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By James Bickerton
News Reporter
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The odds on the Democrats taking control of both the House and Senate in the November 3 midterm elections have risen to new highs according to the “Dulux” version of polling guru Nate Silver’s latest 2026 Silver Bulletin midterm election model.
According to the latest data from October 8, Democrats had a 74.8 percent chance of winning the Senate, the highest figure since the model began on August 5 when they were on just 56.2 percent.
Similarly, the odds of the Democrats winning the House were on 93.1 percent, which is also their best performance since August 5 when they had 85.5 percent odds on taking the lower chamber.
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Republicans currently enjoy a slim majority in both chambers of Congress. Winning both in November would be a major coup for the Democrats that would significantly impede President Trump’s ability to get legislation passed during the final two years of his second term.
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Figures Collated and Tested
Silver’s 2026 midterm election model is named FLIPR, which stands for Forecast with Leading Indicators, Polls and (Expert) Ratings.
The default “Dulux” model combines public polling, weighted by perceived reliability, with a range of variables including candidate incumbency, fundraising, elected experience, scandal and party loyalty along with “expert” ratings to “account for idiosyncratic factors in each race that are not necessarily well-captured by the fundamentals.”
Once the data has been collected the model is used to simulate the election at least 40,000 times before the final results are published. Published data from the model is available from August 5 to October 8.
Overall, Silver’s model gives Democrats a 74.5 percent chance of winning both the House and Senate in November, while Republicans are only given a 6.7 percent chance of retaining both chambers.
"Republicans chances in the midterms are a sinking ship," Democratic National Committee spokesperson Kendall Witmer told Newsweek. "There’s no overcoming Donald Trump's record-low approval ratings or that Trump and Republicans drove up gas and grocery prices and started a never-ending war with Iran. Meanwhile, Democrats are focused on lowering costs, rooting out corruption, and making healthcare affordable. Democrats are fighting for every American and we're not taking any vote for granted."
Newsweek contacted the Republican National Committee for comment on Friday via email outside regular office hours.
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The Senate
The Dulux version of Silver’s FLIPR model gave Democrats a 74.8 percent chance of winning the Senate at the midterms on October 8, with an average of 52.2 seats. By contrast Republicans were given a 25.3 percent chance of holding the upper chamber, and averaged out at 47.8 seats.
Notably, Democrats' chances of victory in the Senate have improved dramatically since early September when the two parties came extremely close to level pegging. On September 7 the model gave Democrats a 50.1 percent chance of winning the Senate, against 49.9 percent for the GOP.
The data shows Republicans enjoyed a brief resurgence at the beginning of September reaching a 49.9 percent chance of holding the Senate on September 7 from a 43.7 percent chance on September 1. Prior to that, they remained on between 42 and 44 percent since the model starts on August 5, when they had a 43.8 percent chance of Senate victory against 56.2 percent for the Democrats.
Currently, there are 53 Republican Senators in the upper house against 47 who caucus with the Democrats.
Silver’s model found the Democrats are “likely” to win key Senate races in New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota. Meanwhile, Senate races in Maine, Texas and Iowa also “lean” towards the party. The Kansas race is classed as a “tossup” with Republicans having a 51.4 percent chance of winning to 48.6 percent for the Democrats.
YouGov polling released on Wednesday found Democrats are on course to win the Texas, Ohio and Kansas Senate races flipping three currently Republican-controlled seats.
The House
As of October 8, Silver’s model gave Democrats a 93.1 percent chance of winning the House against just 6.9 percent for the Republicans. This result would give the Democrats an average of 238.7 House seats, against 196.3 for the Republicans.
Since August 5 the Democrats odds of flipping the House have remained consistently higher than 80 percent, hitting a low point of 81.1 percent on September 3, when the Republicans reached 18.9 percent. On August 5, when the model starts, it gave Democrats an 85.5 percent chance of winning the House against 14.5 percent for the GOP. This gave Democrats an average of 232.9 House seats, against 202.1 for the GOP.
According to the latest data there are only two California House seats that are solidly Republican, with the rest solidly Democratic apart from two that are only “likely” to elect Democrats.
Texas is one of the most competitive states, with elections to its 23rd, 35th and 15th congressional districts all classified as tossups. Of its other districts, 21 are classed as solidly Republican, three as likely Republican, two as likely Democrat and eight as solidly Democrat.
The most competitive House races are for Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, where the model gives the GOP a lead of just 0.2 percentage points on October 8, and Maine’s Second Congressional District, where the Republicans had a 0.3 percentage point lead.
Currently, there are 218 Republicans in the House along with one independent, California Representative Kevin Kiley, who caucuses with the GOP. By contrast there are 214 Democrats and two seats are vacant.
It remains to be seen what impact the redistricting of House seats by Republican controlled legislatures in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas will have on the final result. Democrats also carried out their own redistricting in California and are expected to gain an extra Utah House seat.
A report by Punchbowl News, based on data from AdImpact, which monitors political advertising, concluded that Republicans spent nearly $100 million on ads in new districts they created.
The Trump Effect
Speaking to Newsweek, Mark Shanahan, an American politics expert who teaches at the University of Surrey in the U.K., said the findings of Silver’s model are primarily a result of Trump’s unpopularity rather than Democrat strength.
He said: “The Democrats can thank Donald J. Trump for their heady position in the polls. While he is not on the ballot in any of the midterm elections across the country, he still dominates the debate and has made this November's election a referendum on his presidential performance. And Trump 2.0 has had a pretty awful 2026. The cost of living remains intolerably high as the U.S. fights a war in the Middle East and an economic war with its traditional allies.
“Trump is far more absorbed with vanity projects such as his White House ballroom and triumphal arch and is singularly failing to deal with America's key social and economic issues....The Democrats remain divided and aren't particularly strong. But Trump has carved the GOP in his own image. It lives or dies on the public perception of its leader. And that has never been worse.”
Trump has a negative net approval in the key Senate battleground states of Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Alaska and Nebraska, according to recent surveys. The only battleground state he has a net approval rating in is Kansas, where the president is at +2.
Who Is Nate Silver?
Silver is a political analyst and statistician best known for his election forecasting models. In 2008, he founded FiveThirtyEight and received national recognition after correctly predicting the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 presidential election. He later worked with The New York Times and ABC News before leaving FiveThirtyEight in 2023.
Silver now publishes his analysis through the Silver Bulletin newsletter on Substack, where he covers U.S. politics, elections and statistical forecasting.
Methodology
Silver’s Dulux FLIPR model begins by combining publicly available polls, that are weighed “based on recency, sample size” and perceived reliability. This draws on data and ratings from election websites Cook Political Report, Inside Elections and Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
It then incorporates a range of other factors including incumbency, the national political environment, partisan scores for the state or district, fundraising, candidate electoral experience, any scandals and party loyalty based on voting records.
Silver noted that “candidates who vote against their party more often actually outperform electorally, other factors held equal.”
Expert ratings are then incorporated after being “de-biased” as Silver said “expert raters tend to implicitly assume a neutral political environment (i.e., a generic ballot of about zero) until quite late in the cycle.”
Contact Newsweek editor on this story: Edward Pearcey.
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