Skip to content
Elect Ledger2026 Midterms

Desk rules

How Elect Ledger is built

Elect Ledger calculates its own descriptive averages from a selected set of pollsters. These are not another publisher’s model, forecast, or election win probabilities.

Rating unavailableSolid DLikely DLean DTilt DToss-upTilt RLean RLikely RSolid R

Colors describe Elect Ledger’s calculated poll margins. Rating unavailable means no qualifying poll or approved input exists; it does not mean toss-up.

Who counts

These are Elect Ledger’s selected firms, not a ranking or a reproduction of third-party pollster grades. AtlasIntel, NYT/Siena, Washington Post, Marquette, YouGov, Monmouth, Quinnipiac, Suffolk, Marist, and Fox News (Beacon/Shaw). A poll is used only if the named house is one of those ten. On the Senate and House boards, tap a firm on the rail to see races with its loaded polls. Collection is incomplete; an empty district does not establish that no poll was published.

  • AtlasIntel · Online river / mixed
  • The New York Times / Siena College · Live telephone (cell + landline)
  • The Washington Post · Live + probability panel
  • Marquette University Law School · Live telephone + online
  • YouGov · Online panel
  • Monmouth University · Live telephone
  • Quinnipiac University · Live telephone
  • Suffolk University · Live telephone
  • Marist College · Live + online mixed
  • Fox News (Beacon / Shaw) · Live telephone

The average

  • Recency weight with a 14-day half-life.
  • Sample-size weight of square-root of N.
  • Likely voters 1.00 · registered 0.85 · adults 0.70.
  • Polls older than 120 days drop out.
  • Superseded matchups (wrong nominee) stay in the archive, out of the number.
  • Trend arrows compare the latest qualifying print to the one before it.

Color

Toss-up is sand, inside two points, not purple. Tilt and lean use light blue and light red fills, not a fade between two colors. Likely and solid stay saturated.

Tilt DLean DToss-upLean RTilt R

No third-party desk is currently approved for reuse. Their ratings, probabilities, commentary, charts, and pollster grades are not reproduced or included in our averages. Public availability or appearance on Wikipedia does not establish permission. Without qualifying polls or approved ratings, a seat is unavailable.

Independent forecast sources

Read each publisher’s forecast at its source. Their ratings are not currently reproduced or included in Elect Ledger’s calculations. No endorsement is implied.

If reuse rights are established, approved available inputs may supply a separate desk consensus: Cook 3, Inside Elections 3, RCP 3, Silver 2, Sabato 1. Weights normalize over available approved inputs, with symmetric rounding. Missing cells never copy another desk’s rating.

The daily sweep

Daily refresh: 18:00 UTC · 1 p.m. EST / 2 p.m. EDT. The scheduled or authenticated manual sweep reads Wikipedia or electoral-vote.com. The completed snapshot is stored as public polling data. A running server picks up a new snapshot within a minute, and “Reload desk” reads it immediately. Those visitor reads do not hit those hosts. A sweep that runs out of time does not replace the stored board. If one source is down, rows already on the board from the other source stay.

The sweep extracts numerical poll results and metadata, not articles, charts, or publisher averages. Direct publisher scraping is not enabled. Existing archive rows lack complete original-release provenance; verification remains incomplete. Sources:

Wikipedia contributors’ text is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 subject to its terms and exceptions. Numerical rows are extracted and filtered. No third-party forecast license is inferred. House seats without qualifying polls remain unavailable.

What the House grid is

All 435 districts appear as squares. Colors use available Elect Ledger averages or approved desk inputs. Gray districts have no rating. Incumbent party never substitutes for a forecast. The state map shows the closest rated district, not a statewide House forecast.

Verification limits

Financial figures are withheld until original FEC filing identifiers are verified. House candidate names, vacancies and current party holdings are also withheld. Inherited Senate candidate metadata and archive polls still need an original-source audit. Archive data should not be treated as verified current reporting.