Monopoly Politics 2026: How 81% of 2026 elections have already been decided
In poll after poll, American voters increasingly say they feel unheard by their elected officials, that politics is broken, and that there aren’t enough choices on the ballot. When it comes to our congressional elections, the voters are right.
81% of 2026 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives have already been decided – even though campaigns won’t be underway for another year.
Read on for more details on what we should expect in 2026, why we’re stuck in this cycle of uncompetitive elections, and how we can give voters a stronger voice and incentivize better governance with reforms like ranked choice voting and the Fair Representation Act.
Sign up for the latest news from the ranked choice voting movement, or get involved in your community.
2026 projections
2026 projected seats by party
Only 8% of seats are truly competitive, and competitive seats are on the decline
We project that in 2026, 81% of the nation’s 435 House seats will be “safe” for Republicans or Democrats. An additional 11% of seats lean red or blue, leaving just 8% as true tossup races. This means we can confidently say which party will win the vast majority of congressional districts in 2026. Moreover, the number of competitive races has steadily declined since FairVote started Monopoly Politics in 1996.
The high number of safe seats, as well as our ability to make high-accuracy projections well in advance of the election, demonstrates the deeply uncompetitive nature of congressional elections. (Find your district using the map above, or in the “Explore the data” section at the bottom of the page.)
Our projections rely almost entirely on district partisanship – that is, how the district voted in the most recent presidential election. The consistent accuracy of these projections demonstrates that simple partisanship is the best predictor of election results. Events that take place between now and the election (e.g. candidate debates, campaign stops) likely won’t impact the results in most districts.
Incumbency advantage reaches an all-time low
As part of Monopoly Politics, we track how well incumbent candidates perform relative to expectations. This helps inform our future projections, as incumbents receive a “bump” to their projected performance.
In 2024, incumbents running for re-election earned a bump of 1.1 percentage points. This bump is at its lowest since we began tracking in 1996. The declining importance of incumbency further demonstrates that national partisanship is almost all that matters for election outcomes.
Crossover representatives are going extinct
The number of crossover representatives (House members whose district voted for a different party for president than for Congress) has declined over time. As national partisanship becomes the most dominant factor in elections, individual candidates have less ability to buck that trend by connecting with voters who may have chosen a different party for president.
What about “wave years”?
The president’s party typically suffers losses in the House in midterm years, so we may expect Democrats to do better than our projections suggest in 2026. When this is particularly drastic, like in 2018, it’s sometimes called a “wave year.” How do our projections hold up when there’s an overwhelming swing toward one party?
FairVote’s high-confidence projections remain accurate even in wave years (and remember, that’s 81% of seats). A wave year most likely means that nearly all the tossup districts are won by the same party rather than splitting evenly, and in a very large wave, a few “lean” seats could be won by that party as well.
Use the buttons in the map above to see how shifts in the national political environment could affect the 2026 midterms.
How the Fair Representation Act would end Monopoly Politics
Fortunately, we can make our elections more competitive, and our government more representative, with election reforms. Ranked choice voting would foster more competition in congressional elections, allowing more candidates to mount third-party and independent campaigns without simply being branded as “spoilers.”
A more transformative fix is proportional representation, which elects candidates and parties in proportion to their share of the vote. If implemented in the U.S., this would create meaningful competition in every district. A federal bill called the Fair Representation Act (FRA) would implement proportional representation for Congress.
Under the FRA, representatives would be elected in multi-member districts. Multiple Democrats and Republicans (and potentially third-party and independent candidates) would compete in every congressional district. The winners would be determined with the proportional form of ranked choice voting.
For example, imagine a 5-member district in which the electorate is about half Democratic and half Republican. Democrats and Republicans would likely win two seats each, and the fifth seat would be a tossup. This means every voter in the district could impact the outcome, and most voters would see a candidate of their choice win a seat. In fact, we project that most districts would contain a tossup seat under the FRA.
Related reports
Dubious Democracy 2024
Our analysis of the 2024 U.S. House elections. 84% of districts were decided by 10 points or more, or were uncontested. We also rank the health of every state’s elections.
Fewest Votes Wins
A report on plurality winners in primary elections in 2024. Many of these plurality winners went on to win safe seats in the general election – meaning they were effectively elected by just a fraction of a fraction of voters.
Monopoly Politics history and methodology
FairVote pioneered the Monopoly Politics methodology in 1997 to show what really matters in congressional elections: partisanship. The key insight we identified and built upon — that presidential candidate performance in a district exposes that district’s underlying partisanship — has become widely recognized and forms the basis of the Cook Partisan Voting Index (PVI) and other similar measures.
For over 25 years, we’ve demonstrated the astounding predictive power of national partisanship. While other forecasting models rely on polling data and other factors, our model has stayed simple throughout the years. Our predictions are based on three simple components, which we calculate for each congressional district, making up our final equation.
Projected Winning % = District Partisanship + Incumbent Modifier + National Partisan Swing
District Partisanship is the amount by which a district favors Democrats or Republicans. A district’s partisanship is based on the presidential vote margin in the district, based on the assumption that the presidential election is a better measure of constituent sentiment than any single congressional race.
District Partisanship = 50% + ((District vote margin – National vote margin) / 2)
Subtracting the national vote margin helps control for an exceptional presidential candidate. Two additional scaling factors are included to calibrate partisanship around 50%. First, the vote margin difference is divided by two, which reflects how much the two-party split deviates from 50%. For example, if a Democrat loses by ten points in a two-way race, the vote margin was 45%-55%. In this example, dividing the vote margin of 10 points by two shows that the Democratic performance is -5% and the Republican performance is +5%. Second, we add 50% to calibrate the overall expected partisanship around 50%.
For example, in Alabama’s Second District, we compare the district’s vote share for the Democrat in the 2024 presidential election (8.32%, meaning Harris beat Trump by 8.32 points), to the national Democratic margin (-1.67%, meaning Harris lost to Trump nationally by this amount).
District Partisanship of AL-02 = 50% + ((8.32% + 1.67%) / 2)
District Partisanship of AL-02 = 54.99% Democratic vote share
Therefore, a two-way race in Alabama’s Second District favors the Democrat to win. In our predictions, District Partisanship functions as a base to which other modifiers are added.
The Incumbent Modifier accounts for the inherent electoral advantage enjoyed by incumbent candidates. The incumbent modifier includes a national incumbent bump and a measure called Performance Over Average Candidate (POAC).
Incumbent Modifier = National Incumbent Bump + POAC
National Incumbent Bump is estimated at 1.1 percentage points for 2026 based on the overall declining trend illustrated in the section on incumbency. This bump is applied to every incumbent who is seeking re-election.
Performance Over Average Candidate (POAC) scores represent an estimate of each candidate’s performance relative to what would be expected from a generic incumbent candidate of the same party. The POAC is calculated by comparing a winner’s margin to the district partisanship.
2024 POAC = Incumbent’s vote share – District Partisanship – National Incumbent Bump
For example, say Democratic Representative Shomari Figures is running for reelection in Alabama’s 2nd District. The district partisanship in Figures’ district is 55% Democratic, so a generic Democrat is expected to earn 55% and a Democratic incumbent should earn 56.1%. In 2024, Figures earned 54.60% of the vote, underperforming by -1.5%. Figures’ 2024 POAC is -1.5%.
Our overall POAC for each incumbent is the weighted average of their POAC from their most recent three contested elections. We privilege more recent elections with higher weights, hypothesizing that those elections more accurately reflect the current opinions of the district’s voters than those in the past.
Incumbent ran in 3 previous elections:
POAC = 0.6*POAC1 + 0.3*POAC2 + 0.1*POAC3
Incumbent ran in 2 previous elections:
POAC = 0.75*POAC1 + 0.25*POAC2
Incumbent ran in 1 previous election:
POAC = POAC1
Finally, National Partisan Swing is a variable representing the average advantage of being either a Democrat or Republican in the upcoming year. Our default projection assumes a 50-50 partisan year, so the default national partisan swing is 0. In our interactive web content, users can input values for national partisan swing ranging from +5 Republican to +5 Democrat.
Our confidence levels are determined by the projected margin of victory. Safe seats are those with a projected margin of 12 points or greater. Lean seats are those with a projected margin between 6 points and 12 points. Seats with a projected margin of less than 6 points are classified as tossup.
For our high-confidence projections, we only include the safe seats (seats with a 12-point margin or greater).
Our projections were originally published in April 2025, 21 months before the 2026 congressional elections. The only update we make leading up to the election is removing an incumbency modifier for seats where the current officeholder leaves office early or announces their retirement.
Our ability to examine trends over 25 years of congressional elections demonstrates the degree to which political polarization has increased. Monopoly Politics’ high-confidence projections were over 99% accurate for seven of the last eight election cycles.
Explore the data
Our full dataset is available here.
