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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
Governor roomArizona · Governor · 3 Nov 2026Lean D

The Arizona mansion

Why this seat

Hobbs won by a fraction of a point and has governed against a legislature of the other party for the whole term. There is an incumbency term here, and it is small.

State of the field

An incumbent Democrat defending against a Republican field the primary has not resolved.

The test

Arizona holds if Maricopa's suburban swing since 2020 is durable. It flips if that swing was a candidate-quality effect on the other side rather than a realignment.

What the desk holds

The mansion model runs separately from the Senate one. It carries less of the presidential result into the race — 0.45 of a point per point, against 0.78 on the Senate board — and allows a wider miss per seat, because a governor's race turns on a personal vote a national baseline cannot see. Both numbers stand: the simulated one and the one the desk wrote first.

Held nowDemocratic
On the ballotKatie Hobbs
2024 presidential margin5.5
Modelled lean · 1σ+6.7 · ±7.5
Desk rating65% Democratic
Band meaningA real advantage. About a third of them will flip anyway.

Model call · governors-2026.1

79%

Democratic nominee wins

Hobbs won by a fraction of a point and has governed against a legislature of the other party ever since.

Nothing written on this page feeds that number. The method.

The seat’s figuresMonogram · no likeness
DemocratKatie HobbsGovernor of ArizonaIncumbent, seeking a second term

Every slot on this board is a typographic monogram. It previously carried painted “house renders” of each sitting member; an audit found the renders were not reliable likenesses — one seat was captioned with a different person’s face entirely — so the class was withdrawn rather than repaired face by face. A wrong face under a right name is a fabrication, not a style. No likeness returns to this board until every figure can be shown from a verified first-party image under identical framing. These are the figures the seat is about, not the full field.

Candidate ledgerNot open yet

No candidate ledger is published for this seat. A ledger requires a completed first-party source pass — every candidate's own published policy pages, read on the same day, under identical headings and an identical word budget. Until that pass is done, printing a partial board would rate the campaigns that publish against the ones that have not, which is the asymmetry the Standard exists to prevent.

See a finished ledger — Georgia
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