🕒 The latest on the generic ballot
Updated October 30, 2026
After hitting a new all-time high for the 2026 cycle of D +9.2, Democrats’ lead on the generic ballot has dropped slightly to D +8.9. Their support is still ticking up in our average, but unlike earlier in the year, so is support for Republicans.
We post a different version of our generic ballot average on our midterm election forecast page. It applies a likely voter adjustment, which in this case benefits Democrats — but just slightly — and moves their lead from D +8.9 to D +9.1. -EMD, 10/28/26
See also: Midterm election forecast, Trump approval rating dashboard, and Iran War support dashboard.
This is the landing page for Silver Bulletin’s 2026 generic congressional ballot polling average. We’ll regularly update the charts below as new generic ballot polls come in, and eventually, this average will feed into our 2026 midterm forecast model.1 This page is designed to be viewed on the web rather than in our email client or in the Substack app.
Click here for more information on how the average works. The Silver Bulletin average weights more reliable polls more heavily — you can find our latest pollster ratings here.
Who is favored to win the House in 2026?
Our default average reflects a combination of all polls, whether conducted among adults, registered voters or likely voters. If a pollster releases multiple versions of the same survey, we use the likely voter version before the registered voter version.2 That’s because for this average, we’re interested in people who plan on voting in 2026.
Every generic ballot poll in our database
Each poll gets an “influence” score based on its pollster rating, its sample size, its recency, and how often a pollster is publishing numbers. You can find that in the table below. Sometimes, surveys with mediocre pollster ratings have more weight in the model just because they were conducted very recently or polled more people.3
Inevitably, there’s a lot of disagreement from survey to survey, not just because of statistical variation, but because some polling firms consistently lean toward Democrats or Republicans. By clicking on the “adjusted results” tab, you can see how the “house effects” adjustment that corrects for these predictable differences works in our model. You can also click here to download every generic ballot poll in our database — including some additional details not shown in the chart below.
State benchmarks and every generic ballot poll since 1994
We also have two cool features we’re reserving for paying subscribers:
Benchmarks in each state. Which party would we expect to be ahead in, say, Georgia or Michigan or Ohio, given the current generic ballot?
And generic ballot averages going back to 1994.
You can find all of that, plus downloadable generic ballot data for the past 30 years, below.
First, here’s a map that shows state-level benchmarks based on our generic ballot polling average, combined with each state’s partisan lean score and elasticity.4 We show four versions of these benchmarks: one based on the current generic ballot, one assuming a neutral political environment (generic ballot = 0), one assuming Democrats gain 5 points from the current generic ballot, and one assuming Republicans gain 5 points from the current the generic ballot.
Next, here’s net support in the generic ballot average from every cycle since 1994. (Republicans are designated with negative numbers.)
Finally, here’s even more detail showing both Republican and Democratic numbers separately for every cycle since 1994.
If you want even more detail, check out the file below to download our generic ballot average between 1994 and 2024. Note that these are calculated retrospectively for previous cycles based on our current methodology and pollster ratings.
If you notice any bugs in the charts or missing polls, just shoot Eli a message and he’ll get them fixed as quickly as possible.
And the registered voter version before the adults version.
We don’t want any one pollster to dominate the averages — so if pollsters have conducted multiple recent surveys, the model essentially divides up the overall weight between them.
A state’s partisan lean score is based on a combination of how that state voted relative to the rest of the country in the past two presidential elections and in recent state legislative elections. (The formula gives 50 percent of the weight to the 2024 presidential election, 25 percent to the 2020 presidential election, and 25 percent to a rolling average of the past five state legislative elections.) Our current elasticity scores are calculated from microdata in the 2022 and 2024 Cooperative Election Studies, which each surveyed 60,000 voters. See the methodology page for more about these.