U.S. House - NC-09 · North Carolina · 2026
General election · 2 on the certified November ballot · Incumbent running
Result
CalledFlip: R to DRichard N. Ojeda II (D) won this race with 51.1% of the vote, 2.3 points ahead, defeating incumbent Richard Hudson.
- Richard N. Ojeda IIDemocraticWinner51.1%139,486 votes
- Richard HudsonRepublican48.9%133,196 votes
- Margin
- 6,290 votes (2.3 points)
- Reporting
- 100% of the count in
- Called
- First seen here, Nov 4, 12:07 AM ET
- Seat
- Changed party: held by Richard Hudson (R)
- Last updated
- Nov 14, 6:05 AM ET
Called it: miss Our locked call before polls closed was R; the winner is D. See every locked call
Unofficial until the state certifies the result.
Before the election
Polls, ratings and the Vugol Tensor below were published before votes were counted. They are not results.
Model rating Leans Republican (Tilting) on the Vugol Vector model, a snapshot of today, not a probability.
2 polls on file, none verified yet (pollster not verified or no public source), shown below, not averaged. Model inputs: 5 of 7, updated today. Page updated 2026-11-14. Sources · What is validated
ExperimentalNews attention 66/100, how much coverage the race gets, not who is winning. Updated 3 days ago. How it works
On the November ballot (2)
Certified by the state, checked 2026-11-13.
Not on the certified ballot (1)
Filed or ran for this seat, but not on the state’s certified list for November.
Official source: https://dl.ncsbe.gov/Elections/2026/Candidate%20Filing/Candidate_Listing_2026.csv
Early vote in North Carolina
2,837,524 ballots cast statewide as of 2026-11-14 · registered Democrats 38.4%, Republicans 26.1%, unaffiliated 35.2%. Turnout by registration, not votes; never part of the rating. Full tracker →
Latest verified field polling
Verified = published by the pollster that conducted it, with a public source we link to.
No verified poll has been published for this race. The Vugol Vector call from our model is below, it is not a poll.
Polling average
2 polls on file for this race, none verified yet (pollster not verified or no public source), visible below, not averaged.
Campaign money (FEC)
Candidate committee totals for the cycle from the Federal Election Commission (public domain), as of each committee's latest report.
| Candidate | Raised | Spent | Cash on hand | Through |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Richard L. Hudson Jr. | $4,173,708 | $3,879,466 | $925,976 | 2026-10-14 |
| Nigel William Bristow | $5,737 | $1,195 | $38,482 | 2026-03-31 |
| Richard N. Ojeda | $2,930,069 | $2,941,848 | $45,572 | 2026-10-14 |
Ad spending (FEC)
What each campaign reported paying for ads, and what outside groups (super PACs, PACs and parties) reported spending for and against each candidate. Federal Election Commission filings, public domain.
| Candidate | Campaign's own ads | Outside groups for | Outside groups against |
|---|---|---|---|
| Richard L. Hudson Jr. | $70 | $6,296 | $366K |
| Richard N. Ojeda | $357K | $1,335 |
Biggest outside spenders
- Richard L. Hudson Jr.. For: NRA VICTORY FUND, INC. $4,860, GOA VICTORY FUND $1,436. Against: AB PAC $366K
- Richard N. Ojeda. For: Turn Left PAC $1,335
Outside groups: 24- and 48-hour independent expenditure reports for the 2026 primary and general, through 2026-10-26, each expenditure counted once after amendments; "ads" is TV, radio, digital and other media, and the rest is mail, phones, canvassing and similar. Campaign's own ads: TV, radio, digital, other media and ad production in the campaign committee's itemized payments, as the campaign described them, from the reports the FEC has processed (latest through 2026-06-30); newer reports appear as the FEC processes them. These are amounts committees reported paying, not airtime tracked by ad-monitoring firms, so very recent buys and future reservations may not show yet. Parser fec-ad-spend-1.0.0.
Results
Vote counts from the state’s own results feed, read every minute while votes are counted. Counts change until the state certifies.
general election · state results feed, unofficial
| Richard N. Ojeda II won | 139,486 | 51.1% |
| Richard Ojeda won | 139,456 | 51.5% |
| Richard Hudson | 133,196 | 48.9% |
| Richard Hudson (incumbent) | 133,196 | 48.8% |
Richard N. Ojeda II leads by 6,290 votes. 100% of reporting units counted.
Democratic primary
| Richard Ojeda won | 18,469 | 41.8% |
| Nigel Bristow | 11,824 | 26.7% |
| Lent Carr | 6,968 | 15.8% |
| Loren Bibler | 6,960 | 15.7% |
Source: the state's official results feed, retrieved 2026-11-11 · parser state-feed-1.0.0+all-reporting/unassailable-1.0.0
Key dates
Official federal election dates for this state from the FEC. Registration deadlines and early voting: see the state election office.
- 2026-03-03, Primary election: U.S. House
- 2026-05-12, Runoff: U.S. House
- 2026-11-03, General election: U.S. House
Source: FEC election dates (public domain).
In the news
- Pete Hegseth impeachment effort dies in the House as absent Democrats couldn't beat the traffic
- Republicans dazed by midterm election defeats grapple with what went wrong
- Republicans tap Moreno and Jack to lead Senate and House campaign arms
- How North Carolina emerged as one of Democrats’ biggest midterm bright spots: From the Politics Desk
- Trump's redistricting gamble faces reckoning as GOP holdouts claim vindication
- How the ‘blue tsunami’ crested in North Carolina
- House GOP elects Jim Jordan as next leader in major shakeup
- How to make friends at freshman orientation
- All the Republican House members ousted from Congress
- Dreams, desks and selfies: Newly elected members of Congress learn their way around
Headlines from outlets across the political spectrum, linked to the publisher. Vugol.me doesn’t write or endorse them. How we choose them · All election news
LabVugol Vector & Vugol Attention
Vugol Attention 66 Vugol Vector R · Tilting
Vugol Me model signals, not polls. Verified polling is in the Polls section above.
Vugol Me Attention (attention intensity)
Vugol Attention intensity index 0–100 · not a poll · normalized nightly
Vugol Vector
Proprietary ensemble model · a call, not a probability · model confidence: medium
The breakdown of this call (the model's multi-signal input matrix, input by input) is on Ultra Pro plans.
Vugol Tensor
How far this call can miss · a range, not a prediction · no verified poll here, so the range is wider and untested
Centre R+6.0. Four times in five the result lands between D+3.4 and R+15.4; nine in ten between D+6.1 and R+18.1. Chance the Democrat finishes ahead: 21%.
Polls have missed by about four points in a typical race and they miss together. How Tensor works →
Desk data: daily telemetry
Per-source daily series, CSV export and the Vugol Vector breakdown · paid plans
Sources
- Roster, official filings; fundraising from FEC datapoints where on file (https://api.open.fec.gov/).
- Vugol Attention inputs, Wikipedia pageviews (https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/) and GDELT news volume and tone (https://www.gdeltproject.org/).
- Polls and results, individual polls and primary results listed on the Wikipedia election article (CC BY-SA 4.0), each poll linked to the pollster's release; money and election dates from the FEC (public domain). How rows are checked.
- Models attention-1.0.0 · vector-1.1.0 · attention inputs SHA-256 8e2ef6491b50 · methodology · license CC BY 4.0 (data license).
Vugol Vector band: R · Tilting. Have a say in the Vugol race poll; it is open to signed-in voters and never feeds these numbers.
The four Vugol signals, side by side
They answer different questions and are kept apart. Full method: Methodology.
- Vugol Vector
- Our call for every race if today’s polls hold. A snapshot, not a win probability or a vote share.
- Vugol Tensor
- How sure we are: ranges and chamber-control odds around the Vector, built from past polling error. An experiment about uncertainty, not a better guess.
- Vugol Attention
- How much news and online noise a race gets, 0 to 100. It measures noise, not support: a high score says nothing about who is ahead.
- Vugol Pulse
- Our daily thumbs-up or thumbs-down question for readers. Anyone can answer, so it describes our readers, not the public. It is not a vote and never enters a poll average or any other signal.