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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 roomWisconsin · Governor · 3 Nov 2026Toss-up D

The Wisconsin mansion

Why this seat

Wisconsin decides statewide races by about a point. Evers retiring removes the incumbency term that was the only thing keeping this off a coin flip.

State of the field

Open, primaries unresolved on both sides.

The test

Wisconsin moves with the WOW counties around Milwaukee. If they keep drifting the way they have since 2018, an open seat is not safe for the party that used to bank them.

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 ballotOpen (Evers retiring)
2024 presidential margin0.9
Modelled lean · 1σ+3.8 · ±9.5
Desk rating50% Democratic
Band meaningThe desk does not know. Saying so is the honest call.

Model call · governors-2026.1

65%

Democratic nominee wins

Wisconsin decides statewide races by a point; removing the incumbent removes the only thing that was not a coin flip.

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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