About
ShowdownWire
Every race, live to the showdown.
What it is
ShowdownWire is a live tracker for the 2026 U.S. Senate, House, and governor races. It puts forecaster ratings, polling averages, and prediction-market prices for each race side by side, with the time each figure was pulled and a link to where it came from. It does not run its own forecast model and does not blend those numbers into one probability.
Data sources
- Wikipedia
Forecaster ratings tables, candidate lists, poll tables, and the generic ballot (CC BY-SA).
- Kalshi
Prediction-market contract prices for Senate, House, governor, and chamber control.
- Polymarket
Prediction-market contract prices, shown alongside Kalshi.
- Federal Election Commission
Senate fundraising receipts from the openFEC API.
- civicAPI
Election-night results adapter. Test data is never shown as votes.
- U.S. Census Bureau
TIGER state and congressional district boundaries (public domain).
- Wikimedia Commons
Candidate photos, only under free licenses, credited on each photo.
- The Hill and Politico
Headlines and links from their public RSS feeds. Articles stay on their sites.
Full credits and license terms are on the Attribution page. Live source status is on Ingestion health.
How it works
- Quoted, not modeled. Ratings and polls are quoted as published. Market prices are the venue’s own prices (bid/ask midpoint when the spread is 10¢ or less, otherwise the last trade), not a probability we computed.
- Timestamped. Every figure carries the time it was fetched. If a source fails, the last good figure stays and is marked as carried forward. The page flags itself stale if prices stop updating.
- Desk notes are short prose generated from the sourced figures on the same page. They add no new data.
- Market prices
- about every 60 seconds
- Headlines
- about every 5 minutes
- Polls and ratings
- about every 15 minutes
- FEC fundraising
- daily
The full method, including the disagreement index and seat math, is on the Method page.
Independence
ShowdownWire is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or paid by any candidate, party, campaign, PAC, forecaster, pollster, or market venue named on this site. Any advertising or paid link is labeled where it appears and never changes the ratings, polls, or prices shown.
Corrections
If a figure is wrong, the fix goes into the source mapping and the corrected number replaces it on the next refresh. If a source itself publishes an error, the figure follows that source’s correction. Material errors in our own text are corrected in place.
Contact
There is no public contact address yet. Each figure links to its original source, which is the fastest way to check it.