By Carl WeinschenkVote This Time is pleased to announce the availability of “The Race for the House of Representatives,” a nonpartisan interactive simulator that creates context for the 2026 House races. Click here to check it out.
The House of Representatives has 435 Congressional Districts (CDs). Each is voted upon every two years.
The 2026 House Races are coming to a head
That’s a lot to digest. The simulator is a free tool that shows how each CD fits into the huge mosaic of the House map and both influences and is influenced by what is happening at the national level.
The simulator provides official and certified vote and percentage totals for each CD in both the 2022 and 2024 House races. It also identifies voters’ top three concerns as we approach this year’s elections.
The heart of the simulator is real time view of how shifts in national voting could have impacted House results in the 2022 and 2024 elections. This is done by moving a bar to the left or right to change the percentage of voters for each party at the national level. The vote distribution and percentage change are applied to the CD being assessed. The tool lists which seats would flip from one party to the other based on the new national total.
The tool provides this data for all 435 seats and displays it for the closest 25 races in both election cycles.
This example focuses on the first district of Iowa (IA-01), which was one of the closest races in the country two years ago. The Republicans won with 49.98% of the vote (a 799-vote margin). Sliding the bar to simulate a national electorate that is 1% more Democratic suggests that the district would have flipped to the Democrats — and would have brought five other CDs along as well. That scenario flips the House overall from the Republicans to the Democrats.
The platform is not a prediction for several reasons. A national vote total change would not filter to individual CDs so precisely. It’s especially tricky this cycle because redistricting has changed the contours of CDs in nine states, according to Ballotpedia. It is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
These limitations notwithstanding, the simulator helps paint a big picture that illustrates the interrelated nature of the huge number of races — some in the next town, some thousands of miles away — and to get a deeper sense of the issues Americans care about as the 2026 House races approach.
Click here to try the simulator.