Original Coverage & Source Attribution: almanacofamericanpolitics.substack.com
Campaign signs in Manchester, N.H., on Oct. 29, 2026. (Louis Jacobson)
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Greetings from the First in the Nation state, where I spent a few days this week covering the Senate and gubernatorial debates for PolitiFact and our partner, WMUR-TV. You’ll see links to our coverage below, and I’l be publishing more reporting from my trip soon.
It’s the end of another week at the Almanac of American Politics Substack with Louis Jacobson — and Election Day is almost here. We’re at the point in the election cycle where the new district descriptions and updated lawmaker profiles have slowed to a trickle, and our preview and results articles for the primaries are fully over. Most of what we’re publishing these days is my own analysis of the political battleground.
In case some of our articles slipped through the cracks this week, here’s a recap of what we published.
New political analysis:
Updated lawmaker and governor profiles:
Our publication of redistricted congressional district profiles:
Reference material from previous weeks:
Meanwhile, here’s what I wrote for my day job as chief correspondent for PolitiFact:
Here’s what we should have coming up:
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The general election is almost here; we will keep posting our final handicapping, and then offer analysis after the results are in.
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We have completed our district descriptions of the 170-odd redistricted House seats. The full index is here. No one else publishes this material — but you need to be a paid subscriber to access these new profiles.
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We will continue posting updated biographies of members of Congress and governors who have experienced major developments since the hard copy of the Almanac was published in early September 2025 — we’ve published 286 new or updated bios so far, in some cases, updated multiple times. That’s about 49 percent of all the officeholders we cover. These are accessible only to paid subscribers.
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And we are posting advance biographies of the candidates who are odds-on favorites to win a seat in the next Congress. They qualify for a biography by winning the nomination for an open seat that leans heavily toward their party. These profiles are accessible to paid subscribers only.
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Once we know the other freshman members who are elected, Almanac co-author Rich Cohen will write biographies of all of them for the Almanac, and we will publish them on the Substack in the coming months.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber, so you can access the new district profiles and lawmaker bios. We think this is value added and worth the price.
And for readers of the Substack who first came to know the Almanac in its paper version, fear not — we are assembling our writing team, and we plan to start writing in earnest not long after the election has concluded.
Thanks for your support, and please don’t hesitate to ask me any questions!
All best,
Lou Jacobson
The debate stage at the WMUR-TV studios in Manchester, N.H. (Louis Jacobson)
