Hey everyone — welcome to A Grain of Saul, my semi-regular newsletter on whatever political and political-adjacent topic I can’t get to in the daily Tangle newsletter. Today is our first-ever members-only edition of Tangle, where I’m going to share my final Senate predictions. Become a member to unlock the full article.
As a general rule of thumb, I don’t love political prognostication. I prefer reporting and analysis — things based in fact, reality, evidence, and interviews — not speculation about the future.
However, I also think making political predictions can be useful. Making an educated guess about the future is a good way to test your knowledge of the present. It’s also a compelling way to put stakes in the ground in certain moments of time to look back on them in the future.
To that end, I often share election predictions with my audience ahead of big races. I did this in 2024, 2022, and 2020. I have also occasionally published a broader series of predictions. In seven years of writing for Tangle, I’ve published two such pieces: In 2021, I made 19 predictions about the future, and recently I went through and graded them: 12 are correct, six are incorrect, and one is yet to be decided (“the first female president will be a Democrat”). In 2025, I followed that piece up with 19 more predictions about the future (and I’ll grade those, too). In both cases, I tried to stretch myself and offer some views that were not obvious and, in some cases, not widely held.
It’s fun. I don’t stake my whole reputation on making election predictions, and anyone telling you confidently they know what will happen on Tuesday is lying. But I want to challenge myself to see how well I actually understand this political moment. I’ve been reasonably good about this in the past, and I enjoy the challenge. For instance, in 2024, I predicted that Vice President Kamala Harris would narrowly win Pennsylvania and North Carolina but lose every other swing state and lose the election; of course, she ended up losing all seven swing states, not five of seven. But I think I had a good bead on where things were headed.
To that end, I’m sharing my final Senate map today based on my own analysis of the polls; voter sentiment; specific race dynamics; and what I’m hearing from friends, family, and reporters on the ground across the country. Election predictions are fickle things, but I feel pretty good about where I’ve landed here. On a 1–10 confidence interval, I’d give myself something just above a six.
I’ll share my map below, then briefly explain each of my decisions in the major Senate races that are considered competitive. Finally, in the interest of viewpoint diversity, I’ll share the Senate maps of several members of the Tangle team, so you can compare how we are all seeing the races and who ends up with the most accurate map.
Without further ado, here is my 2026 Senate map:
