Senate & House · 2026

Value Bets

Who gets the most race for their money? In each race, one candidate is running ahead of what the state's partisan lean and the national generic ballot — currently D+7.2 — would predict. Each dot is that candidate, placed by how far ahead they are and how much more (or less) money is working for them. Of 21 races, 11 are led on this measure by a Democrat, 9 by a Republican, 1 by an independent; 9 of them are doing it while being outspent, 12 while outspending.

Click any mark to see exactly where its number comes from. ★ = incumbent.

These are estimates for understanding the race, not betting lines. Please don't bet on elections.

Correlation ≠ causation. Money pours into races that are already close, so a candidate who “bought it” may owe the edge to anything but the spending, and a “bargain” may owe nothing to its budget. These are descriptions, not proof that spending works.

Democrat (D)

Republican (R)

Independent (I)

Dot size: pollsters in the average

Each dot is one race, shown from the side of the candidate who is beating their party's baseline (letter and color = their party). Their opponent trails their own baseline by the same number of points. Labels mark the most extreme races; hover or tap any dot for details.

Limits of this data

Expected margin = 2 × Cook PVI (state/district lean, converted from vote share to margin) + the current generic-ballot average (or, if fewer than 4 pollsters have polled it in the last 60 days, the median of other aggregators' averages). It ignores incumbency and candidate quality on purpose — that's what over/underperformance measures.

Money flows toward competitive races, so spending and polling move together for reasons other than spending working. Treat these as descriptions, not causal estimates.

Candidate totals come from each campaign's most recent filed report; most cover through June 30 or September 30, so recent fundraising is not yet visible.

Outside spending in House special elections is left out of race totals (listed under Exclusions). A candidate who also ran in a 2025–26 House special still has that campaign's own spending in their FEC totals, which cover the whole two-year cycle and can't be split.

Polling data: VoteHub, licensed CC BY 4.0. Campaign finance: Federal Election Commission.