Who’s ahead on the generic congressional ballot?
Our constantly-updating tracker of polls for the most important indicator in the race for Congress.
🕒 The latest on the generic ballot
Updated January 22, 2026
Today, we’re launching our polling average for the 2026 generic congressional ballot! We’ll be updating these numbers daily, so check back often to see how the race for Congress is progressing.
Donald Trump started his second term a year ago. Back then, Republicans were riding high on their wins in 2024 and the apparent conservative vibe shift. And polls of the 2026 generic congressional ballot backed up those good feelings. According to our polling average, the generic ballot was R +3.3 on the day of Trump’s inauguration.
But a lot can change in a year. Trump has gone from a positive net approval rating to being one of the least popular modern presidents — perhaps even something of a lame duck. The smattering of elections held in 2025 went about as well as they could have for Democrats, and so far in 2026, focusing on improving his popularity has not exactly been top of mind for Trump.
Today, our average has the generic ballot at D +5.3. That’s an 8.7-point shift toward Democrats over the past year. For historical context, that puts Democrats behind where they were at this point in 2018 (D +9.3), but ahead of where the opposition party was this far into other recent cycles.
For a deeper dive into what these numbers mean for the midterms, check out our very detailed history of generic ballot polls here. -EMD, 1/22/26
See also: Trump approval rating dashboard and Elon Musk favorability rating dashboard.
This is the landing page for Silver Bulletin’s 2026 generic congressional ballot polling average. We’ll regularly update the charts below as new generic ballot polls come in, and eventually, this average will feed into our 2026 midterm forecast model.1
Click here for more information on how the average works. The Silver Bulletin average weights more reliable polls more heavily — you can find our latest pollster ratings here.
Who is favored to win the House in 2026?
Our default average reflects a combination of all polls, whether conducted among adults, registered voters or likely voters. If a pollster releases multiple versions of the same survey, we use the likely voter version before the registered voter version.2 That’s because for this average, we’re interested in people who plan on voting in 2026.
Every generic ballot poll in our database
Each poll gets an “influence” score based on its pollster rating, its sample size, its recency, and how often a pollster is publishing numbers. You can find that in the table below. Sometimes, surveys with mediocre pollster ratings have more weight in the model just because they were conducted very recently or polled more people.3
Inevitably, there’s a lot of disagreement from survey to survey, not just because of statistical variation, but because some polling firms consistently lean toward Democrats or Republicans. By clicking on the “adjusted results” tab, you can see how the “house effects” adjustment that corrects for these predictable differences works in our model. You can also click here to download every generic ballot poll in our database — including some additional details not shown in the chart below.
State benchmarks and every generic ballot poll since 1994
We also have two cool features we’re reserving for paying subscribers:
Benchmarks in each state. Which party would we expect to be ahead in, say, Georgia or Michigan or Ohio, given the current generic ballot?
And generic ballot averages going back to 1994.
You can find all of that, plus downloadable generic ballot data for the past 30 years, below.