In 2026, November 3 is Election Day for the US midterms — and every year it is National Sandwich Day and Panama's Separation Day.
Next: Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
Federal Election Day falls on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, which in 2026 is November 3. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and about a third of the Senate are on the ballot, along with many governorships and state and local races. Election Day lands on November 3 only in some years — most recently in 2020, for the presidential election, and next in 2037.
National Sandwich Day is an unofficial U.S. food holiday usually linked to John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, whose birth in 1718 is dated November 3 in some sources and November 13 in others. A popular story says the Earl asked for meat between slices of bread so he could keep playing cards without stopping; one of his biographers suggested he was more likely eating at his desk. Either way, the snack took his title.
On November 3, 1903, Panama declared its separation from Colombia, after the Colombian Senate rejected the Hay–Herrán Treaty that would have let the United States build a canal across the isthmus. U.S. warships kept Colombian troops from intervening, and within weeks the new republic signed a canal treaty with the United States. Panama celebrates November 3 as Separation Day, one of several national holidays in November that also include independence from Spain on November 28.
The Caribbean island of Dominica became independent from the United Kingdom as the Commonwealth of Dominica, a republic within the Commonwealth. Christopher Columbus had sighted the island on a Sunday — November 3, 1493 — and named it for the day of the week, so its Independence Day shares a date with that first European sighting.
For the first time, residents of Washington, D.C. voted in a presidential election, thanks to the Twenty-third Amendment, ratified in 1961, which gave the District electoral votes. Its three electoral votes went to Lyndon B. Johnson, who won a landslide over Barry Goldwater that day.
The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 carrying Laika, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow, who became the first animal to orbit Earth. The spacecraft was not designed to return, and Laika died within hours of launch from overheating — a fact not officially acknowledged until 2002. The mission showed that a living creature could survive launch and weightlessness, an important step toward human spaceflight.
Ulysses S. Grant, the general who led Union forces to victory in the Civil War, was elected the 18th president as a Republican, defeating Democrat Horatio Seymour. Grant served two terms during Reconstruction, supporting the Fifteenth Amendment and federal action against the Ku Klux Klan, though his administration was also marked by scandals.
The English Parliament passed the first Act of Supremacy, recognizing King Henry VIII as "the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England." The act formalized England's break with the papacy, which followed the Pope's refusal to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It was repealed under the Catholic Mary I, and a new Act of Supremacy was passed under Elizabeth I in 1559.