State Navigate

🚨NEW ARTICLE🚨 @StateNavigate knocked it out of the park this year. We only missed two state legislative chambers this year and got 93-94% of all contested state legislative seat winners right. We improved upon 2024, too. articles.statenavigate.com/u…

.@StateNavigate will only miss 2 state legislative chambers in the 2026 state legislative elections, the TX and GA Houses. It's our best ever when going back to the @CNalysis days. Pop a cork.

Threw this together pretty quickly but @StateNavigate looks like it's made the top 10 most accurate pollsters this year. + We had the best performance of any pollster when comparing field performance vs. others; our governor polls did 5 points better on average than the rest.

:)

JUST CALLED: In a remarkable upset, Democrats have flipped UT HD-62 in Provo. Democrat David Chappell had just a 2% chance of winning in our forecast, but he flipped one of the country's youngest state legislative districts anyway. projects.statenavigate.com/2…

My personal Virginia predictions and the @StateNavigate poll did remarkably well this year; the error will be reduced further as same-day registration votes are counted by Wednesday (esp. in VA5, though Perriello will narrowly lose). The last-minute GOP money saved McGuire, IMO. R's got caught sleeping at the wheel in a lot of reliably Republican districts this year, but everyone in Virginia knew from the start of early voting that it was a dogfight.

So far...pretty darn good.

It's official: Republicans now hold just 3 of 36 seats in the Connecticut State Senate. An extinction-level event hit Republicans in this chamber. Ironically, Republicans didn't do too badly in the State House compared with our forecast. projects.statenavigate.com/2…

🚨PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS🚨 The favorite in @StateNavigate state legislative/gubernatorial forecasts has won 95.8% of the time in races that have been called (131 uncalled seats; 5709/5957 of called races) Across 1,801 single-member races, the average gap between our forecast probabilities and actual win rates was 1.8 points, down from 4.7 in 2024. An INCREDIBLE improvement despite a >4x larger polling error this year than 2 years ago. As you can guess, most of the seats that upset our forecast went to Democrats: 198 of the 248 seats we missed (79.8%) were won by Democrats. We're still waiting on more races to call, but we'll be writing more in-depth about our forecast performance this year. But here at @StateNavigate, we celebrate our wins and focus on our losses. We've already discussed several methodology changes that should help us improve again in 2028.

Democrats' net gain in some state legislative chambers is so large that you have to go back to the 19th century. DEMs' net gain in the NH Senate precedes the Republican Party; you have to go back to 1847 (!) DEMs' net gain in the TX House is the largest since Reconstruction ended

2026 is not only the largest Democratic wave in state legislatures since the 1974 Watergate Wave. 2026 is probably the 7th-largest Democratic net gain in state legislatures over the last 100 years. It's likely going to beat Landslide Lyndon's 1964 win.

In 2026, Democrats have won over FIVE HUNDRED seats that voted for Trump in 2024 at the state legislative level so far, with more seats yet to be called. Republicans won 54 Harris-won seats, and HALF of them were left uncontested by Democrats. projects.statenavigate.com/2…

The @StateNavigate poll grades for all of our final 2026 general election polls are out. We were the most accurate pollster in the Georgia 2026 elections, but we still undershot Democrats. Still, most of our polls earned an A or B. Good job to the committee!

Josh Turek's State House district, which voted for Trump in 2024, was seen as a likely Republican pickup when the Democratic opponent dropped out in the Fall. He won anyway, by 10 points. weareiowa.com/article/news/p…

We still have provisional and late mail votes coming in VA, but @StateNavigate has calculated how each House of Delegates and State Senate district voted this year for the US Senate and US House using current results. docs.google.com/spreadsheets…

.@StateNavigate will land around 96% of state legislative seats correctly forecasted this year nationwide, our usual hit rate every two years. Our forecasts take polling into account, and given the enormous industry-wide miss, we consider this to be a massive win for us. Good work to the team especially @jhkersting

Georgia House update: GA House Democrats are clearly on track to flip the chamber, we have to 1. wait for recounts and 2. wait for more votes to be counted near Savannah before having an official call here. GA Senate Republicans are clearly on track to have a 1-seat majority projects.statenavigate.com/2…

Beau Bayh's coattails in Indiana absolutely destroyed our Indiana Forecast. Democrats will end up just a few seats shy of winning a majority in the Indiana House. Just absolutely ridiculous DEM overperformance in Indiana, literally Obama '08 level. projects.statenavigate.com/2…

🚨DATA CENTERS = ELECTORAL DEATH🚨 Two districts that were marked as Solid R in our forecasts saw huge Democratic overperformances, narrowly flipping one seat and narrowly losing another. These are districts where large data center projects are being built. KS HD-43 voted for Trump by 23 points in 2024; WV HD-18 voted for Trump by 57 points. Republican voters were absolutely outraged at the data centers and bolted to Democrats as a result. The Stratos Data Center project by Kevin O'Leary that has outraged Utahns is also why Utah Democrats are expected to greatly outperform our forecast; our forecasts performed well elsewhere in the West, but Utah proved to be a problem, and it's obvious why. In our Republican primary polling, we saw primary voters outraged with the project, and that rage transferred to the general electorate. This was especially the case in northern Utah, where voters are closer to the project. We've added a layer to our results pages where you can see the NavCast's projected margin by district for each state (data availability permitting) vs. our final forecast's projected margin, and it's just Republican death everywhere in Utah. The Economist saw this 3 weeks ahead of the election: Trump voters closer to a newly announced/built data center bolted to Democrats at much higher rates than Trump voters over 2km away. Going forward we're going to be tracking this and adding it to our forecasts in the near future so long as the issue continues to be electorally poisonous. National state legislative results: projects.statenavigate.com/2…