Resolution Criteria

The market resolves to the Democratic popular vote share minus the Republican popular vote share in the 2026 House elections, expressed as a percentage. The elections will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2026. The margin includes all votes cast for Democratic and Republican candidates across all 435 House districts, excluding third-party and write-in votes from the calculation.

Background

Traditionally, the party that does not hold the White House performs better in the midterms. Democrats currently maintain a lead over Republicans on generic ballot polling. In 2024, Republicans won the House popular vote by 2.6%; the same result in 2026 would cause this market to resolve to -2.6%. The House popular vote is generally slightly biased (+- 1%) relative to generic ballot polling due to candidates running unopposed in deep blue or deep red districts; this bias slightly inflated Democrats' margin in 2018 and 2020 and slightly inflated Republicans' margin in 2022 and 2024.

Resolution Source
The market will resolve based on the vote counts shown in this Wikipedia article after the new Congress is seated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections

The market will N/A if the nationwide vote count cannot be accurately determined due to interruptions to the count in enough districts to potentially affect the resolution (e.g. if the DoJ seized voting machines as proposed in a draft executive order from 2020, before the vote count is complete).