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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 roomGeorgia · Governor · 3 Nov 2026Toss-up R

The Georgia mansion

Why this seat

Kemp is termed out, so the closest state in the country runs an open governor's race on the same ballot as its closest Senate race. The two are correlated and the desk says so rather than rating them as independent events.

State of the field

Open, and both nominations settled in the 16 June runoffs: Rick Jackson took the Republican nomination over Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, and Keisha Lance Bottoms carries the Democratic one.

The test

An open mansion in Georgia is decided by which coalition treats a midterm like a presidential year. Neither side has an incumbency term to fall back on.

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 nowRepublican
On the ballotOpen (Kemp termed out)
2024 presidential margin2.2
Modelled lean · 1σ+3.2 · ±9.5
Desk rating50% Republican
Band meaningThe desk does not know. Saying so is the honest call.

Model call · governors-2026.1

63%

Democratic nominee wins

An open mansion in the closest state in the country, with no incumbent advantage on either side.

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

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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