Trump’s negatives in Kansas. So this is the one state where we’ve got Trump in low double digits underwater. Kris Kobach is worse. So this was going to be a state we targeted, and we’re seeing it move. And I got to tell you, at this point, the only thing that’s been on TV by way of Chris Mann has been positives about himself. We haven’t hit Kris Kobach yet.

So I got to tell you, those numbers are going to move again. One more thing about Chris Mann, he just got the FOP endorsement in state. I think we all know it’s rare for a Democrat to get that. In fact, he didn’t get it last time. He got it this time. I think you’re really seeing the state move in his direction. And let’s go all the way to the end of the spectrum. We can win in Florida. This is a state that I would have never put on our map. But I got to tell you, we’ve got competitive numbers there right now. We’re in the process of making a very large investment in Florida. We have donors, Republican donors in state, who have come forward and said that they love our candidate, they want to be with him. So we’re stretching our map. And I’m excited about Jose Javier Rodriguez, our candidate there. I tried to get him to run in 2018, in fact. He wasn’t ready. In 2022, he got an appointment from the Biden administration. This time he was ready. And it’s a late-breaking race with the dynamics, again, across the country changing. This is a winnable race, and we’re now going to go contest it. We’re going to go fight in Florida. We are really putting on this late investment in the state. We’re going to go make sure… And again, sort of the gamesmanship of this, the other side’s got to go fight to keep it. We’re not going to let them have Florida and just walk away with it. They’re going to have to earn it this time. So get ready.

Clayton Friedman:
Following up on that, and we’ll talk probably a little bit more about some other specific races and the close ones, what’s unique here, though, about the national environment as you look at the large number of open seats? And if you were to say two or three states that really are the bellwether for those national issues that are coming up?

Sean Rankin:
I think in terms of states where you see real movement, let me talk about another one of our incumbents. Wisconsin is always a battleground state. This year, Josh Kaul has a significant lead. This is a rematch of 2022. We’ve got him up high single digits. Josh is leading the ticket. So we always see Wisconsin as a fight. Doesn’t feel a whole lot like a fight right now. Georgia. Georgia is one that was always a little bit out there, a bit of a stretch. We engaged somewhat in 2018. We engaged somewhat in 2022. This year, I think we bring it home. We actually have Tanya Miller, our candidate, up in Georgia, and we’ve seen this steady progress. Being very transparent about it, we’ve got four polls in the state from earlier this year: down three, down one, up one, now we’re up outside the margin of error. We continue to see the march forward. We’re investing heavily in the state. We are now getting into low to mid-seven figures. We’ve got more money that’s going in. Tanya is a great candidate. So again, I think the entire landscape has shifted. We’re really just seeing states that were a bit too far now are right there for us. And even stretching it further, Oklahoma is in play.

I got to tell you, our candidate there, Nick Coffey, great guy, former prosecutor, US Attorney. Nick has enough money in an inexpensive market to be on TV. He’s got three weeks of TV, maybe, I think he’s up now, so actually maybe four weeks of TV, plus there’s an IE in the state to go support him. So he’s going to have IE spending as well. The one thing that his polling showed is where it starts out being very Republican-heavy, as soon as you actually identify who he is, something about him, and why he’s running, the numbers shift. It gets competitive fast. So he’s a true wildcard. It’s a bit of a stretch outside of where we are, but I got to tell you, Trump won the state by 34 points, I think. Right now, Trump is in low single digits and falling. So if in Oklahoma, Trump is actually on the verge of going underwater, the state opens up. So again, we are paying a lot of attention to our map. We’re being disciplined about how we’re approaching it, but we are accepting the opportunities that come at us to go out and invest and push.

Ashley Taylor:
Sean, that makes for a great segue into a topic we want to talk about with you. And this comes from the experience I know we all have had in elections where the candidate for AG experiences a significant drop-off. So you’ll have people who vote for governor or vote for president and are in the voting booth and just don’t vote for the attorney general. That drop-off is oftentimes between 20 and 30%. I wonder if you could comment on whether or not the individual consumers\constituents are recognizing the unique role of a state AG in this modern election, or is it still tied to really the national environment?

Sean Rankin:
Actually, I think we’re seeing a couple of things happen. I think we’re seeing both a national environment but also a local environment. What is actually going on in the states is actually this balancing act between the two. The issues actually move based upon where you are. So for example, in Arizona, water rights are critically important, critically important. And we’re seeing this regularly in the state. The way that AG Mayes approached it gives her a winning issue in the state. So this is helping her to stand out. It’s contributing to the lead she’s got right now. Nevada, it’s tourism. They have been hit hard, not only by foreign guests not wanting to come into the United States, but I happen to be with our current Attorney General Aaron Ford over the weekend, who’s running for governor, and he’s actually noting that you’re not even getting domestic tourists into Nevada right now. So if that’s the bread and butter for Las Vegas and it’s not happening, then you know people are hurting. And this goes to cost of living, it goes to affordability. People in Nevada are hurting. We can actually show the sort of difference between and distinguish between what Joe Lombardo, the governor, is doing, what Aaron Ford is saying in his campaign, how does that affect the AG race with Nicole Cannizzaro?

So we actually feel confident. Nevada is more of a dogfight. It always is. It’s not a huge state, but there’s a lot of money that goes in, but we show a lead for Nicole. And so again, it is the combination of the national play, the national landscape, but also how do people in state feel? Iowa, here’s an interesting one. Nate Willems is talking about the new Cancer Alley. I know that both of you are familiar with what’s deemed Cancer Alley in Louisiana, this track of land along a river where incidents of cancer just are through the roof. You’re actually seeing that now in Iowa. And I got to tell you that constituents in Iowa are really concerned about this. It is not something that is driven necessarily by anything that the Trump administration is doing, but Brenna Bird, the incumbent Attorney General, has not done a thing about it, and our candidate is making her pay for it, and people are responding to it. So this is one of those states where my friend on the other side, at DAGA has made a huge investment in the state.

Right now we’ve got this competitive and in the margin, but at the top of the ticket, we see the governor, the Democratic governor, gubernatorial candidate running away with it. We see the Senate leaning to us, and I think we’re going to win the Senate seat in Iowa. I got to tell you, I just don’t think that Brenna Bird is that person who can beat back the tide. Rising tide lifts all boats. She is not going to stop it. We’re going to fight this one down to the finish. We only lost this one last time by 20,000 votes, and that was with Tom Miller. We’re finding the extra 20,000 votes. We’re going hard at this. And again, we’re seeing people in state who are really concerned about an issue, again, a state issue, in addition to everything else they’re feeling, and they’re looking to the Democratic candidate right now to answer it. And this is really the pattern across the country: national landscape, state issue. It’s a combination of the two, and our people are ready and working really hard.

Clayton Friedman:
Historic low approval ratings for the President, unprecedented. Does that guarantee victory from the trickle-down effect, like if the Senate swings to the D, or do you still got to be really careful?

Sean Rankin:
It’s a combination, and I think that’s what this conversation has illuminated so far. We have to take advantage of the opportunity. The fact that there isn’t a strong national figure who’s guaranteeing and driving out votes on the right, helps us. We’ve still got to make that breakthrough moment occur so that the voters in each of these states recognizes that the candidate who’s running in that state can be their candidate. And again, we are seeing this in the numbers across the board. We’re seeing these fights, we’re seeing people move. But this is actually something the campaigns have to do. This is this, again, I’m calling it this sort of breakthrough point, and we’ve seen it occur. And now we’re looking at again at these other states down the line, like Florida, where we’re now fighting to get to that breakthrough point. We’re getting close to it, and again, that’s why we’re going to go invest. But it really does have to do with the combination of the two. It’s a one-two punch. You’re not going to get this one just because they don’t like the President or people are upset at the President. You got to earn it. And I think all of our campaigns are doing a very good job of being out there in the field and earning it.

Clayton Friedman:
Let me change the direction a little bit. It goes back to something we talked about earlier. There’s 11 open seats plus three more in the non-elected AG states that are up and the close races. You literally could have a switchover of over 15 states easily, if not 20. How does that impact, especially in your role at DAGA, in trying to anticipate what different leadership styles are we going to see, what sort of different coalition building, et cetera, both within the Democratic Party, and we’ll touch a little bit more about bipartisan relationships in a second, but just in that one particular area, what are your challenges and what’s positive?

Sean Rankin:
Whenever we have a cycle like this, again, when we have so many races up, and in particular for us where we have five AGs who are term-limited, one of the hardest parts about this moment is that I’ve got some really good friends who are moving on. And that goes to leadership in the room, too. As you all remember, we had 12 new AGs join us in 2018. That was a combination of eight Democrat-to-Democrat transitions as well as four pickups. I’m down to five, so… And those are my longest-serving AGs at this point. So we will have a number of AGs who continue on beyond, again, five who will continue on into a third term. But it does change the chemistry of the room. So we’re going to see somewhere between five, eight, maybe more that will come in as a result of the election results. That’s a lot of new people. They are young AGs. They are going to need to get settled right away. We’re just in a moment where, I’ll speak for our AGs or speak about our AGs, they work as a group. They are consistently on the phone, on Zoom, talking to each other, making sure that there is good communication, and they work as a group.

You’re going to have a lot of people to bring in in this moment who need to be ready to go on day one. So there’s work that has to be done between the election and certification, certification and the swearing-in, and then getting them ready to move based upon any of the things that we see in the greater environment. So I felt this way in 2018, where how do we actually get everybody settled in, right? And each time we have elections where we have people move on or we have new folks come in, we have to do a little bit more. But this will be a big class. And if I point out one person, not that I want to just focus on one, but with AG Ford in Nevada being term-limited, he was a co-chair for four years. He was a great partner of mine in getting things done, and he’s a really great friend. I mean, again, I mentioned earlier I was lucky to see him over the weekend. I know he’s got to go do what he’s got to do. The term limit made it absolute. There was no staying. It was just you’re going. But I’m going to miss the guy. I mean, I really am. He’s just been a great friend and a great partner. And that’s what we’ve got to see. We’ve got to take the new leaders who are here, and I will point out a few of those.

Nick Brown in Washington state has been an incredible young leader in the room. Jeff Jackson of North Carolina, Dan Rayfield. I mean, we’re seeing leaders emerge who are taking on greater responsibility, and I’m excited about where they go organizationally and how they’re, again, moving forward. But I’m also reassured by Kathy Jennings from Delaware, who stays in the room, who also was a four-year partner as a co-chair. She remains on my executive committee. Being able to lean into Kathy is really important as the back-and-forth just to talk about ideas or how do we actually go forward with something in the room or what should we be helping to do? Right? Where does she see that we can fill the gaps? And having that thought leader as a partner is really important. But change is constant. We know how to do it. We’re good at it. I’m excited about the class that would come in. This is the fun part, right? Now we’ve got, again, five to eight additional leaders who are coming in, people who are enthusiastic, people who want to grow into the roles. And in a state like Georgia or maybe Florida, it fundamentally changes the map when you have those kinds of states that join your caucus for the first time. And I know that I’ve talked with Tanya Miller a lot about this. For a state that’s as big as Georgia, it’s a really small office. And there are a lot of needs that that office has that haven’t been funded over time. So this also goes to legislative strategies and being supportive and giving her what she needs. Because I got to tell you, Tanya Miller in the seat, she starts to grow that office, you’re going to see a national leader emerge.

Ashley Taylor:
Sean, let me turn, if I could, to your comment about AGs working together. And I know one thing our clients have seen, contrary to the headlines in major newspapers, AGs work together across the political aisle on consumer protection issues. So would you talk about that and really help our listeners understand how state AGs think about consumer protection issues and how they escape the bounds of partisanship?

Sean Rankin:
Yeah. This is a key aspect of their role. And while we all know it, it’s oftentimes not something that the average voter or average constituent thinks about. We’re learning that they’re growing in their understanding of it. But truly, it historically has always looked like the top cop. And in fact, in some states, it is the top cop. But in most states, if not all the states, it is, in fact, the top consumer regulator. And so the way that we have approached this, the way that I’ve talked to the AGs about it, they want a level playing field in the states. They want to make sure that everybody is playing by the same rules, that people are following the rules. Right? We need a thriving economic business environment so that we’ve got jobs, we’ve got growth, we’ve got people doing well. But you also have bad actors who are regularly positioning themselves in places or are taking advantage of consumers. And then you also just have the basic kind of friction that occurs. There are consumers who sometimes just can’t read a bill for a pretty typical service like a mobile phone or for cable TV.

And that causes challenges. And there’s a reason that AGs need to lean in and engage with those type of service providers or, again, anybody who sells a consumer product. So to that point, there’s not as much difference between AGs on the right and the left necessarily when it comes to protecting consumers. And because most of the big actors engage across state lines, what an actor does in one state that’s red is going to follow it as it does something in another state that’s blue. So you really do see the AGs working collaboratively on these issues. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be with each other or agree even their viewpoint on where the issue may be. They may still get to the same conclusion and choose to act together. And so we do regularly see 42 AGs together in an action, or 48 AGs together, or 37. You see the supermajority of the AGs working together on consumer matters. So while we run against each other and elections do matter, when it comes to actually serving, I think we can say that those who are sitting AGs will do the responsible thing when it comes to consumer work.

I’d like to think that across the board. I’d like to think that they can find the common ground and work on it. And I think what this means for your clients, what it means for those others who engage with us as an organization and who participate with us, is that you really do need to build your relationships with AGs. You have to understand the broad powers that they have. You’ve got to understand how they’re looking at issues. You need to build, again, just long-term relationships and make sure that if you’re engaged in a consumer space, that you’re relying upon steady counsel like you, you’re looking at participation in organizations which help to foster relationships like ours so that you have a better chance to solve the problems more easily when they come up. And even with the best of players, again, there’s just natural friction between companies who are selling a consumer product or service and those people who actually are buying that product or service.

Clayton Friedman:
Sean, the last four years have been interesting in consumer protection in that you always had some multistate cases. Bipartisan cooperation in consumer protection has always been there. The last four years has been a little bit more of where there’s been some Democratic initiatives and some Republican initiatives separate and apart from each other. Touching on what you just talked about, what do you see coming around the corner as far as an opportunity for more bipartisan enforcement?

Sean Rankin:
No one exists in a vacuum. Again, this takes us back to the kickoff topic of the national landscape. I do think it’s harder, I’m going to speak to my opponents for a second here, I do think it’s harder for Republican AGs, for whatever reason, to stand up to their president even when they think that what their president is doing is wrong. And so I think you end up finding that in certain cases, in certain situations, I’ll call it situations, they’re going to take a different tack with a consumer issue because the president has said, “I want it to go a certain way.” I don’t think we have that on our side. I think in some ways we’re less orderly and we’re a little bit more critical of authority, and that means pushing back on fellow Democrats in places that just sort of less, happens less often on the right. There are times where I know that our AGs pushed back on the Biden administration and they weren’t real happy. Usually, I got those calls. I do think that there will be moments where, again, because the administration wants a thing, that it’s going to lend itself to the Republican AGs having a slightly different position or handling it differently. Notwithstanding, I do think that more often than not on the big issues, you’re going to see multistates which are 30-plus states, 40-plus states, and you’re going to find commonality and shared leadership between Ds and Rs on consumer issues when it matters most.

Ashley Taylor:
Sean, I want to thank you for joining Clayton and me today. I know our listeners enjoyed your valuable insights. And I want to thank our audience for tuning in. And as a reminder, you can stay up to date with election information leading up to November elections as well as the election results and analysis by visiting our blog at regulatoryoversight.com and subscribing. Please make sure to also subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you use, and we look forward to you joining us next time.

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