2026 midterms

the incredibly true story of how boringly methodical elections are supposed to be

Less than two weeks out. Here’s where to learn the part of the midterms nobody puts on screen.

Here’s the paradox of November 3: the number you’ll stare at all night, the one in the corner of the screen with the little checkmark beside it, is the least official number in American democracy.

It has no legal status. None. It’s a private news organization’s running total, pieced together from county websites, state feeds and reporters in the field. This cycle, every major broadcast network reads from the same one. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News all buy their 2026 results data from the Associated Press, the first time since the 2016 election that all the major broadcast networks have used a single vendor. The call desks are still separate. The numbers feeding them aren’t.

Meanwhile, the actual election happens somewhere far less telegenic. In county offices. In rooms where election workers decide what a half-filled oval meant. In Pennsylvania, where counties can’t even start processing mail ballots before 7 a.m. on Election Day. That’s why the mail vote there lands last, and why the margin “moves” overnight. That’s not the count shifting. That’s the calendar.

And when somebody loses? The National Archives has a stock answer to the question of what a concession speech does to the process. It begins with one word: “None.”

So on November 4th someone will tell you the late-counted ballots are suspicious. Or that a race was over because a candidate said so on TV. You’ll want to know how the machine actually works.

That’s what we built.

The 2026 Midterms Hub

The 2026 Midterms Hub is the front door to the whole cycle:

And the part I’m proudest of: a shelf of step-by-step maps of the plumbing. How a Ballot Is Counted. How Election Results Are Transmitted and Reported. How a Provisional Ballot Is Cast and Counted. How a Midterm Election Is Certified. How a Conceded Election Is Finalized.

It moves fast. In the past week alone, close to 100 midterm pages were added or updated: new race pages, new super PAC money, new court rulings. A “Latest midterm updates” feed at the top of the hub refreshes every morning, so you can see what changed since your last visit. And if reading isn’t enough, the hub will point you to volunteer shifts near you.

The bigger map

The midterms section is one corner of something bigger. The Civics vs. Oligarchy Knowledge Base is more than 10,000 linked pages mapping the people, money, ideas and institutions of the modern American right: who funds what, who knows whom, and where the receipts are. New here? Begin at Start Here, with a 15-minute tour and six one-hour reading tracks. Election season is track one.

Then follow the links. That’s the whole trick. Every page connects to the people and the money around it.

It’s free, and there’s no paywall. Send it to the friend who’s planning to doomscroll through election night.

Because election night is a broadcast. The election is a process: slow, local, deeply unglamorous. When the numbers lurch at 2 a.m., the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

The people who want you to panic are counting on you not knowing the difference.

civil servant election workers quietly and humbly going about doing their jobs
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congress ascii maps project

Who Runs Congress: An ASCII Maps Project

Here’s a paradox for you: the most powerful people in Congress are the ones most Americans have never heard of.

Cable news covers the floor — the speeches, the walkouts, the C-SPAN theater. But the floor is the last stop, not the first. By the time a bill gets a floor vote, the real decisions have already been made in committee: what gets a hearing, what gets marked up, what gets quietly buried, who gets subpoenaed, and who never has to answer a single question under oath. The committee gavel is where the power lives. Everybody in Washington knows this. Almost nobody outside of it does.

So let’s map it. All of it.

This is the full committee and subcommittee leadership of the 119th Congress as of mid-2026: both chambers, every standing committee, every select and special committee, the four joint committees, and — the part nobody bothers to compile — every subcommittee, with its Republican chair and Democratic ranking member. Over 100 panels. Because Republicans hold both chambers, every gavel is a Republican hand; every ranking member is a Democrat (or an independent caucusing with them — hi, Bernie!).

It comes in two flavors:

  • The infographic (above) — the visual overview for scanning who holds what.
  • The ASCII tree — a plain-text, monospace map with the complete roster down to the subcommittee level, including mid-Congress successions and the seats I couldn’t verify (flagged, not guessed). It’s diffable, terminal-friendly, and pasteable anywhere. Check it out below the break, and in my Github plain-gov repository where I’ll be adding more of these “just the facts, ma’am” maps.
Continue reading Who Actually Runs Congress?
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gerrymandering -- an illustrated guide to its effects

A new long-form data brief on how representativeness has been gerrymandered away — and the first installment of a series on how American democracy was engineered to stop being competitive.

In 2024, Americans went to the polls to elect 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. 366 of those races were over before a single ballot was cast.

Not “predictable.” Not “incumbent advantage.” Decided — by maps drawn years earlier, with software, by politicians choosing their voters instead of the other way around. According to the Cook Political Report‘s 2024 ratings, only 69 of 435 House seats — 15% — were genuinely competitive in the general election. The other 85% were already in the Republican or Democratic column before campaigning began.

That’s the headline of the new Doctor Paradox data brief, The Gerrymandered Republic, and it’s the launch piece for a new series: Structural Sabotage, on the ways American democracy has been engineered to stop being competitive.

This first installment is the receipt-collection edition. It covers:

  • The vote-share vs. seat-share gap in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio — and Maryland as the Democratic counter-example, because honesty matters
  • Packing and cracking — the two techniques every gerrymandered map uses, unchanged since 1812
  • The efficiency gap — the metric that quantifies how badly a map cheats
  • The collapse of swing seats from 164 in 1999 to 82 today — a 50% loss of competitive districts in 25 years
  • What actually works — independent commissions draw 19% of America’s districts and produce 41% of its toss-up races, a four-to-one ratio in favor of taking the pen out of politicians’ hands
  • The Supreme Court’s 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, which closed the only federal door left

Click the image below to open the new mini-magazine style format:

gerrymandering -- an illustrated guide to its effects

Stay tuned for part 2 of the Structural Sabotage series — on how primaries weaponize safe seats — that will be coming next. If 85% of seats are decided before the general election, then who actually decides them? The answer is a much smaller and more ideological electorate than most Americans realize.

Please share. The cover-up that worked is still working, and the least we can do is make sure people can see the map.

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