Well his overarching point is that at this point all the models are essentially saying it is too close to call with the information currenty available. Of note in his reply to the offer of a bet was a counter offer bet based on Nate’s model.
Health care costs are rising now. One way to make health care costs lower is to allow consumers to buy less comprehensive plans.
Nate’s model assumes that the races aren’t independent of one another. A 2-point swing nationally can put more seats in the GOP column. I’d say 25% is very reasonable for the GOP to get 8-9 seats.
I can believe a 51-seat or even 52-seat Republican majority. I’d be extremely surprised by anything beyond that.
I actually think 51 or 52 is unlikely. If this election is national, then the GOP will either disappoint across the board, by winning only 3-4 seats, or sweep, and win 8-10. Just depends on what the national mood is like in November.
I’ll simply respond “Cite?” and cover it that way, howzat?
Actually, according to the latest from 538 now has 52 GOP as the most likely scenario with 50 and 49 in 2nd and 3rd. Overall, the GOP’s chances have dropped to 55% from the open of 65%.
Still time for some rape comments from the GOP to help things along…
Two new polls show Hagan with a solid lead, although a new poll also shows Brown now tied with Shaheen.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/senate/
I’d rather have Scott Brown than Tillis if I get to choose, which I don’t.
Nate Silver now calls the race for control of the Senate “pretty darn close”.
I’m hoping that the generic poll lead the GOP opened up starts filtering down to these close races soon.
It works the other way. When you’re presenting actual people to voters, they don’t get to impose their own idealized, typically positive views of what parties stand for upon them. The NH race, FI, is Shaheen and Brown, not generic Dem and generic Rep.
Always willing to take a bold stand, that’s our Nate. 
That’s true. But there has been a big movement in the generic polls, so I’d like to see movement in the individual race polls.
Not saying it WILL happen, just that I want it to. But alas, I do not always get what I want.
That’s from Sep 10th. Today 538 is tracking at 54.7% for the Republicans. Upshot gives 51%. Sam Wang’s forecast is steady.
That is exactly the pattern you should see if polls don’t matter in early September. Sam Wang: [INDENT]Second, as the election approaches, other sites are decreasing the bias that they add by using fundamentals. This will inevitably make them approach the PEC snapshot, day by day. If everything converges on the PEC Election Day prediction, I would score that as an argument in favor of using polls only – or at least letting readers see the difference added by the use of fundamentals. [/INDENT] I’d say we’re at the point where breaking out the contribution of fundamentals would be interesting.
Over at MfM armchair central, we’ve increased the subjective probability of living in Samland. I currently place the odds of a Republican senatorial majority at 45.2% - the straight mean of all 3 forecasts. I don’t say 30% (Sam’s forecast) , because 5 days of data could be a mere blip. Still, I no longer de-weight his forecast because it’s an outlier.
Not incidentally, 45% is very close to 50-50. It would take a lot of flips to figure out that a coin was unfairly weighted to that extent.
Sorry, I misspoke. Or rather, miswrote. What I meant to write was, “That is exactly the pattern you should see if [del]polls[/del] fundamentals don’t matter in early September.”
Republicans will, of course, be using every dirty trick in the book to win the close races. As should the Democrats, but they do not have the desperate edge of being behind in the demographics, hence are not so willing to dump scruples.
Nate Silver’s forecast is now up to 47% that the Dems hold the Senate. 52 R seats is still the most likely outcome, but 49 and 50 follow closely behind.
Employers and insurers were the ones making the changes.
Of course, if the GOP were going to fix the ACA by making it a single payer system or even by simply adding a public option, I’d favor them winning.
Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. We’re trying to move towards more choice, not less. And I’ll anticipate your response that the public option would add choice. It would, but it’s also a poison pill. Will the public option compete in the market, or will it have government covering its losses should they occur? If it was to fail completely, would that convince Democrats it’s a bad idea or would they just resurrect it, this time with anticompetitive advantages? The issue was trust.
Yeah, funny how the special sauce sites start moving towards what Wang has been saying. Exactly MtM … at least by end of August Wang was saying pretty much what he is saying now. Meanwhile the added fundamentals special sauce sites have moved toward that. So now Silver is calling it a coin flip and Wang saying a coin flip that marginally favors a Dem plus Independent majority. If we believe that 538 and others in the herd are more likely more accurate as the election gets closer, today than 3 weeks ago, then adding fundamentals subtracted from predictive value.