Loading…

What's on the ballot: November 3, 2026 | The Receipts - media kit | The Receipts - Dataspheres AI

The midterms are the national elections between presidential races, when every House seat and a third of the Senate are chosen. Watch What's on the ballot:...

The midterms are the national elections between presidential races, when every House seat and a third of the Senate are chosen. Watch What's on the ballot: November 3, 2026 (7 min), with captions The stories November 3, 2026 Here's the scale. Every House seat, 35 Senate seats and 36 governors. Plus 145 ballot measures in 39 states, by Ballotpedia's count. Who holds power now Who holds power going in? Republicans hold the House, 218 to 214. And the Senate, 53 to 47, counting the 2 independents who caucus with Democrats. Donald Trump has the White House. Speaker Mike Johnson runs the House. Majority Leader John Thune runs the Senate. Two years of full control. Every bill, every budget and every confirmation went through them. The Senate: 35 seats Start with the Senate, on the Cook Political Report's ratings from October 20. Red leans Republican, blue leans Democratic, and gold marks the 7 Toss-ups. 6 of those 7 are Republican seats: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio and Texas. Michigan is the Democratic one. Democrats need a net gain of 4 seats for a majority. And North Carolina, a Republican seat, now rates Likely Democratic. Governors: 36 races Governors next. 36 races, and 3 Toss-ups: Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin. Ohio moved toward Democrats on October 23. Alaska and Iowa lean toward a Democratic pickup. The House: 435 seats In the House, 218 seats make a majority. Cook rates 17 seats as Toss-ups, 12 of them held by Republicans, and projects Democrats gaining 12 to 22 seats. On the ballot: 145 measures in 39 states Then the questions voters decide directly. Abortion is on the ballot in Idaho, Missouri, Nevada and Virginia. Missouri voters approved abortion rights in 2024. This year's measure would repeal that amendment. Voter ID and citizenship checks are on the ballot in California, Nevada and Alaska. 506 U.S. citizens Now the agency that two years of full control built up the most: ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ProPublica counted 506 U.S. citizens held by immigration agents from January 2025 through September 2026. At least 70 were children. Citizens held, and some deported About a dozen U.S. citizens were deported, most of them children. A 2-year-old born in Baton Rouge was sent to Honduras with her mother. ICE held about 200 children a day, against about 25 a day before. And 37 people died in ICE custody in fiscal 2026, the most on record. The claim: 'violent crimes' Here's how it was sold. Kristi Noem, then Homeland Security Secretary, in January: 70% of them have committed or have charges against them on violent crimes. DHS still calls them the worst of the worst. The claim vs. the record The record. 70% violent was the claim. Cato found 5% of people booked in had a violent conviction. The New York Times found 7% of arrests. And TRAC found 70.6% of people held had no criminal conviction at all. Where the operations went Where it went: four big city operations, in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte and Minneapolis. In Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed two people in January. No charges have been filed. In Texas, arrests leading to detention went from 5,787 to 10,331. How ICE gets people's data And this is how ICE finds people. Data. It sent the IRS 1.28 million names and got back 47,289 taxpayer records. An appeals court upheld a block on that program on September 8. Medicaid data on millions of people went to ICE, and ICE passed it to Palantir, a private company. A judge halted it in July. ICE investigators took in 99 million voter records. And agents scan faces on the street with Clearview AI and an app called Mobile Fortify. DHS's own privacy review says those scans can capture U.S. citizens. What ICE pays private companies for data tools The bills. Palantir's ImmigrationOS, $29.9 million. Clearview AI's face recognition, $9.2 million. Phone location tracking bought without a warrant, up to $8.3 million, no-bid. Social media monitoring, $5.7 million. Private companies, paid to watch. DHS's answer DHS's answer: its operations are highly targeted, and claims that face scanning violates privacy are false. ICE says 60% of detainees have a criminal record, a count that includes charges still pending. Palantir says the Medicaid data was purged. Who voted for the money Who paid for it? The July 2025 law put $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement. It passed the House 218 to 214. Every yes vote was a Republican. Every Democrat voted no. In the Senate, the vice president broke a 50-50 tie. The president's party usually loses seats History mostly cuts one way. The president's party usually loses House seats in a midterm. 63 seats in 2010. 41 in 2018. Since 1994, the president's party gained only twice, in 1998 and 2002. Where the race stands This year, Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by 7 to 9 points in late October averages. The president's approval sits between 35% and 39%. And in special elections since 2025, Democrats have run more than 10 points ahead of 2024. How