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 March 16, 2026
This might be shocking to read, but as of today, Democrats hold a 5.4 point lead over Republicans in our generic ballot average. The average has fluctuated between D +5.3 and D +5.6 since the beginning of February.
Some polls released in the past couple weeks have shown larger Democratic leads: Marist has the race as D +9 and the latest NBC News poll is D +6. But they’ve been counterbalanced by lots of polls showing a D +3 to D +4 environment:
Economist/YouGov: D +3.
Morning Consult: D +4.
Cygnal: D +4.
As with Donald Trump’s approval rating, there hasn’t yet been any movement in the generic ballot in response to the Iran War. It’s entirely possible that will change if gas continues to get more expensive. But as I wrote about yesterday, Trump’s coalition remains broadly supportive of the war. -EMD, 3/12/26
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 This page is designed to be viewed on the web rather than in our email client or in the Substack app.
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.