FLIPR 2026 midterm election forecast

Models & Forecasts

FINAL FLIPR 2026 midterm election forecast

Silver Bulletin's prediction for every Senate, House, and gubernatorial election in 2026.

Nate Silver

and

Eli McKown-Dawson

Nov 03, 2026

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🐬 Our latest midterm forecast

Updated November 3, 2026

Our final FLIPR update of the 2026 election cycle is in! When we launched the model back in August, Democrats were strong favorites to take the House but

the Senate was close to a tossup

. Today, a Democratic House majority looks all but certain, and the polls indicate that they should also win the upper chamber. In fact, Democrats’ Senate win probability as of our final update is just a few percentage points lower than their House win probability was at launch.

Democratic candidates lead in our polling averages of every major battleground state, including Texas (D +3.3), Ohio (D +3), Michigan (D +4.9), Maine (D +3.9), and Iowa (D +1.1). Meanwhile, Georgia and North Carolina barely even register as competitive, and the

Kansas

Democratic Senate candidate leads by four points in the polls. At this point, the party should be able to

absorb a modest polling error and still win the Senate

.

You can

read Nate’s final Model Talk of 2026 here

.

Thanks for following along with us this cycle! And make sure to join us on Election Night for our livestream and live blog.

-NS & EMD, 11/3/26

ELSEWHERE IN FLIPR:

House forecast —>

Senate forecast —>

Governors forecast —>

See also:

Generic congressional ballot dashboard

and

Donald Trump approval rating dashboard

.

Paid subscribers

get full access to our Election Night livestream with The Argument, GD Politics, and Slow Boring.

This is the landing page for FLIPR

1

, Silver Bulletin’s 2026 election forecast.

2

This page is designed to be

viewed on the web

rather than in our email client or in the Substack app. If you’re curious about how the model works, and what’s new for 2026 (quite a lot, actually), we also have a

very detailed methodology article

.

The polls

The Silver Bulletin polling averages account for whether polls are conducted among registered or likely voters, and for

house effects

. They weight

more reliable polls

more heavily. They also include a “timeline adjustment”, where outdated polls are revised to reflect trends in the generic ballot. Speaking of the generic ballot, you can find a version of it with our likely-voter adjustment below; this is the version that FLIPR uses.

We draw most of the election polls used in our model from

The New York Times poll database

3

, but collect

generic ballot

and congressional approval polls ourselves.

The topline

Here are today’s topline numbers for Senate and House control. They are typically based on 40,000 simulations and include a small amount of sampling error. FLIPR models House, Senate and gubernatorial elections jointly, meaning that we can calculate the probability of things like Republicans holding the Senate but losing the House.

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