… Our final Election Lab forecast was for the Republicans to win 243 seats with a 90 percent confidence interval of 236 to 251 seats. Our forecast proved reasonably accurate. What about the individual House elections? There are 429 races for which the results are finalized, and our model correctly […] Read more »
Did Asian Americans switch parties overnight? No.
Buried in the blue and red bars of the exit poll results from Tuesday’s midterm elections is an astonishing figure. Asian Americans were nearly evenly split in their voting in congressional races: 50 percent to 49 percent, with a nod to Democrats by the faintest of recordable margins. … Is […] Read more »
One Reason the Democrats Lost So Big in Midterms: Exceptionally Low Voter Turnout
When turnout falls, Democrats perform worse in elections. That general pattern is well known. In making their forecasts, pollsters try to estimate what that turnout will be on the basis of previous elections. This year, pre-election opinion polls were off by the largest amount seen in over 20 years. Could […] Read more »
Who else had a bad night? Pollsters
The polls were wrong. And so were the predictions about how the polls would be wrong. Instead of being biased against Democrats, who still hoped they could overcome modest deficits in a number of states, the surveys of the 2014 Senate landscape turned out to have significantly underestimated Republicans. CONT. […] Read more »
What the Forecasts Got Right, and Wrong
The results of the midterm elections are in, leaving Republicans with at least 52 Senate seats, along with the likely addition of Alaska, where Dan Sullivan holds a four-point lead. … The results were not unexpected. The set of Senate seats up for election in this cycle favored Republicans. Polling […] Read more »
Why did Republicans outperform the polls?
As election results continue to roll in, the big puzzle of the morning is not why the Republicans won so many Senate seats – as was just noted in the previous Monkey Cage post, The Monkey Cage’s Election Lab did a remarkably good job of predicting this outcome — but […] Read more »