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How the 2026 federal elections sit on the chart
Why the 2026 House and Senate dots use party programs, not roll-call scores, and how the two names in each race were chosen.
The 2026 chart on the United States page is a campaign chart. It is not the Congress chart with new names pasted on. A roll-call score describes votes that have already been cast. A challenger who has never served does not have those votes. Giving that person a Voteview number would be an invention. Uncanted does not do it. The dot for a 2026 candidate is the public program the site assigned to that candidate’s party line.
The field is the November 3, 2026 general election for federal offices. House and Senate names started from the public race tables as they stood on October 16, 2026. Governors are not on this chart. State legislative candidates are not on it. The federal chart then keeps at most two names in each House district and each Senate race. When both a Democrat and a Republican are on the list, those are the two who stay. No polling percent is invented to break a tie or to drop a major-party nominee. If one major party has no name on the list, the next name is kept by whether they are the incumbent and then by party, not by a made-up poll.
That rule will disappoint anyone who wanted a full ballot or a forecast. It is the rule that keeps the square readable. A district with eight names, each offset by a pixel, is a smudge. Two names can be compared. The page should be honest about the cost: a third-party nominee is left off when both major parties have a candidate. Their absence is a choice about the picture, not a finding that their program does not exist. The party programs for Libertarian, Green, Constitution, and the smaller lines are still in the file. They are used when that nominee is one of the two names the rule keeps.
Each party line has one economic number and one authority number. Democrats sit left of center and slightly toward liberty. Republicans sit to the right and toward authority. Libertarians sit further right on economics and further down toward liberty. Greens sit further left and toward liberty. The Constitution line sits toward authority with a milder economic reading. Independents sit at the origin unless a more specific label is on the list. These are the public shapes of the party programs as Uncanted reads them for this election. They are not a claim that every nominee agrees with every sentence of a platform.
Two candidates of the same party are not drawn on the exact same pixel. A small offset, a few points at most, keeps the dots from stacking into one circle. The offset is a display choice. It is not a research finding that one Republican is four points more authoritarian than another. The written method says this so a reader does not treat the jitter as a biography. If a page implied that the offset came from a close reading of two campaign sites, it would be false. Where the site has not read a personal platform into the file, the party line is the placement.
Incumbents are the bridge between the two charts. A senator who is on the ballot and also in the 119th Congress has a Voteview score on the Congress chart and a party-line dot on the 2026 chart. Those dots will not match. They should not match. One is the votes. The other is the program of the party they are running with. A reader who wants the record uses the Congress page. A reader who wants the campaign uses the 2026 chart and remembers what it is. The site links the two when the bioguide is the same person. It does not average them into a third, friendlier number.
Nothing on this chart is a prediction of who will win, or a recommendation of who to vote for. A candidate can be closer to a reader on two axes and still be the wrong vote on the one question that decides the household. District lines, courts, a war, a single bill: the square drops all of that. The 2026 chart is useful only as a comparison of programs, side by side, with the major-party pair visible and the source labeled. Anyone who wants the speeches can read the campaign. Anyone who wants the votes, for the people who have votes, can read the Congress file.
The chart will go stale. Nominees withdraw. The October 16 list is not a promise about November. When the field changes, the names should change with it, and the pages should keep the same rule: party program, two names, no invented poll, no fake roll call for a first-time candidate. A compass that updates its election file and still refuses to pretend a promise is a vote is doing the only job this page has.