The 2026 House Forecast

Designed by Logan Phillips

Our House Forecast projects each party’s chance of winning the majority. It uses data-driven projections to forecast all 435 races and runs 10,000 simulations of the election after every update. The model takes into account the recent electoral history of each district, the latest polling, fundraising, and other key data.

In 2026, Democrats are seeking to reclaim the House majority, after coming tantalizingly close to victory in two straight election cycles. They need to flip just three seats to secure the majority. Since starting in 2022, our forecast has called the second-highest percentage of House Races right of any forecaster, short only of the former political news site FiveThirtyEight. To learn more about how our forecast works, click here.

When you’re done with the main forecast, you can explore the forecast across each region and see the latest House polls. You can also check our forecasts for the Senate and Governor races, and track the President’s approval rating, or explore the latest polling across the entire site.

May 13th Update: A slew of court decisions in the final days of April and early days of May have shifted the 2026 congressional map in the Republican Party’s favor. The Supreme Court severely weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, making it much harder to challenge congressional maps that dilute minority voting power. This has opened up a Pandora’s box of new gerrymandering opportunities for Republican-led states in the South to eliminate majority-Black districts in the region. In a matter of days, Tennessee implemented a new gerrymander to eliminate a Memphis congressional district, and other Southern states like Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina may follow suit. Unrelated to the Supreme Court’s decision, Republicans in Florida also implemented a more extreme gerrymander. Virginian voters approved a severe 11-1 Democratic gerrymander in April, but the state Supreme Court struck it down, returning the state to its pre-April map. — protections requiring states to ensure minorities had some representation in Congress through majority-minority districts.

Combined, these new maps seriously improve the GOP’s chances of winning a majority, though the Democratic Party remains the clear favorite for this cycle, as it is likely to have a strong national advantage in this midterm election (as indicated by polling, special elections, and the nature of midterm elections, which are almost always a check on the President’s party). After we changed the maps in Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia, Republicans’ chances of winning the House rose from 18.9% on May 7th to 27.2% on May 13th. If more states pass new maps, I’ll add them to the House Forecast as soon as I can.

Right now, this writeup focuses on the recent Fundraising Update in April. I’ll add a more detailed explanation of how the map has changed in Florida and Tennessee in the near future.
In late April, the Federal Election Commission released new fundraising data for every House race, reflecting how much candidates have raised between January 1st to April 31st in 2026. This is the second round of fundraising data that I’ve added to the forecast, and it’s enormously useful for our House Forecast for two main reasons.
First, it helped me identify the most likely nominee in many districts, in conjunction with other factors like endorsements and information from local experts and newspapers. That allows the model to take into account each candidate’s experience running for office, use polling when available, and incorporate fundraising, rather than treating races as matchups between Generic Democrat and Generic Republican. This meaningfully improves the forecast’s performance, even this early in the cycle.
Second, I have now incorporated fundraising into 133 House races - an additional 55 races beyond the 78 it was active for back in February. With a few exceptions, I limited the scope to races where two likely nominees can be identified and where both candidates have been raising money for at least 90 days. Their fundraising totals are compared, and the stronger fundraiser receives a boost proportional to that advantage. In races with an incumbent member of Congress, the challenger also gets a small adjustment to account for the incumbent’s natural fundraising edge.
Importantly, I’m only using money raised from individual donors, excluding self-funding and PAC money. Individual-donor fundraising is an excellent signal of a candidate’s ability to mobilize supporters and run an effective operation. Across dozens of past election cycles, this measure (often referred to as “individual-donor fundraising”) has consistently been more predictive than broader fundraising totals.
After this update, Democrats’ odds of winning the House increased from 71.8% to roughly 73.4% (before taking the new Virginia map into account). While there are exceptions, the overall pattern suggests Democrats currently have an advantage in individual-donor fundraising, an indicator that their supporters are engaged and motivated. In many of the most important House races, Democrats’ odds of winning also rose by a few points.
To see where the forecast changed the most, scroll down to the two interactive tables showing where Democrats and Republicans gained the most ground over the last 30 days. I also designed a new interactive graphic showing how much each candidate has raised in every race where fundraising is active in the forecast. It’s near the bottom of the page, under each race’s trend line.