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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
House roomNebraska · 2nd district · 3 Nov 2026

The Omaha room

Why this seat

The clearest crossover district in the country: it awards a presidential elector one way and has re-elected a member of the other party six times. Bacon's retirement removes the personal vote that made the split work.

State of the field

Open on both sides for the first time in a decade.

The test

Omaha stays Republican only if the party finds another candidate who can run this far ahead of its presidential line. Without the personal vote, the district's own margin is the whole story.

What the desk holds

District margins are certified returns compiled from state canvasses. The seat estimate is the national-swing conversion published on the House board — the desk does not rate individual districts against maps still in court.

2024 presidential marginD+4.6
Sitting memberDon Bacon (R, retiring)
National conversion5.4 seats / point

Chamber flip

91%

Democratic majority, published model

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

The seat’s figuresMonogram · no likeness
RepublicanDon BaconU.S. representative, Nebraska’s 2nd districtRetiring — the seat is open

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were not reliable likenesses — one seat was captioned with a different person’s face entirely — so the class was withdrawn rather than repaired face by face.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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