Early polls have historically done fairly well in predicting the the outcome of governors’ races. We can add bells and whistles to improve the forecast — and we will — but the polls are a good start and a good baseline. So, let’s check out what the early gubernatorial polls […] Read more »
Democrats Are in a Perilous Position in 2014 Senate Races
Can you predict Senate elections more accurately than a basic polling average? It’s something we at FiveThirtyEight try to do. … But the basic polling average still does pretty well. So before we launch our official projections, let’s take a look at what the latest polling shows and how that […] Read more »
What’s the value of early Senate polls?
Some recent discussions of Senate forecasting models have looked at current differences among the models, mainly ours and The Upshot’s. One key factor that has differentiated them is polls. Our model hasn’t incorporated polling data, although we’ll be doing so shortly. The Upshot’s model has factored in available polling data […] Read more »
When Senate Polls Start to Matter
When does a lead in the polls start to matter? At the risk of oversimplifying, this can be thought of as a function of two things: How big the lead is and how much time there is until the election. With this in mind, the table above displays the winning […] Read more »
What We Can Learn From Eric Cantor’s Defeat
… In truth, when an election result hits “10 on the political Richter scale” of shock value, there usually isn’t just one reason for the outcome, but lots of them acting in concert. While surveying the wreckage, Cantor adviser John Murray acknowledged his boss’s loss amounted to “death by a […] Read more »
It’s Not Too Soon to Pay Attention to Senate Polling
Just five months until November’s midterm elections and already early polling results have countered some expectations. In Arkansas, the Democrat Mark Pryor is showing surprising strength in a red state, and in North Carolina, Kay Hagan is trailing as an incumbent in a battleground state. We won’t know how accurate […] Read more »