Nice article by Nate Silver published this afternoon. Election Update: Democrats Are In Their Best Position Yet To Retake The House. My summary: for the Democrats, things are looking very good, but there are still significant risks. They really need to be motivating their voters. For Republicans, it’s rather dismal. The best they can really hope for is to turn the upcoming Blue tsunami into a only a ripple. Republicans really have to hope there is a systemic error in the polling.
I love the table with “Projected Seat Gain” vs “Popular Vote Margin”.
I didn’t see this poll when it was fresh but here are my bets.
House = 228 D vs 207 R
Senate = 51 D vs 49 R This is the misguided optimism that made me buy two bottles of champagne on election day in 2016.
Popular Vote = 54% D vs 46% R Assuming we are disregarding third-party votes.
Well, first of all, I am 100% confident that the Democrats will not win more than 18 of those 18 seats.
I edited the above to add 538’s current estimated chance of a Democratic win. Looks pretty good; just a decent night for the Dems should get 15 or 16 seats, and 18 certainly isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
But I’m not sure where you got that particular list; it includes several districts that the Dems are almost guaranteed to pick up, and there are lots of swingy districts that aren’t on the list; just grabbing a few at random, WA-8, TX-23, TX-7, MI-8, MI-7, NC-13 and IL-12 are all districts that are approximately tossups right now.
538’s model shows 49 districts in which both parties have at least a 25% chance of winning, against 216 safe Dem seats and only 180 safe Rep seats. So that sounds great; we only have to win 7 out of 49 tough races. However, 20 of those are rated as having a 60-75% chance of a Rep win, while “only” 10 have a comparable chance of a Dem win, and 19 are true tossups. Bottom line: Dems are a 5-1 favorite to take the House.
House 241 D 194 R
Senate 51 D 49 R (really a bit of a stretch; if there was a gun to my head I’d probably have to go with 50-50, but ya gotta believe)
Popular vote 55% D 45% R
Yeah, I had a spat with a guy in my resist group who stated ‘What do polls know? That Nate Silver guy was off in 2016.’ This guy is an engineer and he can’t understand basic probability.
It goes both ways, though. A 1/3 (32.4%) chance of the democrats taking the Senate isn’t half bad. Imagine each time you’ve ever rolled a die. Each time it’s come up 1 or 2? That’s a Senate for you. It’s not the safe bet, but it’s not a terrible one.
I was thinking of revising my guess, but decided not to. This morning’s Votemaster has a Quinnipiac pole showing Cruz up by 9 points. They are not a Republican organization and are generally respected. For the house, I think it may be a couple more than 220, but not worth revising for that.
I don’t see why one poll that shows Cruz up by 9 would make you change your mind about anything. +9 is still worse than he should be doing and I can’t imagine you assumed a Cruz loss in your original guess.
This might be the most savage campaign ad I’ve seen, where six of Paul Gosar’s (Arizona Republican) siblings endorse his opponent and decry their brother’s lack of values.
(That said Nate Silver gives Gosar’s opponent something of a snowball chance in hell of winning.)
WOW! I’d never heard of Paul Gosar, but that’s very damning.
And the fact that (acc. Nate Silver) he’ll win anyway despite six (Republican!) siblings who know him best attacking him is … Flabbergasting for what it says about the values of Republican voters. :eek:
Ugh. Senate is not looking good. Heitkamp’s numbers are falling in a big way. If she loses, then the Dems would need to sweep MO/NV/FL/AZ and also pick off one more, presumably TX or TN, in order to flip the chamber. 51-49 GOP looks like the likeliest outcome right now. 50-50 is certainly plausible but not good enough. And if Dems do just a little worse than expected it could easily be 54-46.
No predictions, but I don’t think the Dems take the Senate, and I think their chances of having a blue wave got smaller. I think progressive voters will be energized to vote against Trump’s GOP, but I also think that a lot of quiet, independent voters are beginning to see Trump as a sonofabitch, but ‘their sonofabitch’. I think Dems retake the House but just barely and I think they’ll be disappointed at the results. The Dems won’t have that much power, and what power they might have could play into Trump’s hands.
Interesting analysis, and I apologize if this is obvious to other people. Basically, 538 pointing out that at a certain point of Democratic party voting, GOP gerrymandering actually would break hard toward Democrats. The premise of gerrymandering being not wasting votes, so putting enough GOP votes to be considered “safe” within the districts that you intend to win, but no more than that. But, if what was considered safe when the districts was drawn shifts, then all of a sudden the dam breaks and those safe districts go Democrat.
The inflection point where the vote goes from linear to non-linear is about D+8.
