Every number computed. Every change explained. Call the Map is an independent, model-based forecast of the 2026 U.S. midterms: every House seat, every Senate race and every governorship, from one model. Free to read, no advertising, no account.
Every probability comes out of a model, with no expert panel. Every input that reached it is listed on the race page, and when a number moves, the site says whether the race moved or the model did.
Cited by the USA Today Network.
Call the Map is not affiliated with, authorized by or paid for by any news organization, candidate, campaign, party or committee.
Every page, with no reader account, no advertising, no paywall and no data sold. Running costs are ordinary and constant: hosting, map tiles, polling and finance data, the domain, and the machine time to fit, validate and reseal the forecast every day.
Those costs are the honest reason this section exists. This has been carried on one person’s time and one person’s money, and it is now at the point where it cannot improve much further without help. Anyone who wants to keep it going and make it better is genuinely appreciated.
The received total is owner-reconciled from completed Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee provider records, plus each support the two platforms have reported to the site since Oct 5, 2026. Test payments and refunds are not counted, and amounts in different currencies are shown separately rather than converted. The compute figure is a measurement at public list rates, not an invoice and not an out-of-pocket claim. It excludes hosting, data and subscriptions, the domain and my own time. The donation total is public because asking for support without showing what arrived felt a bit one-sided.
Ko-fi takes the smallest cut. You leave Call the Map to pay; the provider shows you its fees and privacy terms first.
Supporters are listed by first name and last initial; a username alone is shortened to its first eight characters. Want your full name shown? Say so in your message. Give privately, or leave the name blank, and you are listed as Anonymous, with the platform and date. Supporters who give a name may also be thanked by name in the newsletter.
It keeps the site online, and it lets me keep working on it. That is the whole of it. Hosting, map tiles, data, the domain and the machine time are ordinary running costs, and they arrive every month whether or not anyone contributes.
Beyond that it buys time, which is what this needs most. Every hour that does not have to be earned elsewhere is an hour that goes into more races, better tools, and eventually something more ambitious than one midterm. I would like this to still be here in 2028, and larger than it is now.
And you have my genuine thanks, which is not much of a return but is offered honestly.
No supporter tier of the forecast, no early access, no private numbers. A contribution never changes a forecast, a rating, a correction decision or editorial coverage.
Settled: for life. If a paid tier ever launches, anyone who supported Call the Map before it existed is never charged for it — not for the first year, but for as long as the site runs.
It applies to people who support the project before any paid tier is announced, and this published promise remains the record if the product changes later. Support is voluntary and does not purchase a subscription or guarantee a feature; do not assume it is tax-deductible. No card or bank details are collected on this site. For a payment question, write to hello@callthemap.com with the provider and transaction reference.
Supporters are listed by first name and last initial; a username alone is shortened to its first eight characters. Want your full name shown? Say so in your message. Give privately, or leave the name blank, and you are listed as Anonymous, with the platform and date. Supporters who give a name may also be thanked by name in the newsletter. Individual amounts and messages are never published, and a contribution never changes the model or the coverage.
The 435 U.S. House districts, the 35 Senate elections and the 36 governorships on the ballot on November 3, 2026. For each race: a projected margin, a chance of winning and the middle 80% of outcomes. For each chamber: the chance of control, the expected seat count and the paths to a majority.
It does not forecast presidential politics, primaries or referendums. State-legislative and statewide down-ballot forecasts were withdrawn in September 2026 because too many of those races lacked usable prior history, confirmed candidate fields and district-level polling; they are outside the current public forecast, and bringing them back on evidence that can carry them is the first item on the list.
CTMM 2.2 is one staged model: fundamentals fitted per office, then one national environment, then what the race itself knows: polls corrected for each pollster’s record, and the candidate field. Expert ratings are not model inputs. Finally all 506 races are simulated together, 100,000 times, with shared national, regional and state shocks, so chamber odds and race odds are one object rather than two calculations.
Missing evidence stays missing: a race with no polls is not given an imaginary tied poll. Campaign finance and prediction-market prices are collected and shown but not used: the backtest switched finance off in every office, and market prices carry a weight of exactly zero.
One number, shared by every race, estimated from generic-ballot polling. Presidential approval and special-election results are not inputs: approval added nothing to a six-cycle regression, and special elections have no origin-dated history to fit against. Both are still collected and shown. Inspect the current environment →
Races are simulated jointly, so a national swing moves them together. The Scenario Machine reads pre-computed hypothetical boards; it never reruns the model or overwrites the published forecast.
A reader can also edit any race there by hand: set its winner and the margin it wins by, or call it a Toss-up. When a reader sets the result of a Senate race or a contested House district, the machine keeps only the published simulations in which that happens (for a margin, the simulated nights in which the race came out close to it, moved the rest of the way by how the other races move with it) and counts the other races again. That is a count of the forecast’s own simulations, not a new forecast; a Toss-up and the group sliders move no chance of winning, and governor races are not counted, because no governor simulations are published.
Two documents describe this edition: a plain-language guide (PDF) and the technical methodology (PDF).
A chance of winning is a statement about a distribution, not a prediction. A candidate at 75 in 100 should lose about one time in four; when that happens the forecast is working. What you can hold it to is calibration: across many races, the 75s should win about three-quarters of the time.
Map fills show each race’s rating. Diagonal stripes mark a seat projected to change party; gray is no 2026 election, green an independent. On the closest-races lists the dot is the forecast margin and the band is the middle 80%.
CTMM 2.2 was tested out of sample on the 2018–2024 record before it published a single 2026 number; the measurements are in the methodology's validation section. Four things to hold against it:
After November 3, a public scorecard sets the forecasts issued here against the certified results.
Every forecast is published as an edition: a sealed bundle of inputs, rules and outputs, named by the hash of its contents. A source refresh never rewrites an older forecast; a change to a published number requires a new edition.
Where a published number turns out to be wrong, the correction is written up on Substack rather than kept in a list here. The changelog remains the dated record of every material change, and each edition above is named by the hash of its own contents, so nothing published can be edited after the fact.
When the model’s specification changes, each published day still shows what was actually said that day. Biggest Movers and the momentum desk compare on a separate history recomputed under the current specification for every day, so a specification change is never read as a race moving; the changelog dates and describes each specification revision.
Call the Map is an independent project by one person: a political science student who previously worked in tech and has a background in web design, and not a forecaster, a statistician or a journalist by profession. The method is published in full so it can stand on its own record rather than on anyone’s authority.
No party, campaign, donor, advertiser or prediction market can buy its way into the model. 2026 is the first cycle; the plan runs through 2028.
It started as a hobby project and is still largely one. It has taken far longer and cost far more than expected, and it was built by one person trying very hard to get it right rather than to get it out.
It does not claim to be better than anyone else’s forecast, or close to it. The people who have been doing this for years have earned their reputations, and no claim here is a comparison to them. What this site claims is narrower and checkable: that its method is published in full, that its numbers come from that method, and that where it is weak it says so on the page. Suggestions and corrections are always welcome.
The judgments are the operator’s: what counts as evidence, which trials ran, which results were accepted or refused, what ships. AI assistants did the work around that: the interface, implementing and validating a specified method, and acquiring and cleaning data.
What they never do is decide a forecast. Specifications are written before they are fitted, gates are fixed before results are seen, and a specification that fails its gates is refused rather than adjusted.
Writing about a race? Embed the live forecast card. It is free and updates on its own.
Work intended, in rough order. It is not a schedule or a promise; whether it happens depends on time.
The forecast already refreshes automatically four times a day, each refresh sealing its own edition. The work now is speed and reach: new polls collected sooner, more picked up in a single pass, less time between a filing appearing and the board moving.
The whole site should work on an old phone on a bad connection, and today some of it only nearly does — the map and the largest race pages first.
The method is published in full, equations included, but a technical document is not an explanation. I want a clear trail from any number back to the evidence that produced it, in language that assumes no statistics background.
Readers will find things I missed. A reported error is reproduced against the edition it appeared in, fixed in a new sealed edition, and listed on the changelog.
The original plan was every race on the ballot, including 5,743 state-legislative seats. Too many of them have no usable prior history, no confirmed candidate field and no district-level polling. Bringing them back on evidence that can carry them is the thing I most want to do.
A results service of my own for the night itself: attributed returns, timestamps and reporting completeness beside the forecast they are testing.
Sourced analysis of individual races and reporting on the contests nobody covers. Writing stays separate from the numbers: nothing I write becomes a model input.
After November 3, the exact forecasts this site issued are scored against certified results and published, good or bad. Before then, the frozen end-to-end replay that would let this site quote an accuracy figure at all.
Longer pieces on what moved and why go out on Substack. The forecast itself lives here and updates on its own schedule.
Corrections, reproducibility problems and methodology challenges reach a person: corrections@callthemap.com, with the race and the edition concerned. Bug reports, interface complaints and methodological objections are all welcome.