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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 roomTexas · Senate · Class 2 · 3 Nov 2026Lean R

The Texas room

Why this seat

The fundamentals are not close. The live risk is a nominee chosen by a low-turnout primary electorate, which is a different distribution from the state's general-election baseline.

State of the field

A contested Republican primary against a sitting senator, with the Democratic field waiting on its outcome.

The test

Texas is safe for the party that holds it if the primary resolves conventionally. It becomes a race only in the branch where the nominee underruns the state baseline by the kind of margin Texas has produced once before.

The seat, by the modelSame coefficients as every other seat
Model terms for this seat
2024 certified marginR+13.7
2024 margin × 0.7810.7
Midterm drag+5.6
Incumbent3.0
Expected marginR+8.1
Seat uncertainty (1σ)±5.5

Model call

90%

Republican gain

Texas is not close on the fundamentals; a nominee chosen by a low-turnout primary is the live risk.

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

The seat’s figuresMonogram · no likeness
RepublicanJohn CornynUnited States senator for TexasIncumbent, contested primary

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were not reliable likenesses — one seat was captioned with a different person’s face entirely — so the class was withdrawn rather than repaired face by face.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