The Candidates Running on Nursing Issues in the 2026 Midterm Elections

Part of Nurses on the Ballot, Nurse.org’s new research series on the nurses and nursing issues of the 2026 midterm elections. We reviewed the platform of every US Senate and governor nominee, and of every verified nurse candidate in the series; the candidates who put nursing commitments in writing are here, from both parties, in their own words. 

Every November, elections help shape the issues nurses deal with every day at work: how many patients you can be assigned, what you’re paid, whether you are safe on shift. Those issues rarely appear on the ballot directly. Instead, they’re shaped by the candidates voters elect. Yet when we reviewed every U.S. Senate and gubernatorial nominee’s platform across the country, statewide races, where one campaign speaks to an entire state, only a handful mentioned nurses or nursing at all. (House races number in the hundreds; the nurse candidates among them are covered in our federal roster.)

Some statewide campaigns do. This piece collects them, together with the nursing commitments we found in the platforms of the nurse candidates our companion rosters track, reviewed the same way, for Congress and the state legislatures. The result spans both parties and every level of the ballot, nurses and non-nurses alike, and every featured commitment appears in the candidate’s own words.

That kind of commitment turns out to be rare. Among every candidate running for US Senate or governor this year, we found five whose platforms carry a commitment on one of the seven nursing issues below: two Senate nominees and three running for governor. Most of the other names below are nurses themselves, running for Congress or a state legislature.

Plenty of candidates voice support for nurses, and that support is welcome. What we collected here is narrower: commitments specific enough to act on, something a candidate says they would create, fund, require, or change. And if we missed a candidate who belongs here, tell us; we will verify and add them.

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Safe Staffing and Patient Ratios

The stakes: how many patients you can safely be assigned is one of the profession’s oldest fights, and the only nursing issue that has ever gone to a statewide vote.

• Ed Markey (D, US Senate, Massachusetts, incumbent): the only Senate platform where we found a staffing-standards commitment. His healthcare plan pledges “Supporting nurses and healthcare workers by establishing safe staffing standards, increasing transparency and accountability, and investing in training, recruitment, and retention,” and lists him as original co-sponsor of the Nurse Staffing Standards for Hospital Patient Safety and Quality Care Act (S.1709).
• Elizabeth Lee (D, AZ-05), an RN, told Nurse.org: “Safe staffing is a key driver in ensuring patient safety and in protecting our nursing workforce from burnout or leaving the profession altogether. To get there, we need to adopt non-negotiable staffing ratios that are evidence-based and unit-specific.”
• Maria Collett (D, Pennsylvania Senate), a nurse, is championing named legislation: her Patient Safety Act “sets safe, unit-specific staffing minimums in Pennsylvania hospitals.”
• Sarah Jayne Della Vecchia (D, Tennessee House) is running on it: “Pass safe staffing laws to support healthcare workers and create safer and better healthcare environments.”
• Rachel Gross (D, Michigan House) makes the economic case: “Establishing reasonable nurse-to-patient ratios and limiting mandatory overtime is a fiscally responsible approach.”

Also on the record: Kyle Mullica (D, CO), Liz Boldon (D, MN), and Tarik Khan (D, PA) in the legislatures, and Jen Kiggans (R, VA), Mitchell Berman (D, WI), and N’Kiyla Thomas (D, OK) in the federal races, each quoted elsewhere in this piece or listed from their published platforms.

The stakes: the workforce crisis isn’t only about training new nurses; it’s about keeping the ones we have. Much of what we found here comes from Republican state candidates.

• Jenifer Jones (R, New Mexico House) backs a rural provider tax credit, writing that “this tax credit is a direct tool to recruit and keep medical professionals in the communities that need them most,” with nurses expressly among them.
• Danielle Penman (R, Illinois Senate), a labor-and-delivery nurse, commits to “recruiting and retaining doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals across Illinois.”
• Sandy Pickert (R, Kansas House), a nurse, authored and carried the Kansas State Board of Nursing Reform bill, which her platform describes as “addressing harsh disciplinary actions for minor re-licensure errors and empowering experienced nurses to return to the healthcare work force.”

Also on the record: Rachel Gross (D, MI), Mitchell Berman (D, WI), and Elizabeth Lee (D, AZ).

Funding Nursing Education and Training

The stakes: the pipeline. Nursing schools turn away qualified applications because of faculty shortages and other capacity constraints. We found commitments from two governor nominees, one from each party, and from the legislatures.

• Deb Haaland (D, New Mexico governor nominee) commits to “work with colleges and universities to expand the number of slots for nursing programs in New Mexico and help with job placement.”
• Michael Roger Minogue (R, Massachusetts governor nominee) pledges to “expand nursing education and loan forgiveness programs for healthcare professionals serving shortage areas.”
• Erin Murphy (D, Minnesota Senate), a nurse, writes: “We should also invest in our healthcare workforce by investing in training programs for nurses and other care workers, to both help meet the needs of our patients and invest in local economies.”

Also on the record: Kyle Mullica (D, CO), Liz Boldon (D, MN), Maria Collett (D, PA), and Mitchell Berman (D, WI).

Nurse Pay and Compensation

The stakes: the bluntest issue of all.

• Doug Jones (D, Alabama governor nominee) puts it plainly: “It’s about giving our nurses and our teachers a raise.”
• Liz Boldon (D, Minnesota Senate), a registered nurse and the only candidate we found with commitments on three nursing issues, commits on her priorities page to “ensuring nurses, direct-care workers, and behavioral health providers have safe working conditions, competitive wages, and opportunities for advancement.”

The stakes: healthcare workers face some of the highest workplace-violence rates of any profession.

• Mitchell Berman (D, WI-01), an emergency nurse running for Congress, covers this and three other issues in a single platform sentence: “Protect nurses and health care workers from violence on the job, ensure funding for nursing education to train and keep nurses in our local communities and put bedside nurses, not hospital executives, in charge of setting staffing standards on their own units.”

Also on the record: Rachel Baker (D, Ohio House), a nurse, and N’Kiyla Thomas (D, OK), quoted below.

The stakes: what NPs, CRNAs, nurse-midwives, and clinical nurse specialists are allowed to do without physician sign-off is decided mostly state by state, with federal payment rules layered on top. See Nurse.org’s guide to NP full practice authority.

• Gale Adcock (D, North Carolina Senate), a nurse practitioner, is blunt about it: “Restrictive and outdated state laws and regulations preventing the full utilization of licensed health care professionals must be repealed.”
• Rachel Baker (D, Ohio House) has introduced legislation “to revise the law governing certified registered nurse anesthetists.”
• Jen Kiggans (R, VA-02), herself a nurse practitioner, comes close: her platform commits to “allow qualified healthcare professionals to practice to the full extent of their training,” though it does not name APRNs.

Burnout and Mental Health Support

The stakes: the issue nurses name constantly and, in our review, platforms almost never named.

• N’Kiyla Thomas (D, Oklahoma US Senate), an LPN, names it directly: “Support healthcare workers by addressing staffing shortages, workplace violence, burnout, and unsafe working conditions.”
• Jen Kiggans (R, VA-02) comes close here too, pointing to her bills “introducing bills to provide health providers with critical mental healthcare resources,” language that covers providers broadly rather than naming nurses.

Some of the strongest nursing content in 2026 doesn’t fit the standard categories.

• Abdul El-Sayed (D, Michigan US Senate nominee) ties hospital consolidation to nurses’ workplace power, opposing mergers that leave “nurses, hospital workers, and doctors with less power at their workplace.”
• Iowa is the only Senate race where we found both nominees putting something nursing-adjacent in writing, though neither meets our commitment standard: Josh Turek (D) pledges to “reverse cuts to VA staffing and health care,” and Ashley Hinson (R) to “expanding the rural health workforce.”
• Dan Osborn (I, Nebraska US Senate) wants to ban the non-compete agreements that trap workers in place, expressly naming nurses among them: “hairstylists, warehouse workers, nurses, and fast food employees.” His commitment: “I support taking the FTC’s proposed November 2024 rule and making it a legislative ban on non-compete agreements for working people.”
• Amanda Janoo (D/Progressive, Vermont governor nominee) is running on community nursing itself. In the expandable detail sections of her platform’s healthcare plank, she commits to expanding the Community Nurse programs already running in Vermont towns from Thetford to West Windsor: “These nurses help people manage chronic illnesses, coordinate care, make home visits…”
• Two state legislators put nurse-naming workforce commitments in writing that our categories classify as broader than any one nursing issue: Kathleen Brudvig (D, South Dakota House) commits to “address the shortage of nurses, doctors and mental health professionals,” and Cindy Ledbetter (R, Indiana House), a psychiatric nurse practitioner, calls to “increase the number of such providers,” naming psychiatric nurse practitioners among the professionals Indiana needs most.
• N’Kiyla Thomas (D, Oklahoma US Senate) named a priority no standard checklist quite captures: accountability and transparency in the nursing education pipeline. “We cannot solve the nursing workforce shortage while ignoring the barriers that prevent qualified students from reaching the bedside,” she told Nurse.org.

No referendum will settle staffing, pay, or scope this November; the one ballot question that comes close funds a building for a nursing college. The rest arrives through candidates. The ones above put it in writing, to voters or to us, what they would do about the work nurses actually live. The 135 nurses on this year’s ballots are covered in our companion pieces: the seventeen running for Congress in our federal piece and the 118 running for state legislatures in the full roster.

Election Day is November 3.

More From Nurses on the Ballot

🤔 Which of these issues would move your vote? Tell us in the comments below.

A commitment, for this piece, means a specific policy: something that would be created, funded, required, or changed. Many candidates express support and appreciation for nurses, and that matters; it simply isn’t what this piece measures. Naming a problem without proposing anything isn’t either.

Within each issue, candidates appear in ballot order: federal races first, then governors, then state legislatures, alphabetically within each; entries that only come close appear last in their sections. We searched both parties, issue by issue. We reviewed the published platform of every 2026 US Senate and governor nominee against the same rules. Candidates for the US House and state legislatures come from our verified rosters of nurse candidates and from our own reporting; for those offices we make no completeness claim, and this piece never counts who didn’t say something, only who did.

Every quote is verbatim, and every platform quote links to its source in the text; statements made directly to Nurse.org are labeled as such. One limit to know: this piece reviews campaign platforms, the case candidates choose to make to voters. Sitting officeholders’ nursing work often lives in official records rather than on campaign pages, so a quiet campaign platform is a fact about a campaign’s emphasis, never a measure of anyone’s record.

If we missed a candidate with a specific nursing commitment, at any level, tell us; we will verify and add them.

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