The 2026 House Forecast

At the start of February, the Federal Election Commission released new fundraising data for every House race. This is 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 incorporated fundraising into 78 House races. 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 64% to roughly 69%. 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.

Looking ahead, if Democrats win the national House vote by 8 points or more, their best-case scenario is a bit brighter than it looked before. There are a surprisingly large number of highly motivated Democratic candidates raising substantial money in very tough districts, seats that typically vote 10 to 15 points more Republican than the country overall. Republicans remain the clear favorites in most of these races, but the fundraising data suggests Democrats have candidates strong enough to make an upset a real possibility, raising their chances into the 10% to 25% range in districts like FL-27, KY-6, MN-1, TN-5, and VA-5.

Finally, I also improved the forecast for the newly redrawn North Carolina and Ohio congressional districts to more accurately capture the partisan lean of the new maps. That change boosted Republicans’ odds of capturing the NC-1 congressional district.

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.