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The rules
The elections desk · the 2026 midterms

The Count

All the outlet's midterm coverage lives here: Senate, House, governors and the race rooms. Every call carries a printed number, months early, and gets graded against the certified result.

Election day
3 Nov 2026
Countdown
 
Senate control
R 82%
Record
53 locked / 0 graded
The Count · House

The House board

The House is not thirty-five separate arguments; it is one national argument resolved four hundred and thirty-five times. So the desk publishes the national number it is willing to defend, converts it into seats at a printed rate, and shows the band rather than a point.

D 212
R 218
218 for the gavel · 1 independent · 4 vacant · net 0 seats decides it
Swing to seats5.4 seats per point

Every point of national swing has moved roughly 5.4 House seats across post-war midterms. The desk applies that rate to the same national-swing draw the Senate model uses — one environment, two chambers — rather than estimating 435 races against maps that are still in court.

National swing to the out-party, converted into Democratic House seats
National swingDemocratic seatsChamberHow likely
Under +2.2 to Democratsbelow 224Straddles 21816%
+2.2 to +5.6224–242Democratic majority34%
+5.6 to +9.0242–261Democratic majority34%
Above +9.0above 261Democratic majority16%

The probabilities in the last column are the same national-swing distribution the Senate model draws from — one shared environment, drawn twenty thousand times, so the two chambers cannot disagree with each other about the year.

Standing facts

The president's party has lost House seats in 19 of the last 21 midterms. That is the single strongest prior in American electoral politics and it is not a partisan claim.

Mid-decade redistricting in several states means the map the country votes on in November is not the map it voted on in 2024. Until every map is final, a national seat forecast is a guess dressed as arithmetic.

Roughly 30 seats decide control. The other 405 are decided already, whatever the coverage suggests.

Why there are no district ratings

District-level ratings arrive when the maps are final. Publishing a seat-by-seat House forecast against boundaries still in litigation would be a number the reader cannot trace, and the Standard forbids it. The 2024 district layer is on the reference board in the meantime — certified, drillable, and not a forecast.

The 2024 district layer