With just a week to go until elections that could wrest control of Congress from Donald Trump’s party, a raft of surprising candidates in a handful of tight races could tip the balance and determine the US political agenda for the next two years.

With Trump’s approval ratings tanking, midterm voters are looking to candidates who can relate to their concerns about the economy, jobs, and the cost of living.

Star candidates with non-political backgrounds, including seminary student James Talarico in Texas and progressive Abdul el-Sayed in Michigan, are hoping to tap into the frustration of voters who are fed up with career politicians.

But joining them on the campaign trail this year are a host of more unusual candidates, including an Olympian, a TV personality, a Latin Grammy award-winner, and even a “smoke-jumper”.

“Everyone’s pissed off, and when people aren’t happy they turn to outsiders,” said Kristina Harrison assistant professor at Indiana University and expert on political marketing.

“Right now there is crisis on top of crisis, and people are looking for candidates that are brash with big personalities,” she told The i Paper, or figures representing an authentic, “folksy hero” who can provide hope and comfort in uncertain times. “There’s so much uncertainty and people are very stressed out so there’s a desire to turn to something that’s authentic and genuine and that’s coming up in these outsiders.”

Come 3 November, some of these outside candidates could prove key to how much power the President and his Republicans continue to wield.

Standouts for the Senate

As Trump’s popularity sinks ever further, recent months have seen growing speculation that Democrats will take back not only the House of Representatives, but even the Senate. Such an outcome would be a crushing blow to the President, who has repeatedly tried to frame the elections as a test of his personal popularity.

Thirty-five of 100 seats in the Senate are being contested this year, with Democrats needing to make a net gain of four to take control from Trump’s Republican Party, which currently holds 53 seats. If the contest ends in a fifty-fifty tie between the parties, the Vice President, JD Vance, will have the casting vote allowing Republicans a working majority. Polls have the balance finely poised, but forecasts increasingly favour the Democrats to win a majority.

However, with candidates embarking on the final stretch before polling day, some of the races are too close to call.

A former sports broadcaster, Michele Tafoya who covered five Super Bowls as a pitch-side reporter has been endorsed by Trump but is pitching herself an “independent Republican” and increasingly trying to distance herself from the President.

She’s mounting a serious challenge to Democrat Peggy Flanagan, the Minnesota lieutenant governor who is leading Tafoya by around 3 per cent in the polls. Last week the closely watched Cook Political Report shifted its rating of Minnesota’s Senate race from “Likely Democrat” to “Lean Democrat” – in favour of the Republicans. The shift is an unwelcome development for Democrats who had expected a comfortable win.

Turek is a two-time Paralympic gold medallist who was born with spina bifida – when a baby’s spine and spinal cord do not fully develop in the womb – after his father was exposed to the poisonous Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Turek, who overcame 21 surgeries by the age of 12 to go on to represent the US wheelchair basketball team at four Paralympics, is currently neck and neck with his Republican opponent Ashley Hinson in Iowa, an agricultural seat currently held by the Republicans. However, the rising cost of fuel and fertiliser for the many farmers in the state mean it could well flip come November.

Amy Tatum, lecturer in communication and media at Bournemouth University, and an expert on US politics and representation, pointed to how candidates positioning themselves as outsiders with interesting back stories like Tafoya, Turek, or Sayed helped with both campaigning and credibility.

“You don’t have to defend previous votes on pertinent issues, and you are not tied to existing viewpoints or ideologies. The slate is clean, giving them more freedom campaigning and more ability to pivot towards voter needs,” said Tatum. Being successful in a field other than politics also gave them social status without a political record. “They are not tarnished with the negative associations many voters currently apply to politicians in America.”

A military veteran, former factory mechanic, and union leader, Dan Osborn is taking on Republican Pete Ricketts, a former two-term governor of Nebraska whose family owns the major league baseball team the Chicago Cubs.

Ricketts has a narrow lead, but the momentum seems to with Osborn despite a leaked audio recording where the independent candidate used a series of profanities to refer to Trump voters in the state. Alongside Democrat support, Osborn has secured the support of Republican Trump critics including former Republic National Committee chairman Marc Racicot and former congressman Joe Walsh.

“We all share the core belief that DC is broken because Epstein class billionaires like Pete Ricketts are putting profit over everyday people,” Osborn told CBS News last week.

Brian Bengs (independent), South Dakota

Brian Bengs, a former National Park ranger, is challenging the Republican incumbent Mike Rounds, running on the “cowboy code of conduct” – promising to “tell the truth and take care of your neighbour”. Bengs and Rounds are tied in polling in a state where nearly two thirds of voters picked Trump in 2024.

While there have long been independent or third-party candidates in the US, polarisation within American politics had opened the door for independents like Bengs and Osborn, according to Harrison of Indiana University. “We’ve got so much into identity politics here: there are some Republicans that can never vote Democrat, some Democrats that can never vote Republican, so if they’re going to be winning against a Republican, being an independent is the best bet for them,” she said.

Race for the House

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the US Congress, are up for grabs in November. The Republicans hold a majority with 218 seats to the Democrats’ 214, with one independent and two vacancies. Democrats are widely predicted to take control of the House.

Like many Democrat candidates, Sam Forstag has a history working in the labour union movement, but unlike most he worked parachuting into remote wilderness to tackle forest fires as a “smoke-jumper”. For eight years Forstag worked as a wilderness firefighter, with four of those smoke-jumping.

Forstag, 32, is hoping his back story can persuade younger working-class voters to plump for him over his Republican rival Aaron Flint, who currently holds a slender lead in Montana’s first district in the polls. However, while the seat was ranked likely Republican weeks ago, it’s now a toss-up, according to the Cook Political Report.

Rebecca Cooke, who runs a not-for-profit business to help female entrepreneurs and works as a waitress while running for Congress, holds a slender lead in the polls over her rival in Wisconsin’s third district.

Cooke’s opponent, the sitting Republican representative Derrick Van Orden, has repeatedly been accused of using AI to post “deep-fake” videos that purport to show 38-year-old Cooke making controversial statements and prompting Cooke to take legal action to try and stop the fake videos. Van Orden has also faced scrutiny over his presence outside the Capitol during the January 6 riots.

The Texas Senate race has generated national and international headlines with 37-year-old pastor Talarico for the Democrats taking on Ken Paxton, a Trump-endorsed Republican mired in controversy.

But in the state’s 15^th Congressional District, Bobby Pulido, a or “Tex-Mex” singer who has had chart-topping albums and won multiple Latin Grammy awards, is hoping to take advantage of Trump’s tumbling popularity ratings with Latino voters who often remain culturally conservative. 

Pulido currently lags his Republican rival, the Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz, but is seen as a standard-bearer for the Democrats’ hopes of regaining votes with the Latino community across the country.

Candidates like Pulido, Cooke and Forstag have been emphasising their working-class roots as a result of the worsening cost of living crisis and the economic pain faced by many Americans, which have made this election more about economic class than previous contests, said Harrison.

But as with Trump, the biggest outsider in recent US political history, the promise of a “folksy hero” can soon turn sour, Tatum and Harrison warn.

And for the new generation of political outsiders, they only need to look to the White House to see an example of a politician in free-fall.