Midterm 2026 Forecast Analysis

The 2026 midterm election is over and this page is frozen. It shows the market consensus as it stood at 9:00 AM ET on Election Day, November 3, 2026 — the final forecast the markets implied before any result was known — and colours the map by the outcome of each race as settled by the venues. A ✓ marks the winner on each race card; races the venues had not yet settled when this page was built are shown in grey.

I proposed the Margin of Inefficiency (MOI) (The Super Model, October 2024) during the 2024 election as a way to interpret the forecast implied by prediction market prices. The MOI accounts for explainable differences between different market prices that may be caused by access restrictions, platform fees, and other sources of market friction. The margin of inefficiency applies to estimates derived from prediction market prices in an analogous way to the margin of error in traditional polling estimates.

Below is a live display of the implied forecasts for the 2026 midterms based on live quotes from Kalshi, Polymarket, and other political markets. The market consensus is derived by combining the forecasts across these markets and accounting for the estimated margin of inefficiency for each market. An asterisk marks a market whose quotes cannot all hold at once; the figure shown is the point the quotes meet at after adding the smallest exogenous margin of inefficiency that makes them overlap.

Background: the original post, Margin of Inefficiency in Prediction Markets (The Super Model, October 2024), and the working paper, The Margin of Inefficiency: Reading Prediction Market Prices as Bounds on Probability (PDF, October 2026).

Quotes: Kalshi, Polymarket, PredictIt. Outcomes: as settled by Kalshi and Polymarket.