Midterm 2026: Live Senate, House and Governor Results Across All 50 States, With an Explainer on How They Work

On the morning of 3 November 2026, the Guardian published a live results page for the American midterm elections, covering races for the Senate, the House of Representatives and state governorships in all 50 states. The results on the page come from the Associated Press, which also supplies the race calls and vote estimates. Alongside the numbers sits an explainer on how each of these offices is filled, and it is worth walking through, because the rules differ more than the ballots suggest.

Start with the House. It has 435 voting seats, each representing a district of roughly similar size, and every one of them is up for election every two years. The representatives choose the speaker, who presides over the chamber. The House also holds several powers the Senate does not: it initiates revenue bills, impeaches federal officials, and elects the president if the electoral college ends in a tie.

The Senate works on a different clock. It has 100 members serving six-year terms, with one-third of the seats up in each two-year cycle. Every state gets two senators regardless of population, so Wyoming, with fewer than 600,000 people, carries the same weight as California, with almost 40 million. Most legislation must clear both chambers, but the Senate has functions of its own: approving senior presidential appointments, including to the supreme court, advising the president, consenting to treaty ratification, and trying impeachment cases for federal officials that the House refers to it.

How a winner is decided also varies. In most states, the candidate with the most votes on election day takes the seat. Georgia and Louisiana require the winner to receive 50% of votes cast, and if nobody does, the top two candidates go to a runoff. Maine and Alaska use ranked-choice voting: voters rank candidates, and if no one has a majority of first choices, the least-supported candidate is eliminated and those ballots move to each voter's next choice, repeating until someone has a majority.

Some states add another wrinkle through top-two, or "jungle," primaries, in which candidates of all parties compete together and the two with the most votes advance regardless of party. That means a general election can feature two Democrats or two Republicans.

Two Senate contests this year are special elections. Florida and Ohio are choosing senators because the previous holders of those seats, Marco Rubio and JD Vance, resigned to join the executive branch after the 2024 presidential election.

Governors are elected by direct vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Every state's executive branch is led by a governor, who serves four years, except in Vermont and New Hampshire, where terms are two years. Governors implement state laws and can use executive orders, executive budgets, legislative proposals and vetoes.

Finally, the page explains how to read the results. AP calls a winner in a state when it determines the trailing candidate has no path to victory, which can happen before 100% of votes are counted. AP's estimates of total vote in each state update through election night and the days after, as more turnout data arrives. A called race, in other words, is a judgment about the remaining count, and the tallies will keep moving after the calls are made.