The House Battlefield Is Nearly Set
Maps and money reshaped the 2026 race for the House this quarter. Here’s what the new terrain looks like, and who’s actually fighting on it.
The Q2 edition of Welcome Democracy Institute’s Congressional Competition Index was published last week, and it’s the last peek at the data we’ll have before the map is too set to change (the next reports will come when voting has already started in some states).
Since the last report (we wrote about it here), three states redrew their congressional maps, a fourth had its new map thrown out by the courts, and the Supreme Court rewrote the campaign finance balance of power by striking down limits on coordinated party spending. The redistricting war that started in Texas a year ago will take a hiatus until after the midterms.
So the terrain for November is set. The question the rest of this cycle will answer is what the parties do with it.
How the maps changed
All told, ten states redrew their maps this cycle, roughly 40% of all House seats. The final round came after Louisiana v. Callais, where the Court held that Louisiana’s second majority-Black district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, substantially narrowing when Section 2 can justify race-conscious districting. Louisiana and Tennessee rushed new maps into law, each eliminating a majority-Black district. Tennessee’s map cracked the state’s only Democratic-held seat in Memphis into three districts, one of which now stretches to the outskirts of Nashville. Alabama simply asked the Court to reinstate its 2023 map (the one a federal panel had found intentionally diluted Black voting strength) and was approved. In Virginia, the Democratic-favored map voters approved in April was blocked by the state Supreme Court over procedural defects in the way the ballot measure was approved, taking four potential Democratic pickups off the board.
But the flurry of action didn’t do all that much to the Welcome Democracy Institute’s measure of competition, and the number of true battleground seats didn’t budge. There are 111 districts with a Baseline Competitiveness score of 4 (Cook PVI between R+6 and D+6, the range where House control is actually decided), down from 112 a year ago.
What changed was the number of seats that are marginally competitive: the biggest shift on the board was in Baseline 3 districts (PVI 7-10), which grew from 76 to 92 seats. Mapmakers pulled partisan strength out of their safest seats to shore up marginal ones. The safe end of the spectrum thinned out, and a wide buffer of modestly competitive districts grew in its place. Texas’s 35th went from D+19 to R+4. Florida’s 15th went the other way, from a Baseline 4 to a 3.
In other words: if parties ran candidates who could contest races the other party’s Presidential candidate won by 8 or 10 or 12 points, redistricting could end up creating a bigger map.
The battlefield, by the numbers
Of the 111 seats that should be fully competitive, 55 now have a challenger who has raised at least $1 million, up from 40 at the start of the quarter. Another 36 races are on pace, with a challenger past $500k who could hit the million-dollar mark by the end of Q3.
That’s real progress but it means that heading into the final stretch, roughly half the districts where House control will be decided still don’t have a fully funded challenger.
Where incumbents are sweating
The July filings show where momentum is: challengers outraised sitting incumbents in 32 districts last quarter, and 25 of those challengers were Democrats running against Republican incumbents.
A few worth watching. In Iowa’s 3rd, state Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott (see her on Winner, Winner) raised $2.2 million, more than double Zach Nunn, and she’s the rare challenger who has also out-banked the incumbent. In Pennsylvania’s 8th, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti nearly doubled up freshman Rob Bresnahan on both the quarter and cash on hand. And in Virginia’s 1st, Rob Wittman got outraised for the quarter in an R+3 seat that has rarely seen a funded challenge, the kind of race that only comes online in a wave year, which is precisely why it’s worth watching.
Democrats aren’t unscathed. In Frank Mrvan’s D+1 seat in northwest Indiana, challenger Barb Regnitz outraised him and ended June with more cash on hand.
Where the parties are conceding
This is the part of the index we care about most: the winnable seats nobody is contesting.
Republicans, despite playing defense this cycle, are walking away from some surprising targets. Eugene Vindman’s D+2 Virginia seat was decided by 2.6 points in 2024; his leading challenger has raised $122,873 against Vindman’s $12.3 million, a 100-to-1 mismatch against a first-term incumbent, historically the most beatable kind. In Kansas’s 3rd, Sharice Davids’s last challenger raised $1.9 million and lost by eleven; the GOP’s answer this cycle is a challenger with $15,771. And Josh Gottheimer’s $12.8 million war chest has apparently deterred the entire Republican Party from a D+2 district Harris carried by a point and a half.
Democrats’ concessions are fewer, but two stand out. Florida’s 16th is something rare: a brand-new Baseline 4 seat with no incumbent, after redistricting trimmed it to R+6 and Vern Buchanan announced his retirement. The DCCC put it on its “Districts in Play” list, but the leading Democrat has raised $223,280, which puts one of the newest battlegrounds in the country in the abandoned tier of our index. A seat can only be new once. And in North Carolina’s 3rd, the GOP’s own redraw accidentally made Greg Murphy’s district competitive at R+6, a seat where he didn’t even face a Democrat in 2024, and so far neither national Democrats nor donors have shown up to claim it.
Why we keep banging this drum
Fewer competitive races carry compounding costs. Contested campaigns build things that outlast any single election like donor lists, volunteer networks, trained staff and relationships with local press. When a seat goes uncontested for cycles, all of that erodes, and the eventual challenger starts from scratch on a compressed timeline against an incumbent who’s had years to learn the district. Running credible candidates even in tough seats isn’t wasted effort; it’s what keeps a party apparatus in place for the moment a seat opens up.
Take Rep. Max Miller in Ohio 7, for example. Trump carried the district by 11 points in 2024 and it was not on a lot of people’s radars in the early stages of the cycle. We wrote in May that the numbers showed the district may not be as red as it appears, and that under the right circumstances it could be competitive. Then Brian Poindexter came out of a crowded primary and raised nearly $500,000 in Q2, putting together a formidable general election campaign in a short amount of time.
Then came the domestic abuse allegations against Miller (which he denies) that have drawn national attention and an ongoing House Ethics investigation. Now the race is moving sharply in the Democratic direction, with a recent poll showing Poindexter up 14 points over the embattled Miller. This seat is live because of the allegations against Miller, but it is competitive because Democrats were ready when the opportunity presented itself.
The bottom line
Redistricting is finished, but the fight over what to do with that new terrain is just beginning. The map could be wider than it was a year ago, with more districts sitting in marginally competitive territory than at any point this cycle. Whether that translates into a bigger battlefield or just a bigger list of missed opportunities depends on parties nominating candidates who can over-perform deep in the territory of the opposing party.
The full Q2 2026 Congressional Competition Index, including our complete scoring methodology and district-by-district data, is available from the Welcome Democracy Institute.