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In this late-night installment of , Nate Silver and Galen Druke put their “Model Talk�� hats on and discuss the from the 2022 midterms. As of this writing, we still don’t know which party will control the House or Senate, and we may not know come the morning. But that doesn’t stop us from talking about what we do know: that Republicans didn’t make major gains in the Senate, and that the polls were pretty good this cycle.

FiveThirtyEight   More: | |

In this late-night installment of , Nate Silver and Galen Druke put their “Model Talk�� hats on and discuss the from the 2022 midterms. As of this writing, we still don’t know which party will control the House or Senate, and we may not know come the morning. But that doesn’t stop us from talking about what we do know: that Republicans didn’t make major gains in the Senate, and that the polls were pretty good this cycle.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play�� button in the audio player above or by , the or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling��? Get in touch by email, or in the comments.

Final Election Update: The Forecast Is More Or Less Back Where It Started Republicans are favored in the House. The Senate is more competitive.

By

Nov. 8, 2022, at 2:20 AM

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER / GETTY IMAGES

When we , Republicans had a 53 percent chance of taking over the Senate from Democrats, and an 87 percent chance of taking over the House.

We could almost have turned our servers off and let that forecast stand. Today, in our final forecast of the cycle, Republicans have a 59 percent chance of winning the Senate and an 84 percent chance of winning the House.

Before I dig deeper into this ostensible stability, a few words about the probabilistic nature of our forecast. 

First, let’s talk a bit more about that final GOP Senate number, 59 percent. It’s in an annoying zone as far as I’m concerned. If I met you on the street, I wouldn’t know how to describe the race. It’s on the brink between a toss-up and one that we say leans toward Republicans. And to make matters more confusing, that 59 percent figure comes from our Deluxe forecast, which includes the input of . The Lite forecast (essentially a “polls only�� version) and the Classic forecast (polls plus other objective indicators) have Republicans as just 50 and 51 percent “favorites,�� respectively.

I don’t want to blow off that 59 percent number. Deluxe is supposed to be the most accurate version of our model. To be blunt, 59 percent is enough of an edge that if you offered to let me bet on Republicans at even money, I’d take it. (If I bet on politics, that is. Which I don’t.) Still, Democrats holding the Senate, or the race coming down to a runoff in Georgia, would not be surprising in the least.  

In the House, meanwhile, you shouldn’t round the Republicans�� 84 percent chance up to 100 or the Democrats�� 16 percent chance down to zero. Two years ago, Republicans had just a 3 percent chance of winning the House in our and yet came within five seats of doing so. The balance of the evidence suggests a national political environment that . And the polling itself, if anything, has been a little tighter than that. (Democrats have a 25 percent chance to keep the House in the polls-only Lite version of our forecast. After the redistricting process, Republicans have from gerrymandering and district boundaries than they did previously, so a roughly tied national environment would lead to a highly competitive race for the House �� see for much more detail on this.)

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At the same time, the upside case for Republicans has perhaps been understated. Our model puts the 80th percentile range of outcomes in the House at between a one-seat and a 33-seat GOP gain; and remember, 20 percent of the time, the number will fall outside that range. Just as it isn’t that hard for the race in the House to become rather competitive, it also .

Similarly, just because we’ll start the night with roughly 50-50 odds in the Senate does not necessarily mean we’ll finish the night with the balance of power determined by just one or two seats. Fairly often, all the competitive races break the same way in races for Congress. There’s almost a 25 percent chance that Republicans wind up with 53 or more seats, according to our Deluxe forecast (and a 7 percent chance that Democrats do so).

As I mentioned earlier, the topline probabilities in our House and Senate forecasts are very similar to what they were in June. But surely some individual races changed a lot, especially in the Senate? Nope, not that either. Take a look at Republican chances of winning in the 12 most competitive Senate races.

Senate races look the pretty much the same as in June

GOP chances of winning competitive Senate races on June 30 and in the final FiveThirtyEight Deluxe forecast

State June 30 Nov. 8 Utah 98% 96% Florida 94 95 Ohio 90 87 North Carolina 77 82 Wisconsin 72 81 Georgia 55 63 Nevada 50 51 Pennsylvania 49 57 Arizona 43 34 New Hampshire 31 28 Colorado 15 9 Washington 7 8

In every state, the numbers are nearly identical. Of course, that doesn’t mean the race was steady the whole time. Democrats had much clearer polling leads in and during the late summer. They were even ahead in the polls in , and tied in and �� all states where they now trail.

One plausible explanation is that Democrats initially benefited from a focus of attention on the Supreme Court’s decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, but then fell back to earth as the news cycle began to emphasize other topics such as immigration, inflation and crime. There is probably some truth to that, but I’d be careful about assuming the story is that simple. For one thing, the president’s party . This time, though, Democrats are actually doing on the day of the election �� trailing by 1.2 percentage points �� than they were on June 23, the day before the Dobbs decision, when they trailed by 2.3 percentage points. That’s unusual historically and does suggest some lasting impact from Dobbs.

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Also, while Democrats might have abortion working for them, they have a lot working against them, including inflation (polling shifts have been ) an , at the Mexican border and . If the polls are exactly right �� they won’t be, but let’s play along �� and Republicans win only 15 House seats or so while the Senate comes down to another runoff in Georgia �� that would be a pretty good night for Democrats relative to historic norms.

Of course, that is one reason to expect the polls and could be biased against Republicans again. And yet, the Democrats�� summer boomlet was real, realized not just in the polls but also in a . If you don’t trust the polls, should you default to the fundamentals or to actual election results, like the upset wins Democrats had in races from Alaska to New York? You can .

The fact is that American voters are under a lot of conflicting pressures. They care about the Supreme Court, the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Republican extremism, but they also care about inflation, crime and immigration, issues that have historically had a large influence on elections. Meanwhile, partisanship is high and tends to swamp all other factors; incumbency and candidate quality matter less than they used to. In any event, those various forces of political gravity have put us roughly back in the same place as we were in June.

One final word: While we’ve tried to prepare you for the �� polls roughly correct, polls biased against Republicans, polls biased against Democrats �� those aren’t the only uncertainties in play. Although polling and forecast errors are correlated from race to race in midterms, they aren’t correlated .

In one of the practice runs I did for the ABC News TV set �� please tune in tonight! �� the producers tried to throw us for a loop by having Don Bolduc, the Republican candidate for Senate in New Hampshire, win his race but Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent in Georgia, wins his race without a runoff. Sounds impossible, right? Well, it’s not that crazy: such an outcome occurs about 5 percent of the time in our simulations. And while there’s been a lot of focus on Georgia, Pennsylvania and Nevada, some state other than those three is the in our simulations 56 percent of the time.

If the election is close, it could take a long time to obtain certainty about who controls Congress, whether because of the Georgia runoff, the , legal challenges, or . A lot of coverage has focused on these concerns as they relate to 2024, but frankly I’m worried about what a razor-thin result would mean this year, too. �±�’v�� appreciated your following our election coverage this year, and we’ll do the best we can to cover a potentially long and messy aftermath.

Hours before we freeze the tonight, it shows that Republicans are in a dead heat for the Senate and are favored to win the House. In this installment of “Model Talk�� for the , Nate Silver and Galen Druke reflect on the many twists and turns of the 2022 campaign so far, including the most salient policy issues and what the final results could tell us about pollsters�� performance this cycle. Lastly, they answer listener questions and talk about which states they’ll be watching closely on election night.

FiveThirtyEight   More: | |

Hours before we freeze the tonight, it shows that Republicans are in a dead heat for the Senate and are favored to win the House. In this installment of “Model Talk�� for the , Nate Silver and Galen Druke reflect on the many twists and turns of the 2022 campaign so far, including the most salient policy issues and what the final results could tell us about pollsters�� performance this cycle. Lastly, they answer listener questions and talk about which states they’ll be watching closely on election night.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play�� button in the audio player above or by , the or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling��? Get in touch by email, or in the comments.

The 3 Big Questions I Still Have About Election Day

By

Nov. 7, 2022, at 10:37 AM

ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

With less than 24 hours to go until we , we’re probably not going to see a lot more changes in the topline forecast. Republicans have a of winning the Senate and an in the House, according to our Deluxe forecast. Those numbers have been relatively steady for the past few days.

So let’s instead ask three big forecasting questions about the race. These aren’t questions like “how much will abortion matter,�� which I hope we’re doing a good job of addressing . Instead, they’re questions that will inform our understanding of future elections from an analytical, polling and forecasting standpoint.

Question 1: Will the polls be systematically wrong?

�±�’v�� that you might think I have nothing more to say about it �� but you’d be wrong!

That’s partly because it , at least when it comes to which party keeps control of the Senate. If Republicans beat their polling averages by, say, 3 percentage points across the board, it would be very unlikely for Democrats to salvage the Senate even if there’s some state-to-state variation. (Perhaps they could hold on in Arizona and New Hampshire, but they’d be considerable underdogs in Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania, where they need to win two out of the three.)

Likewise, if Democrats beat their polls by 3 points across the board, the picture is very rosy for them. In that event, they’d be favorites in Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Arizona and New Hampshire would probably be out of reach for Republicans. But conversely, Ohio, North Carolina and Wisconsin would be in reach for Democrats. The House would also be highly competitive in this circumstance.

Which type of polling error is more likely? If you’ve been following these election updates, you’ve probably noticed me between a , where I take the �󾱱���ճ󾱰��ٲⷡ�������’s model’s output as gospel, and a concern that the model may still be underestimating the chance of a pro-Democratic bias in the polls as we saw in 2016 and 2020.

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For what it’s worth, I’ve mostly landed on “trust the process.�� My personal view of the race is pretty well aligned with the FiveThirtyEight Deluxe model. The polls could very well be biased against Republicans again. The best reason to think so is probably that as polling gets more difficult, you should put more faith in the fundamentals. Usually, the president’s party has a rough midterm, especially when the president has a and inflation is at .

But it’s not hard to imagine how the polls could be biased against Democrats instead. After 2016 and 2020, pollsters , and that could consciously or unconsciously affect decisions they make at the margin, or even . Moreover, the , with fewer “gold standard�� polls and more quick-and-dirty ones that tend to show more favorable results for Republicans.

I’m not sympathetic to Democratic complaints Not all polls with a Republican-leaning house effect actually have any formal affiliation with the GOP. Also, to the extent that polls do have a house effect �� that is, �� our model adjusts for it.

Besides, being the University of Chicago economics major that I am, I mostly trust the market to sort everything out. Firms with a Republican house effect will lose business and credibility in future election cycles if Democrats have a good night. Conversely, some traditional pollsters like Monmouth University in the races that they’re polling. If GOP-leaning firms like Trafalgar or InsiderAdvantage are willing to put their credibility on the line and Monmouth isn’t, that tells you something.

Still, we’re a long way removed from the Golden Age of Polling circa 2006-2012 when “gold standard�� pollsters (live-caller telephone polls with transparent methodologies) could be counted upon to set a reliable benchmark. Nobody in the polling or election forecasting community has any right to be all that confident about what will happen on Tuesday. That might make you want to give up and trust the vibes or insider sentiment about the race, which is . But the track record of vibes is that they’re somewhere between useless and worse-than-useless, like in 2016 when .

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It’s also worth mentioning that the FiveThirtyEight Deluxe model is of our forecast, which essentially means that it does predict a little bit of pro-Democratic bias in the polls, especially in some of the redder states such as Ohio. So by endorsing Deluxe’s view, I’m putting a pinky finger on the scale for the view that polls will again have a Democratic bias, while also being open to a mere severe bias in either direction.

I do think this is a big year for the pollsters. In 2016, the polling error , and pollsters had a semi-decent array of excuses from shifts in voter coalitions that made it important to weight polls by educational attainment to a crazy . In 2020, . This year, there aren’t as many contingencies. Most Americans have given up on COVID-19 precautions, there have been no late-breaking news events with obvious electoral implications, and Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot. 

Question 2: How big will the turnout gap be?

 I’m sorry to repeat the biggest cliche in election analysis, but if the polls are roughly in the right vicinity, control of the Senate will come down to turnout. If you care about the outcome and haven’t voted, you should do so.

On that front, Democrats got good news on Sunday with two major network polls showing a relatively small turnout gap. (I’ll use the terms “turnout gap�� and “enthusiasm gap�� interchangeably here; in both cases, I refer to the difference in margin between the likely voter and registered voter version of a poll.) The , from our colleagues at ABC News and The Washington Post, showed Republicans 1 point ahead on the generic ballot among registered voters but 2 points ahead among likely voters, making for only a 1-point enthusiasm gap in the GOP’s favor. Meanwhile, an NBC News had the generic ballot tied among registered voters but Democrats 1 point ahead among likely voters, meaning that there was actually a tiny enthusiasm gap in Democrats�� favor.

In both cases, that reflects improvements in Democratic enthusiasm from earlier this cycle. The previous ABC News/Washington Post had shown a 4-point turnout gap favoring Republicans, and the prior NBC News had Republicans gaining 2 points from their likely voter screen instead of it helping Democrats.

Most other polls show a modest enthusiasm gap in favor of Republicans. Republicans gain 3 points from the likely voter screen in , for instance, 2 points from , and 1 point from . But these numbers can be noisy. In Marquette Law School’s early October of Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race, the race was tied among registered voters but Republican Sen. Ron Johnson led by 6 points among likely voters. In Marquette’s more recent , however, Johnson led by 3 among registered voters but actually lost a point and led by 2 among likely voters.

If there could be anything from a 6-point turnout gap favoring Republicans (as in Marquette’s October poll) to a 1-point turnout gap favoring Democrats (as in its latest one), that creates a wide range of plausible outcomes. And neither of those scenarios are necessarily crazy. There was roughly a favoring the GOP in the 2010 midterm, for example. 

A turnout gap of any magnitude favoring Democrats would be unusual �� typically voters from the opposition party have more enthusiasm at the midterms than the president’s party, and typically Republican voters are more likely to turn out than Democratic ones. But political coalitions are shifting, with Democrats increasingly relying on college graduates, who are . Moreover, there are some tangible signs of high Democratic enthusiasm. Their House and Senate candidates have than Republican ones, and Democrats in a series of ballot initiatives and special elections over the summer, often on the basis of superior turnout.

A Wonky Aside About The Generic Ballot, the House Popular Vote, and the “National Environment��

Before we get to the third question, a note on terminology. You’ll often hear us use the terms “generic ballot,�� “House popular vote�� and “national environment,�� but they mean somewhat different things.

The FiveThirtyEight combines what are really two types of polls. One set of polls asks voters which party they’d rather see in control of Congress. Another type asks them whether they plan to vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in their U.S. House race. Since these questions tend to produce similar results, we combine them to increase the sample size and consider both to be generic ballot polls.

After the election, you can evaluate these polls based on how well they predicted the House popular vote. That’s the number you get when you add up votes for Democratic and Republican U.S. House candidates in all 435 Congressional districts. In 2020, for instance, Democrats won this measure by �� similar to, but less than, Joe Biden’s 4.5-point win in the presidential popular vote.

One potential source of divergence between these measures is that in some districts there’s no Democrat or Republican on the ballot, either because the party didn’t bother to nominate a candidate or because it’s a state like California and the advanced to the general election regardless of party.

This year, there are considerably more districts with no Democratic nominee than with no Republican. Specifically, there are 23 House districts with no Democrat on the ballot but 12 with no Republican. Moreover, the districts with no Democratic nominee tend to be more competitive than those with no Republican one, meaning that Democrats are sacrificing more votes.

It’s slightly tricky to calculate exactly how big this effect is, but it will likely shift the final House popular vote margin by at least 1 percentage point toward Republicans, and probably more like 1.5 percentage points. In other words, if the final generic ballot margin was Republicans by 3 percentage points, we’d expect them to win the House popular vote by more like 4.5 percentage points because of all the districts with missing Democratic candidates.

Finally, you’ll sometimes hear an analyst like me describe the ��national environment,�� usually in a context like the following: “Democrats will need a D+1 or D+2 national environment to keep the House.�� This term is more ambiguous, although I think of it as referring to what you’d expect to happen in a perfectly neutral setting: a district with no incumbent, two “average�� candidates, and .

Let’s sort through how all of these numbers work this year:

Our generic ballot tracker has Republicans ahead by 1.1 percentage point.However, our model uses a slightly different version of the generic ballot that includes a . This helps Republicans, and they’re ahead by 1.7 percentage points in this version.Here’s where it gets more complicated. Our model also makes a forecast of the House popular vote. The estimate is determined by literally forecasting the popular vote in each district one race at a time. It is not just based on the generic ballot: it also accounts for factors such as district-by-district polling and incumbency. We also forecast how many people will vote in each district, accounting for past turnout and even factors such as population growth. Currently, this forecast has Republicans winning the House popular vote by 4.0 percentage points. However, as mentioned earlier, when you tally up the race-by-race forecasts, Democrats get a lot of zeros in their column because of all the districts with no Democrat running. If you back out this effect �� if both parties had a candidate on the ballot in every district �� Republicans would be predicted to win the House popular vote by more like 2.5 percentage points instead. This is roughly what I think of as �󾱱���ճ󾱰��ٲⷡ�������’s forecast of the national environment. It’s about how you’d expect a Congressional race to go in an average district with no incumbent or partisan lean.

So in case you’re wondering why Democrats have only a 17 percent chance of winning the House despite our generic ballot average being within a percentage point: our more detailed forecast suggests that Republicans have more like a 2- or 3-point advantage. On top of that, they have a slight advantage because of how voters are distributed between districts, although this is . Thus, Democrats would have to beat our forecast of the national environment by 3 or perhaps 3.5 percentage points to be favored to win the House. That’s hardly impossible �� we’re talking about a �� but it’s a little tougher than our generic ballot average implies.

Question 3: How much does candidate quality matter?

Here’s an important fact about this election that’s become somewhat obscured. If it weren’t for the candidates �� some relatively strong Democrats and some relatively weak Republicans �� Democrats would be completely screwed in the Senate, barring a major polling error.

As I said, FiveThirtyEight estimates that the national environment favors Republicans by about 2.5 percentage points. Now take a look at the states where pivotal Senate races are being held: Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Ohio are all . (Consider that Biden underperformed his 4.5- point national popular vote victory in each of these states, even though he won several of them.) New Hampshire is Democratic-leaning according to our index, but just barely, enough that you’d expect it to also go Republican in a year where the national environment is GOP +2.5.

So if all races went according to the national environment plus the state’s partisan lean, Democrats would lose the seats they currently hold in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and New Hampshire while failing to make any gains from Republicans, resulting in a 54-46 GOP Senate. That sort of outcome is not out of the realm of possibility by any means at all, but it’s relatively unlikely. The GOP may well pay a price for its , unpopular and in some cases candidates. Just how much of one could determine which party winds up with Senate control.

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The Case For A Democratic Surprise On Election Night

By

Nov. 4, 2022, at 10:46 AM

ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Earlier this week, , a “friend�� of mine (actually, a fragment of my alter ego) who attempted to convince me that Republicans will do . Today, you’ll meet Nathaniel Bleu, another figment of my imagination who I spoke with at a wine bar in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where he lives with his husband and two French bulldogs. Bleu, an ad sales executive with a major New York publishing company, expressed confidence that Democrats will win, although as you’ll see his confidence was easily shaken. An abbreviated transcript of our conversation follows.

Bleu: Happy election season, Nate. I’ve never seen everyone so terrified.

Silver: Well, if I can put on my concerned citizen hat for a moment ��

Bleu: That looks more like a Detroit Tigers hat.

Silver: Very funny. If I can put on my concerned citizen hat for a moment, there’s good reason to be worried. All those . The . I’m not sure where this leads, but it doesn’t seem like it’s a good place.

Bleu: That’s not what I’m talking about. I’ve never seen everyone so terrified to admit that Democrats are going to win.

Silver: Ummmmm ��

Bleu: Even you, Nate. You know I have the utmost respect for you and FiveThirtyEight. Why, I’d have a whole menagerie of Fivey Fox plush dolls if I could. But your forecast has Democrats winning and you’re terrified to admit it.

Silver: It very much does not have Democrats winning. Are you reading those ?

Bleu: The Deluxe forecast . But I don’t trust all the subjectivity it introduces ��

Silver: For the record, I’m going to object to that characterization of the Deluxe forecast ��

Bleu: The Lite forecast has Democrats winning. That’s the one I trust.

Silver: Lite has them barely ahead in the Senate. And Republicans are closing so quickly, that lead might disappear by the time we get to Tuesday. And that’s to say nothing of the House, where Republicans are heavy favorites. Besides, Deluxe is the better, more accurate product.

Bleu: I could almost see the grin on your face when Republicans went ahead in Deluxe the other day. It’s just so much safer for you that way.

Silver: You think of me as risk-averse? You’re the one who still refuses to eat dinner indoors.

Bleu: Not true. Only during that Omicron surge last winter. Was that the last time we saw each other? Besides, it’s a lovely evening.

Silver: I can barely feel my toes.

Bleu: To be fair, it’s not just you. It’s everybody. You and me and everyone in the media. Everybody is terrified of predicting that anything good happens for Democrats, having a replay of 2016 and looking foolish again.

Silver: You don’t work in “the media.�� You work in ad sales for a media company. Just because you see David Remnick in the Condé Nast cafeteria doesn’t make you Maggie Haberman.

Bleu: Somebody needs another glass of wine. The truth is, nobody knows how this election is going to turn out. It’s just people groping around trying to sound smart. It’s the supply of takes meeting the demand for takes. And right now, the take everyone wants is “Republicans are going to win.��

Silver: I don’t really buy that at all. Turn on MSNBC, and you’ll see . People like takes that flatter their sensibilities. But I’m not interested in the psychology of your brunchmates. I’m interested in why you think our forecast might be wrong, and you haven’t said a word about that yet. Besides, I expected you to be on Team Gloom. I thought you’d be apoplectic by this point.

Bleu: I was on Team Gloom. Why, I might as well have been the quarterback. And then I went to Kansas.

Silver: What the hell were you doing in Kansas? I know you and Corey were talking about buying a country home, but that’s a long ��

Bleu: Well, Corey grew up in Topeka. So we were out there for “No on 2�� �� you know, the . We were even doing a little canvassing. I knew that No was going to win, I knew in particular how strongly younger women felt about it. But even I didn’t expect it to win by, what was it, 18 percentage points?

Silver: It was impressive, no doubt. And if Tuesday was some sort of national referendum on Roe, I’m sure Democrats would do pretty well. But ��

Bleu: Let me stop you right there. Because it �ɲ�����’t just Kansas. There were a bunch of special elections, too. Are you familiar with the website FiveThirtyEight dot com? Here, I’m going to pull my phone out because I just to make sure I got this right. According to Mr. Nathaniel Rakich �� lovely first name, by the way �� things changed after Roe was overturned. “Since that decision �� Democrats have outperformed their expected margins in [four special House elections] by an average of 9 points.�� And that doesn’t even count ! You’re telling me Democrats are going to have a bad year when they’re winning elections in Kansas and Alaska?

Silver: I’m telling you that we’re not in Kansas anymore.

I’m telling you that Democrats�� position has deteriorated since then. You hold this election in August, and yeah, I think Democrats keep the Senate and maybe even the House. But the polls have been pretty clear in showing a Republican rebound.

Bleu: So now we come full circle. Have the polls shifted, or has there been more of a ? And is the vibe shift real, or is it just an artifact of media coverage? Because I don’t see what’s so different now compared with August.

Nate: Oh boy, this is starting to sound conspiratorial. And there’s a lot that’s changed since August. . About a zillion and “defund the police.�� And it’s not really even that Democrats are losing ground so much as that Republicans are �� people who were probably going to vote for them all along. It’s all been .

Bleu: I’m certainly not alleging any conspiracy, or connivance, or cabal. I’m saying that pollsters have incentives, and those incentives run toward giving Republicans the most optimistic numbers they can, because they’ll , but nobody will care if they overestimate Republicans by a point or two.

Silver: Well, a few things here, because this is quite the claim you’re making. Number one, you could have made exactly the same argument in 2020, and yet the polls had an ! Number two, I’m not sure the incentives are so obvious, and the clearest incentive is that you just want to be accurate. Number three, I think you’re underestimating the pollsters. Sure, some of them are cynical and partisan, but most of them see what they do as a public service ��

Bleu: Why how lovely! Let’s send a fruit basket to the Pew Research Center to thank them for their service! Do you think Trafalgar and Rasmussen care about public service? They’re with partisan polls!

Silver: Actually, they were .

Bleu: I don’t care. A broken clock is right twice a day. You have tons of Republican polls, and no Democratic ones. It’s going to skew the averages.

Silver: I’m not so sure that’s true, at least for FiveThirtyEight. Our model , so if a pollster consistently shows overly rosy results for Republicans �� or for Democrats, for that matter �� it takes that into account. And besides, to your point about incentives, it’s a free market. If there’s a firm with a turnout model that shows great results for Democrats, they can publish those numbers if they have confidence in them.

Bleu: I can tell this whole discussion is making you uneasy. You’ve looked uncomfortable all night. 

Silver: I’m just a little chilly. Indoors next time?

Look, it’s not a great situation. As America gets more partisan, and trust in institutions erodes, there are a lot of downstream, negative consequences for pollsters. To start with, most people . So people who do answer polls are weird in some sense, and they . You used to be able to default to more of a �� it was expensive, but you could do it. Now, there are a lot more choices to make. On top of that, trust in the . Does that make pollsters more likely to instead of publishing numbers that could cause them a lot of grief? Maybe, but I’m not going to make too many assumptions about that until Tuesday.

Bleu: So if we can’t trust the polls, maybe we should look at early voting data instead ��

Silver: Oh, no no no no no. Let me stop you right there. . There are , and the . About the only person I trust to any degree at all on early voting is Jon Ralston in Nevada, and .

Bleu: Have you agreed with a single thing I’ve had to say, Nate? I could once count on you to defy conventional wisdom. Now you sound just like everybody else. What do you really think?

Silver: My least favorite question! I don’t have some private set of beliefs that I keep to myself! I trust our forecast, which is based on a computer program I wrote four years ago and not my mood as I’m sitting here with a glass of pinot! Our forecast says that the Senate is a toss-up at best for Democrats, and the momentum has been with Republicans. But I’m not sure what we’re really arguing about. I agree that the special elections were good for Democrats. And I very much agree that Democrats could beat their polls. It’s an . But it’s not the likeliest scenario. Besides, the president’s party doing poorly in the midterms would be about the most , especially with inflation at 8 percent.

Bleu: You keep using that word “normal,�� but we’re not in normal times anymore. This country is going to hell.

Silver: So you’re on Team Gloom after all!

Bleu: Just tell me there’s a chance, a chance that Democrats keep the Senate.

Silver: There’s a .

Bleu: I’ll take it.

�󾱱���ճ󾱰��ٲⷡ�������’s continues to show Democrats and Republicans in a dead heat Senate race, with Republicans taking a very slight advantage. Recent polls have sent some contradictory messages, but the long and short of it is that seven races are now separated by a three points or less polling average. Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss what to make of it in this installment of “Model Talk�� for the . They also answer listener questions and ponder whether analysts actually believe the polls anymore.

FiveThirtyEight   More: | |

�󾱱���ճ󾱰��ٲⷡ�������’s continues to show Democrats and Republicans in a dead heat Senate race, with Republicans taking a very slight advantage. Recent polls have sent some contradictory messages, but the long and short of it is that seven races are now separated by three points or less polling average. Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss what to make of it in this installment of “Model Talk�� for the . They also answer listener questions and ponder whether analysts actually believe the polls anymore.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play�� button in the audio player above or by , the or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling��? Get in touch by email, or in the comments.

The Case For A Republican Sweep On Election Night

By

Nov. 2, 2022, at 9:55 AM

ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Republicans reached a milestone on Tuesday, in our Deluxe forecast for the first time since July 25. Still, the race for the Senate is about as close as it gets. So I thought it might be worth engaging in a dialog with my alter egos.

Today, you’ll meet Nathan Redd. He’ll try to convince me that the Republican outlook is even better than our model shows. Then later this week, we’ll introduce you to Nathaniel Bleu. While fairly partisan, Redd and Bleu are canny observers of politics who are reasonably numerate. Last night, I met with Redd at a bar near Grand Central Station before his commute back to Connecticut. An abridged transcript follows:

Redd: You’ve gotta be the luckiest guy I know, Silver.

Silver: Wait, what? What are you talking about? How are the kids, by the way? It’s been a while.

Redd: Luckiest guy I know. This is the easiest election call I’ve ever seen.

Silver: Well, we’re not really making “calls�� at FiveThirtyEight, exactly. You know how the model works. It’s probabilistic. And the model says the Senate is about as close to 50-50 as it gets.

Redd: You think it’s 50-50? OK, let’s bet then. Steak. Sushi. Rangers tickets. You name it.

Silver: You haven’t even told me which side you want to bet on! Though I think I can guess.

Redd: To me there are two scenarios: Republicans win big or Republicans win small.

Silver: Shocker.

Redd: I’m telling you, this one is easy. Just look around you. 

Silver: It looks like �� an Irish bar in Midtown.

Redd: It’s half-empty. And yet, the waitress hasn’t been to our table in 15 minutes. Welcome to Joe Biden’s America!

Silver: So, you’re voting Republican because you can’t get your drink refilled?

Redd: I mean, just look. It’s not back to normal. This place used to be packed from 5 p.m. ’til close. Now, they don’t even stay open past 10. Then there’s all the crime, the homelessness. There’s the inflation and the supply chain.

Silver: I’ll take you out to Brooklyn next time. It might as well be 2019 there. And when was the last time you closed out a bar? You moved to Connecticut when you were 23 and single.

Redd: You’re getting off-track. The equation is pretty simple. The Democrat Party promised normal. They’re in charge of everything. We haven’t even gotten close to normal. 

Silver: Are we really saying �� now?

Redd: You’re dodging, Silver. I know the numbers. People are . They’re . Democrats barely even have a majority to begin with and there’s a backlash every midterm election.

Watch:

Silver: I get that, but it’s not so straightforward. Voters may be unhappy, but they’re . They remember former President Donald Trump, who . They care about the Supreme Court, which exercises a lot of power even when Republicans are out of office. Have you talked to any of your female friends about abortion?

Redd: I don’t trust the polls anyway. C’mon. I read your stuff, believe it or not. I know your about how it’s hard to predict polling bias. I sort of get it. But let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s say it’s France, where they ban you from doing polling ��

Silver: You can do polls in France! Except for the .

Redd: Silver, this is a thought experiment! Let’s say you’ve got no polls. What does your model say?

Silver: Well, it’s not exactly set up to run like that. But if what you’re getting at is Republicans are pretty heavily favored on the basis of the fundamentals, then I agree. At the start of the year, I was �� Republicans would win both chambers of Congress.

Redd: That’s exactly what I’m getting at. I’m not even saying polls will always have a Democratic bias. I’m just saying in this election they will, because if you look at everything apart from the polls, it points toward a big Republican year. And the less you trust the polls, the more you need to look at everything else.

Silver: I’m not even sure that’s true. Democrats are . They did this summer.

Redd: Summer? Who cares about summer? The Trump guys I know, they don’t vote in the summer.

Silver: So now you’re back to making assertions based on imaginary friends of yours?

Redd: And by the way, I do talk to my female friends about abortion. Abortion is a problem for Republicans. That’s why I’m not sure if we’re going to win small or win big. But pretty much everything else lines up on our side.

Silver: I don’t see how you can be so confident about all of this.

Redd: I’m not confident! I just told you, I don’t know if we’re going to win small or big. But lately I’ve been thinking big. You want to know why?

Silver: I’m sure you’re going to tell me.

Redd: You know my favorite saying? Follow the outfielders, not the ball. When Aaron Judge hits a fly ball, look at what the left fielder is doing. Don’t listen to the crowd, they’re a bunch of idiots. Look at the professionals. The professionals are backing way up, like it’s going to be a big year for Republicans. Look where the campaigns are spending. For Democrats, it’s in blue districts. They have . I’m going to ask you about my boy and future New York governor Lee Zeldin in a minute, by the way. They have . They’re even !

Silver: For a guy who’s as cynical about the media as you are, you’re awfully willing to buy into cherry-picked narratives. I don’t see how there’s any information given away by Biden visiting South Florida, for instance �� it’s a swingy part of the country! And midterm elections can be regional. For every Lee Zeldin, you’ve got an Oklahoma, where the race is . And by the way, the . They’re just as much in the fog of war as anyone else.

Redd: I’m just saying, , Republicans win this thing. Keep it simple.

Silver: Occam’s razor? Where ? But here’s the thing: I’m not actually sure that keeping it simple is better. There’s a reason we go through the trouble of building a model and . I’m not sure that people’s intuitions are very good when it comes to election forecasting. In 2012, the media because they were looking at national polls, not realizing that former President Barack Obama had a pretty big edge in the Electoral College. In 2016, they didn’t realize how fragile Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead was because of . They kept it simple and they were wrong! Sometimes the devil is in the details!

Redd: I’ll tell you a detail. Your still has Democratic John Fetterman up in Pennsylvania’s Senate race. He’s not going to win after .

Silver: Ahead? I mean, . And it’s still not . But I agree with you in principle: if there’s news that hasn’t yet been fully reflected in the polls, that’s going to make our model a lagging indicator.

Redd: And I tell you who else is going to win: my boy Lee Zeldin. People are sick of Kathy Hochul. Maybe you need to step out of your media bubble.

Silver: Your boy? Do you actually know him? You live in Greenwich, Connecticut, not New York. Who’s living in the bubble? And he’s probably not going to win. Hochul’s still . And by the way, this cuts against everything you were saying earlier about the fundamentals. Even if Republicans are having a pretty good night, we’re living in very partisan times �� it’s hard to win as a Republican in New York these days.

Redd: So, we got a bet?

Silver: You on Zeldin, me on Hochul? Sure. Winner picks the restaurant and the wine, too. 

Redd: No, on the Senate.

Silver: I’m going to pass. Our model has it at 50-50, it’s been , and you make a couple of semi-persuasive points, like about Pennsylvania.

Redd: Semi-persuasive! That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Silver! And good luck on Tuesday, but you won’t need it. It’s going to be an early night.