Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight joins the pundit chorus saying Democrats seem to a bit more shape them the early forcasts that they would lose their shirts and other things in the No0vember Modterm elections….
The bottom line will be who and how many people come out and vote…..
Ever since we launched our election model in late June, it has moved entirely in one direction: toward Democrats. Pretty much every week, they’ve either gained ground in our forecast or held steady.
This week has been more in the “held steady” category. In the Deluxe version of our model, Democrats’ chances of keeping the Senate are 71 percent, while their chances of holding the House are 31 percent. Neither number has meaningfully changed from a week ago.
As Democrats’ position has continually improved, I’ve tended to focus on optimistic scenarios for Democrats. Frankly, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to reiterate why Republicans could still have a pretty good midterm. They are, after all, reasonably clear favorites to flip the House, and a 30 percent chance to flip the Senate is nothing to sneeze at, either. That 30 percent chance is pretty much the same one our model gave to Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton on Election Day in 2016.
But that Republicans could win doesn’t mean that their situation is improving. I’ve seen several recent claims about Republican momentum in the polls that I don’t think are yet justified in the evidence.
Let’s leave our probabilistic forecast aside for now and just look at the polls themselves. Specifically, we’ll look at what our polling averages say as I write this on Sept. 22 and how that compares to one month ago, on Aug. 22. A fair amount has happened since then: The White House announced its student loan forgiveness program on Aug. 24; there’s been some fairly negative inflation news and other economic data; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent around 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard; Russia is facing significant setbacks in its war with Ukraine; and campaigns are kicking into higher gear in many states after Labor Day….