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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
Senate roomNorth Carolina · Senate · Class 2 · 3 Nov 2026Toss-up R

The North Carolina room

Why this seat

An open seat in the state that has been decided inside four points in three straight cycles. Tillis retiring removes the only incumbency term the model had to apply here.

State of the field

Open on both sides. No first-party policy pass has been run on the declared candidates yet, so this room publishes no candidate ledger rather than a partial one.

The test

North Carolina turns on whether the Republican coalition's rural margin holds while the Charlotte and Research Triangle counties keep growing the other way. An open seat widens the distribution by the model's open-seat term.

The seat, by the modelSame coefficients as every other seat
Model terms for this seat
2024 certified marginR+3.2
2024 margin × 0.782.5
Midterm drag+5.6
Expected marginD+3.1
Seat uncertainty (1σ)±7.0

Model call

66%

Democratic hold

An open seat in the closest state in the country for three cycles running.

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
Other rooms
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