📈 Our latest midterm forecast
Updated August 23, 2026
Yesterday, we published a tour of the 48 key House races. Check it out to learn where in the country Democrats stand to gain the most ground, and where they might have more trouble. Spoiler: mid-decade redistricting is making things easier for Republicans in the South. -NS & EMD, 8/23/26
See also: Generic congressional ballot dashboard and Donald Trump approval rating dashboard.
This is the landing page for FLIPR1, Silver Bulletin’s 2026 election forecast. We’ll regularly update the charts below as new election polls and other data come in.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 are the first step in FLIPR, and they include various adjustments. They 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 They also include a “timeline adjustment”, where outdated polls are revised to reflect trends in the generic ballot.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 database3, but collect generic ballot and congressional approval polls ourselves.
The forecast
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.