With the possible exception of Nate Silver’s forecast over at Silver Bulletin, The Economist runs one of the most methodologically serious election models out there. It debuted in 2018 and has consistently produced strong results since. I’d call it the most reliable published forecast, to date,1 for the 2026 midterms.

I have a few qualms I note below, but my personal rule of thumb is2 to rely on it unless I can clearly explain why I disagree with a specific prediction.

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The model lists separate results for the House and the Senate. In this post, I’ll walk you through the headline results for each.

The House

In the very first line of the forecast write-up, The Economist comments

The sun rises in the east; the other queue always moves faster; and the president’s party loses the House of Representatives in the midterms.

It’s an apt metaphor. They currently give Democrats a nine-in-ten chance of flipping the House.

This is a surprisingly confident prediction, significantly higher than Polymarket’s 78%, and they list three reasons for this confidence:

• Individual races tend to cancel out across hundreds of concurrent elections.

• The House usually tracks the generic ballot survey, which Democrats currently lead by six points.

• Undecideds tend to break for the challenger and against the president’s party.

I haven’t dug into House elections, but it’s reasonable to think of them in terms of many uncorrelated results. If you flip 10 coins, each one individually could come up tails, but the odds of all landing tails are quite low. That’s the key intuition explaining why Democrats are in such a strong position. There would need to be a fairly systematic shift in favor of Republicans, or a very large polling error (~6 points, nearly twice that of 2024), and neither is likely to happen.

Additionally, secondary metrics also favor Democrats. They’ve been performing well in special elections, presidential approval is 17 points underwater,3 and gas prices are through the roof.

Ultimately though, there’s a simple principle at play: The president’s party truly does tend to lose the House of Representatives in the midterms. It takes special circumstances to defy that raw gravitational force.

Is Gerrymandering a Special Circumstance?

There’s been a lot of ruckus about gerrymandering lately. Some states (both Republican and Democratic) have redrawn their congressional maps.4

It initially seemed to have been fought to a draw, but after Virginia’s new map was overturned the advantage shifted back to the GOP. This resulted in a notable uptick in The Economist’s House forecast (R used to hover around 5% but has since gone up to 10%).

Still, this isn’t a huge change, and there aren’t that many opportunities remaining to change the map this cycle. A few options remain for Democrats, and Republicans are facing strong national headwinds. It’s certainly something to keep an eye on, but my guess is that this will matter more for the House election of 2028.

The Senate

Currently, The Economist gives Republicans a 51% chance of keeping the Senate and Democrats a 49% chance of flipping it.

To say this clearly: this is a coin flip.

Anything in the 45-55 range, in either direction, I read as a one-in-two chance. It’s easy to look at a number and say “oh my god, party X is favored,” which makes for excellent clickbait, but these numbers are too noisy to view them as anything other than a coin flip.5

On the individual races:

This aligns reasonably well with my Senate article from last month. A few details:6

• They agree Democrats are likely to successfully defend all of their current seats: Michigan (22/78%), Georgia (18/82%), New Hampshire (13/87%), and Minnesota (9/91%).

• They believe Democrats are likely to flip North Carolina (8/92%) and Maine (22/78%).

• They rate Texas (61/39%), Ohio (61/38%), and Iowa (64/36%) as toss-ups.

• They rate Alaska (68/32%) and Florida (71/29%) as likely to remain Republican.

• And while they list Nebraska as a “key race,” they give Independent Dan Osborn a very low chance (88/12%) of claiming the seat.7

My Thoughts

While I deeply respect The Economist’s work, I do have a few notes.

Candidate Quality Matters

I think they aren’t giving quite enough weight to the quality of individual candidates. Three individuals running in those Senate races—Susan Collins (R) from Maine, Mary Peltola (D) from Alaska, and Dan Osborn (I) from Nebraska—have quite dramatically outperformed the baseline partisanship of their state.

Osborn is an especially clear example. Trump won Nebraska by 20 points in 2024, but Osborn only lost by seven, and while I agree his chances are small it looks like they are using the presidential baseline in that race (they use a voting history score of R+17 for this race). Another item that makes me pause is how they priced Lindsey Graham’s chances of winning in South Carolina (81/19%) as lower than Osborn’s opponent (88/12%). I think their methodology undervalues candidates with a track record of major over-performance.

I’d give Collins, Peltola, and Osborn better odds than the ones listed above.

What they aren’t accounting for

They also don’t account8 for a handful of external factors. They assume the map is set and don’t consider the chance of additional gerrymandering (this is why Virginia’s ruling created such a sharp change).

They also explicitly aren’t considering other mechanical changes to the election. I’m not going to speculate on that here, but I’ll note that they’ve written a handful of articles about this possibility.

Finally, I’ll note that The Economist tends to make strong predictions. When they first published this model, it gave Democrats a 95% chance of winning the House. The model had previously peaked at 98%, which is frankly overconfident for a race that’s six months out. The gravity of opposition midterms is fierce, and 90% might be reasonable, but it’s worth remembering that a lot of time remains before voters reach the booths.

Other Midterm Notes:

• Talarico (TX, D) got a very promising poll out of YouGov in Texas. It’s enough for me to begin thinking of the seat as a toss-up.

• Peltola (AK, D) had another promising poll, but it’s worth highlighting that she maintains only a slim edge when compared against the sum of Republican candidates in the race (50.2% vs 49.8%).

• Mike Rogers (MI, R) has emerged as a clear frontrunner in the Republican primary for the Michigan senate race and had a handful of strong head-to-head polls against the Democratic primary field. I may keep an eye on this race as the field consolidates.

There is one item where I think many people have an outdated view: Rubio’s chances in the 2028 GOP primary.

For a long time, the expectation has been that Vance is going to be the nominee.1 He’s the closest thing the modern MAGA-GOP has to a unity candidate. He’s straddled the techno-optimist right and the populist right and as VP remains the obvious heir apparent.

But Rubio is quickly becoming a strong runner-up. CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Committee) is the largest yearly gathering of Conservative political leaders,2 and they conduct a yearly informal poll of preferred nominees. Last year, Vance held a dominant lead at 61% while Rubio held a measly 3%.3 This year, Vance held at 58% while Rubio jumped to 35%.

This kind of poll is informal and elite-centered, but there are more reasons to be optimistic about Rubio’s chances. A lot of recent reporting has focused on a Mar-a-Lago donor dinner where Trump reportedly asked the attendees which of the two they prefer and received near unanimous support for Rubio. Other nationwide polling has shown Rubio’s favorability among Republicans (71%) approaching Vance’s (78%).

Vance has also been champing at the bit to express his discontent with the Iran war, leading to a steady stream of reporting on Vance’s preference for a ‘more careful approach.’ This may very well turn out to be a politically savvy move, as the war is not popular, but the fact that he feels the need to distance himself from the President shows that he’s worried about the future.

As ever, the markets have also noticed.

At the beginning of December, Kalshi had Vance at 50% and Rubio at 9%; Vance is now at 38% and Rubio a solid 26%.

In my opinion, the biggest question around whether there’s going to be a meaningful contest between Vance and Rubio in 2028 or not comes down to whether Rubio will actually run against Vance—he’s previously said that he doesn’t plan to, but those promises were made back when he was at the 3% mark (not 30%). Trump himself also seems to be signaling more enthusiasm for Rubio lately.

There are, of course, many other options. It is still extremely early, and a lot can change. I’m sure other people will jump in the race, and some of them might have a good shot. There can always be a dark horse. Vance still very clearly remains the institutional and default choice.

If you still have in the back of your mind the idea that 2028 is simply Vance’s to lose, it’s time to update that view. Rubio is no longer a fringe alternative. He is a serious, rising contender.

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There’s a fascinating candidate running who pulled off a 14-point over-performance last cycle, is generating meaningful liquidity in betting markets, and still isn’t getting any mainstream attention.

That candidate is Independent Dan Osborn, and he’s running in the ruby-red state of Nebraska.

Independents in the Senate

Osborn is a U.S. Navy veteran, industrial mechanic, and former labor union leader. He ran in 2024 as a long-shot against Deb Fischer, and has announced his candidacy this cycle against incumbent Pete Ricketts.

He will probably not win. Nebraska is a Republican stronghold red (R+18.3 in a neutral environment). No one covers statewide elections in Nebraska because Nebraska is not a state with competitive statewide elections. This is still a fascinating race.

Here are 9 reasons to think Osborn has a real chance.

• Osborn performed shockingly well in the last election. He lost to incumbent Deb Fischer by the relatively thin margin of R+6.7. For context, Trump won the state by a whopping R+20.4.

• The national environment has shifted by a similar margin. Trump won the popular vote by R+1.5 in 2024, but the current national environment favors Democrats (D+5.4). These are not quite numbers you can stack together,1 but there has been something like a 5-6 point swing against the GOP since Osborn’s last race.

• The 2024 margin in Texas was close to the margin in Nebraska. Osborn lost by nearly the exact same amount as Allred in Texas (R+6.4) and significantly less than Powell in Florida (R+12.8). If Texas is competitive today, it stands to reason Nebraska could be as well.

• Osborn has cash. He has already raised more than 2 million even at this remarkably early stage, 13 times what he had previously raised at this point in the election.

• Prediction markets see a path for him. Osborn has a 30% chance of winning on Kalshi.2

• This is not a presidential election. Trump’s name tends to draw a large number of voters who otherwise skip the ballot box. Midterms are lower-turnout than presidential elections, and Democrats usually benefit from this decreased turnout.

• Democrats will not be fielding a candidate in Nebraska. The state party has decided not to field a candidate and is instead backing Osborn. The anti-Republican vote will not be split between a Democrat and an Independent.

• Osborn appears to be a true independent. There is a small wave of ‘independents’ who are effectively Democrats trying to gain a leg-up by ditching the party label. I don’t think this is a bad idea per se, but I also don’t think voters will be convinced; several of these candidates had previously belonged to the Democratic party and even run as a Democrat. Osborn isn’t like this; he appears to be a true independent.

  • He has thus far not indicated which party he would support for Senate leadership.3

• The limited polls we have are encouraging for him. There are not many head-to-head polls out yet in the Nebraska race. But we have a few:

And, to keep a lid on expectations, here are 6 reasons to think he doesn’t stand much of a chance at all.

• Those polls are not reliable. Take a look at the dates, sample size, and partisan sponsor. The most recent one comes out of the Osborn campaign, and his campaign tended to release these strategically to boost fundraising efforts. Lake research is similarly a Democratic pollster (albeit a legitimate one not affiliated with the Osborn campaign).

• Ricketts is a formidable incumbent. He is extremely wealthy, with a net worth exceeding $200 million, and Cook Political Report describes him as a popular former governor.

• Ricketts also over-performed in the last election. Unusually, Nebraska had two senate races (due to Ben Sasse’s resignation). Pete Ricketts won this election by an R+25.2 margin, outperforming Trump.

• There’s some weird drama in the primary. I don’t fully understand what’s going on here,4 but intra-party conflict might result in a spoiler “Democrat” on the ballot that could plausibly cost Osborn a few points.

• Professional race raters are not convinced. Cook Political Report still rates this as a Safe Republican seat. Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved it from Safe to Likely, but noted that Ricketts is a strong candidate and an upset here remains unlikely.

• Political gravity is powerful. Strongholds tend to be strongholds for a reason, and Nebraska is ruby-red territory. All these bullets should be considered against the backdrop of an R+20 state.

Finally, here are two reasons I’m keeping an eye on him regardless:

• This may not be the end for Osborn. Jon Ossoff had a tendency to lose races in Georgia, until he began winning them. He is now in the conversation for president. Osborn could run in the next five statewide elections, keeping each one competitive; he only needs to get lucky once.

• He could inspire more independent candidates. We are already seeing a handful of people following his model, excited by his 14-18 point over-performance.5 If Osborn can draw blood from a partisan stronghold—say, if he can shave the margin to R+2 or R+3—he will have already demonstrated something incredible: that an independent can turn a Safe seat into a toss-up.

People in my circles like to speculate about the Democratic nominee. I hear a lot of names tossed out in these conversations: Andy Beshear, Mayor Pete, Newsom, Whitmer. I’ve mostly held to the same view: Newsom is in first place, AOC is a decisive runner-up, and Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro are a more distant third and fourth.1 Harris probably belongs near this pack as well.

The hierarchy is based on prediction markets and an occasional glance at polling data, where Newsom usually leads.2 Polls show Buttigieg and AOC in a rough tie for second, but the markets firmly believe AOC is in a stronger position. I agree; I think she benefits from being the only clear left-wing candidate in a primary filled with moderates.

But this piece isn’t about the primary. I’m writing because this morning I got an uncommon notification. A new candidate, someone almost never discussed, had briefly dethroned AOC for the #2 slot on Polymarket. That candidate was Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff.

Kingmaker Matt

About three weeks ago, Matt Yglesias highlighted Ossoff as the potential Obama of 2028. In the article, Yglesias described Ossoff as someone uniquely well-positioned3 to bridge all sections of the Democratic Party: the center-left abundance crew, the left-wing activists, Nate’s resistance libs, and any other faction you care to mention.

I was taken by the piece and shared it with a handful of friends. Not a single one had a negative opinion on Ossoff as a 2028 contender.4 A handful had no idea who he was, which is a legitimate barrier to overcome.

I’ll provide a quick bio here: Jon Ossoff is a senator from Georgia, up for his first re-election after winning a key swing seat in 2020. He is hard to pin down ideologically, but he’s well spoken and occasionally goes viral for scolding Republicans in the Senate. Before running for Senate, Ossoff managed a D+10 overperformance in a 2017 special election for GA-06, breaking fundraising records in the process, but narrowly lost (R+4) to Karen Handel.

Here’s the pro-Ossoff case as I understand it: he’s competitive in a swing state, which means he can win districts with actual Republicans.5 He’s simultaneously liked by Yglesias-style centrists and left-wing figures like Hassan Piker and Mehdi Hasan, making him a viable unity candidate. He’s a forceful public speaker and—most importantly—a phenomenal fundraiser.

The case against him is… Nonexistent? I can’t find much.

Ossoff will need to win reelection in Georgia this November to be seen as viable, but since the GOP failed to recruit outgoing governor Brian Kemp this seems likely.6 When forced to invent a reason people may not like him, ChatGPT defaults to his excessive polish and limited experience. Claude says something similar, but stipulates at the end that “most of this applies to any Democrat and Ossoff at least has the rare asset of having actually won in Trump country, twice.” Even for a language model, that’s a pretty thin case against him.

A Note of Caution

This should definitely all be taken with a grain of salt. Ossoff is not the #2 Democratic candidate, he’s already faded to third, and prediction markets consistently gravitate to Shiny New Objects.7 The spike is probably at least partly an artifact of the Yglesias endorsement, and Ossoff may simply still be too obscure to attract organized criticism.

Still, I’m keeping an eye on Jon. He’s my Dark Horse pick for 2028.

The Conventional Wisdom

Among election junkies, the conventional wisdom about the midterms --throughout most of the last year-- looks something like this:

There will likely be a backlash to the Trump administration, partly due to the administration’s unpopular actions, and partly because midterm backlash is the default behavior. Considering their extremely narrow margin (of 3 seats), Republicans are very likely to lose the House.

The Senate is another story. Democrats might win a few seats, but flipping it outright would require winning races like Texas or Florida, which just isn’t likely to happen.

This is a very reasonable take. It largely aligns with Silver Bulletin/Nate Silver and it’s what I told people when they asked for my opinion on the topic, but it is now out of date.

Establishing Baselines

In a completely neutral political environment, this is what we might expect for the 2026 Senate map.

It’s the ‘baseline’ given no assumptions about the current political environment. Looking at it, one would suppose that the races to watch are Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire, Maine, and Minnesota—and only two of these (Maine and North Carolina) are held by Republicans.

In other words, 2026 is a bad Senate map for Democrats.1

Conventional wisdom does update this. We do know the national political environment, it’s ~D+5.5 (according to Silver Bulletin’s generic ballot polling average). Midterms also tend to result in a backlash against whichever party holds the White House, and presidential approval is trending downwards. Incorporating this ‘current national environment’ baseline results in the following plot:

And this is pretty much exactly the conventional wisdom.

Democrats would probably hold the Midwest battlegrounds and, in the most normal outcome, will defend Georgia and flip North Carolina (and really should take Maine).2 However, the next closest states here are Texas, Iowa, Ohio, and Florida, none of which seem particularly likely pickup targets, and Democrats need to net four seats to win the Senate.

For more on the conventional wisdom, these are the Cook Political Report ratings:

And Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

But if the map is so favorable to Republicans, why did Polymarket start favoring the Democrats?

The thing I want people to understand most about the conventional wisdom is this: it does not factor in state-specific polls. This technique of projecting the general-ballot onto state baselines works in a pinch, but it’s imperfect and meaningfully worse than head-to-head polling on the races themselves.

These head-to-head polls are mostly conducted after the primaries wrap up, and that’s a big part of the reason most forecasts aren’t live yet—we don’t have enough data to average state-level polls.

But while we don’t have enough for a robust average, a few polls are worth looking at.

Counting to Four

We probably should wait for comprehensive state-level polling, but on a gut level, partly due to preliminary polls and partly due to candidate quality, I think Polymarket is more correct than the conventional wisdom.

To win the Senate, Democrats need to pick up four seats. Here is how they can plausibly count to four.

Maine — Lean D/Tossup

I don’t want to say too much about this race. Susan Collins is the Republican Joe Manchin: she is a moderate and pragmatic incumbent with a habit of winning impossible races.

That being said, it is an especially difficult race for her to win. Maine voted for Harris by a margin of D+7, and that was in an R+1.5 environment (remember: it’s currently D+5.5). Collins will need to pull off an R+14 overperformance. Considering her record, she has a chance, but it’s not going to be easy for her.3

North Carolina — Lean D

North Carolina should be a toss-up. The national D+5.5 environment maybe moves it onto the margin of Tilt D (the baseline plot above has the average at D+2.7). Two things changed this: Democrats have successfully recruited the popular former Governor Roy Cooper as their candidate, and Republicans have lost the popular incumbent Thom Tillis, who chose to retire this cycle.

This race is high-profile enough to have a solid set of head-to-head polls, and they show Cooper with a decisive lead.

Considering this uncommonly robust polling data, it’s difficult to see former RNC chair Michael Whatley as anything other than an underdog. Democrats did very well here; popular governors are some of the strongest possible Senate candidates.

Alaska — Tossup/Lean D

This is the big one.

Mary Peltola, Alaska’s former representative, is running against incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan. It’s another election with a handful of horse-race comparisons to look at, and Peltola is performing astonishingly well in them.

I might write more about this race later, but the short version is that while those polls are preliminary (only one was conducted in the last 75 days) they are individually solid, and we have other reasons to expect Peltola to be an extremely strong candidate. Polymarket is slowly converging on the view that a Democratic victory is more likely than not.

It’s a little shocking and a bit early, but I agree. One or two more polls confirming the results above will solidify this as a Lean D race, and it is the single best reason to update your priors on the chance of Democrats taking the Senate.

Ohio — Tossup

The trend of strong Democratic candidates continues in Ohio with Sherrod Brown. Brown was the U.S. Senator who narrowly lost in the 2024 election (R+3.62), and is generally well-liked. Ohio has been trending right for the past few elections, but a strong candidate in a Democratic environment can absolutely overcome this trend. We also have some horse-race polls here, and they look very much like a toss-up:

It’s also worth noting that elections themselves are the strongest data we can draw from, and Brown lost by 3.6 points in a 2024 national environment that has since swung D+7.4

Texas — Lean R

The recent two-way primary battle drew a lot of national attention and resulted in possibly the absolute best outcome for Democrats: a win for the more-electable James Talarico5 and a prolonged fight between the MAGA-backed Ken Paxton and incumbent institutionalist John Cornyn.6

Even so, I think Republicans retain the edge here. Talarico has a genuine shot (Polymarket and Kalshi place him at 44% and 43%), but Texas is the Democrats’ white whale. I vividly remember the Beto-Cruz matchup in 2018, which had an extremely similar national environment (a midterm backlash to an unpopular Trump presidency). The race was close, but Cruz still won with a respectable R+2.6 margin. Preliminary polling has also been erratic:

There absolutely could be a blue wave that carries Texas, but it’s not something to count on.

Overall

The important thing to realize is that Democrats don’t need to count on Texas. Their best path to the Senate runs through Maine, North Carolina, Alaska, and Ohio; the Lone Star State is just extra credit.

These factors make a Democratic Senate look genuinely plausible. It’s far from a sure thing,7 and Polymarket may very well be getting ahead of itself --Democrats still need to win nearly every competitive race-- but we no longer need to squint to see the path.

And that’s a big update.

Going Forward

I have more to say about the Senate. Once we get a little more head-to-head polling, I can begin projecting my own data onto the maps above, and I’d like to do a case analysis of incumbent over/underperformances.

There are also several races I didn’t mention. Iowa is another truly plausible pickup for Democrats and uncommonly exposed to the repercussions of the war in Iran (I’d call it Lean R), Ossoff will need to defend his seat in Georgia, and it’s worth at least glancing at New Hampshire, Florida, and Michigan.

And there’s one more race to discuss. I think it’s the most interesting one on the board, but we’ll save it for a future post.

That one deserves its own article.

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