2026 Elections
These statistics are computed directly from The Ballot Brief's hand-curated 2026 election dataset and update automatically as coverage grows and races resolve. Every underlying fact traces to an official election office list, government roster, or named source. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite these figures with attribution to The Ballot Brief (theballotbrief.com), as of October 9, 2026.
34,583 county and municipal candidates are hand-curated from official election office lists across 20,644 contests on 3,006 local guide pages in 50 states.
6,940 of the 20,644 tracked partisan county contests drew filers from only one party, meaning the race is effectively decided before the general election in states without a runoff requirement.
9,145 tracked local contests have exactly one candidate on the ballot; 11,499 are contested.
1,124 U.S. House candidates are transcribed from certified state election office filing lists across 435 districts in 50 states, rather than from third-party aggregators.
14,384 campaign website links on local guides were individually fetch-verified for the right person, the right office, and the 2026 cycle before being published; unverifiable domains are never linked.
12,817 local candidates carry an incumbent flag, applied only when an official government roster confirms the officeholder - never inferred from press coverage.
13,722 local candidates have policy priorities researched from their own campaign materials or on-the-record interviews, each with a named source.
Methodology: county and municipal figures cover the hand-curated local guides only (not the separate frozen archive of legacy tracker rows shown on some pages). "Effectively decided" counts partisan contests where every filer belongs to one party. U.S. House figures cover the states where certified filing lists have been transcribed; other states show sitting-incumbent rosters that are excluded from these counts. Questions or corrections: contact The Ballot Brief. More for journalists at /data.