All of the major Senate forecasting models, including ours at Election Lab, now rely heavily on averages of public polls. This raises the question of whether those averages will be correct on Election Day, and whether any misses could affect which party manages to retain control of the Senate. In […] Read more »
What to Expect From Senate Polls in the Final Days
A few weeks ago, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver released a dataset of over 6,000 polls, all conducted within 21 days of the election. This trove of data dates back to 1998, and covers all manner of races: Senate, House, gubernatorial, and presidential. This allows us to build some expectations for what […] Read more »
No, Republicans Aren’t Guaranteed to Win the Senate. Here’s Why.
On Monday, the Libertarian candidate for Senate in Iowa, Doug Butzier, died in a plane crash. Butzier, an emergency room physician, was polling at only two percent. But Republican candidate Joni Ernst leads the Democratic candidate, Bruce Braley, by an even narrower margin. How Butzier’s supporters eventually vote is a […] Read more »
Time and chance
… Models are, by definition, simplifications of reality and are necessarily incomplete. If they were complete descriptions of reality, they would be reality itself and too complex for us to understand. Critiques focused on the fact that models are sometimes wrong and don’t include all possible sources of human behavior […] Read more »
Democrats Face Strong Headwinds in Fight to Keep Senate Majority
Since March, I have been saying that Republicans had at least a 50 percent chance of retaking a Senate majority this year, and since July, I have upped that chance to 60 percent. There has been the normal ebb and flow of candidates’ fortunes in many individual races since then, […] Read more »
Dems: Don’t trust the polls
Democrats have a new message in the 2014 race for the Senate: Don’t trust the polls. The party is stoking skepticism in the final stretch of the midterm campaign, providing a mirror image of conservative complaints in 2012 about “skewed” polls in the presidential race between President Obama and Republican […] Read more »