Polymarket
KalshiTX-26 Is Priced on 2024 Margins That the Redraw Left Almost Untouched
TX-26 House race odds rest on a map that the 2026 redraw barely touched. The district keeps all of Cooke County, 74% of Denton County and 85% of Wise County under PlanC2333, the congressional plan the Texas Legislative Council lists as in effect for the 2026 elections, and those lines gave the Republican Senate nominee an 18.9-point margin on November 5, 2024. Texas voters decide the seat on November 3, 2026, with early voting running through October 30. The market treats TX-26 as a Republican hold because the sitting member is on the ballot, the lines are the ones he already won, and nothing in the district's 2024 returns came close. The live board above has the current number.
What the TX-26 price is saying
Start with the map, because in TX-26 the map is most of the read. The previous plan, PlanC2193, put all of Cooke County, 75% of Denton County and 67% of Wise County in the district. The new plan keeps Cooke whole, takes Denton down a point to 74%, 666,816 people on the 2020 Census, and raises Wise to 85%, 58,503 people. On the council's population report of August 18, 2025, the district that results is 55.6% Anglo, 20.3% Hispanic, 11.6% Black and 10.2% Asian, against 56.6% Anglo under the old lines. Of the Texas House seats this site follows, few were left this close to where they stood, and the price reflects that: there is no new electorate here for a challenger to introduce himself to.
The 2024 returns recomputed inside the new lines say the same thing in votes. On November 5, 2024 the Republican presidential ticket carried the 2026 version of TX-26 by 61.2% to 37.4%, 237,076 votes to 144,933, and the Republican Senate nominee won it by 58.4% to 39.5%, 225,803 to 152,638, on the council's election analysis. Under the old lines those figures were 61.0% to 37.6% for president and 58.2% to 39.6% for senator. The redraw moved the top of the ticket by about two tenths of a point. Down the ballot the Republican candidates ran between 61.9% and 64.6% in the statewide judicial and Railroad Commission races within the same lines. A seat where the weakest Republican statewide result of 2024 still cleared 58% is a seat the market can price from the returns alone, and that is what the price is saying.
The name on the Republican line is the sitting member's. Brandon Gill of Flower Mound, a Republican sworn in on January 3, 2025 according to the Clerk of the House's member list for the 119th Congress, won the seat on November 5, 2024 with 241,096 votes, 62.07%, to 138,558, 35.67%, for the Democratic nominee, Ernest R. Lineberger III, and 8,773, 2.26%, for the Libertarian, Phil Gray, in a race the Secretary of State's results list with no incumbent. That means the incumbent runs again on lines nearly identical to the ones he carried by 26 points. On March 3, 2026 he took the Republican primary with 73,610 votes, 91.13%, against Robert A. Chick. The Secretary of State's qualified-candidate list for the general election carries three names: Gill for the Republican Party, who filed on November 11, 2025 and lists his occupation as congressman; Steven Shook for the Democratic Party, a nurse practitioner who filed on November 8, 2025; and Phil Gray for the Libertarian Party again, who filed on December 8, 2025 and lists property management.
The Democratic nomination was the contested one. Shook won the March 3, 2026 primary by 1,208 votes, 29,172 to 27,964, 51.06% to 48.94%, over Lineberger, the 2024 nominee. Turnout in the two primaries points the same way as the general-election returns: 80,779 Republican primary ballots against 57,136 Democratic ones, on the Secretary of State's official canvass, which puts the Democratic share of all primary ballots at 41.4%, close to the 39.5% the Democratic Senate nominee took inside these lines in 2024. Primary voters are not general-election voters, but nothing in the March numbers hands the challenger a new argument.
Money follows the map. Ballotpedia's table of Federal Election Commission data showed Gill with $7.29M raised, $5.47M spent and $1.96M on hand through September 30, 2026, and Shook with $35.8K raised, $30.2K spent and $5.6K on hand through October 14, 2026, the close of books for the pre-general report. The incumbent had more than 300 times the challenger's cash on hand at those two dates, and the market treats that gap as part of the hold.
The raters agree. As of the week of October 20, 2026, the Cook Political Report and Inside Elections rate TX-26 Solid Republican and Sabato's Crystal Ball and Decision Desk HQ rate it Safe Republican, ratings Ballotpedia shows unchanged since July 21, 2026. No independent public poll of the district appears on the race page.
The price path is a slow climb with one wobble. Polymarket's Republican contract opened in late January 2026, printed a low of 49% on January 31, was 82% on primary day, March 3, 2026, was between 87.5% and 89.5% on the first trading day of each month from May through August, reached 91% on September 1 and a high of 98.1% on September 19, and was 97.6% on October 1. The Democratic contract went the other way: 18% on March 3, 9.5% at the start of every month from April through September, 2.3% on October 1 and a low of 1.5% on October 8. On October 23, 2026 the best price on the Republican contract was 94%, on Polymarket, against 95% on Kalshi, and the best price on the Democratic contract was 4%, on Polymarket, against 6% on Kalshi. That is a give-back of about four points from the September high in the first week of early voting, which means traders have priced a little more doubt into the seat without treating it as competitive.
The trading is unusual in one respect. Polymarket's event had matched about $79.4K by October 23, 2026, $55.3K of it on the Republican contract, while Kalshi's KXHOUSERACE-TX26-26 series had traded about 20,700 contracts, 13,900 of them on the Democratic side and 6,900 on the Republican side. More Kalshi contracts changing hands on a 4% to 6% outcome than on a 95% one is what cheap contracts look like, not a forecast, and it is no evidence that the seat is closer than the returns.
The case against the TX-26 read
The case against the read is that 2024 was a presidential year and 2026 is not. Inside the new lines 388,007 people voted on November 5, 2024, 67.8% of 572,023 registered, but only 274,339 voted in the November 2022 midterm, 52.6% of 521,227, on the council's voter-data report. A midterm electorate about seven tenths the size of the presidential one is decided by who stays home, and a statewide Senate race heads the 2026 ballot, which could pull Democratic voters in Denton County to the polls who skipped 2022. A reader who holds that view says an 18.9-point Senate margin from a presidential year is the ceiling of the Republican vote, not the floor, and that a 94% price assumes a turnout pattern the midterm does not have to repeat.
The second point is the gap between the top of the ticket and the rest. The Republican presidential margin inside these lines was 23.8 points and the Senate margin 18.9 points, a five-point spread that shows a slice of the district willing to split its ticket in 2024. The four-point slide in the Republican contract since September 19 shows traders have started to charge something for that, and a contract that has moved four points with no rating change behind it can move again.
What changes the TX-26 read
The read is wrong if the 2024 margins do not carry into a midterm. These are the dated things that would show it.
• The Democratic contract on Kalshi above 15%: the best price on it was 4%, on Polymarket, on October 23, 2026, with Kalshi at 6%; a move above 15% on either venue before election day would say the market has stopped pricing the seat from the 2024 returns.
• The Denton County early vote, October 19 to October 30, 2026: 666,816 of the district's 766,987 people live in its part of Denton County, so the county's turnout against its 2022 pace is the first measure of whether the midterm electorate looks like 2022 or 2024.
• The pre-general reports, books closed October 14, 2026: Shook's showed $5.6K on hand; Gill's pre-general figures were not yet in Ballotpedia's table on October 23, and an outside group spending in the district after that date would be the first sign anyone with money sees a race.
• A rating change: all four raters have held TX-26 at Solid or Safe Republican since at least July 21, 2026; a move to Likely by any of them before November 3 would be new information the price has not had.
When the TX-26 market resolves
Texas holds the general election on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, after early voting from October 19 through October 30 and a voter-registration deadline of October 5, 2026; October 23, 2026 is the last day for a mail-ballot application to be received. Polymarket's TX-26 House Election Winner contracts resolve on the party of the candidate who wins the seat, by ballot-listed affiliation at the time all 2026 House elections are conclusively called by a consensus of credible reporting, with the Federal Election Commission's official results as the tiebreaker if reporting is ambiguous; the event's listed end is November 4, 2026 at 04:59 UTC, which is 11:59 p.m. Central on election night. Kalshi's KXHOUSERACE-TX26-26 contracts pay Yes if the House member sworn in for TX-26 for the term beginning in 2027 belongs to the named party, allow accelerated determination once a consensus of media organizations projects the winner, expect settlement on January 4, 2027 and carry a latest expiration of November 3, 2027.
Related TX-26 markets
The nearest seat this site follows is the Texas 24th District market, a Republican-held district in Tarrant and Dallas counties that the redraw also left almost unchanged, and the Texas 32nd District market is the Dallas-area seat the new lines moved toward the Republicans with no incumbent on its ballot. The statewide contest on the same ballot is the Texas Senate market. The elections page lists every Texas race with a contract, the Texas politics hub carries the full set of state boards, and the markets catalog has the rest of the Texas inventory.
