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Election Update: Polls Show A Close Race (So Our Model Does Too)

Well, folks, this is getting tight. Donald Trump is in his strongest-ever position in FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus forecast, which gives him a 46 percent chance of winning the election. Trump’s chances are about the same, 45 percent, according to our polls-only forecast, his best standing since it showed him with a 50 percent chance in the midst of his convention bounce.

Our models have been on the move toward Trump for roughly six weeks. But with dozens of polls coming out over the past few days, he’s no longer much of an underdog at all. Hillary Clinton leads narrowly — by 1.5 percentage points — in our projection of the popular vote. But polling weakness in states that Clinton probably needs to win, particularly Colorado and Pennsylvania, makes the Electoral College almost even.

I’m aware that there’s a lot of consternation and/or excitement out there about our forecast. But there’s nothing particularly deep going on here — our numbers are just reflecting what the recent polls are saying. First, here’s a list of the 10 national polls that we’ve added to our database since Saturday. I’ve shown both the current result and — since this is how our model’s trend-line adjustment works — how it compares to the average of other polls conducted by that pollster throughout the year:

POLLSTERNEW POLLAVG. OF PREVIOUS POLLSTRENDABC News/Washington PostClinton +2Clinton +6Trump +4CVOTER InternationalClinton +1Clinton +1—Monmouth UniversityClinton +4Clinton +7Trump +3Morning ConsultTrump +1Clinton +4Trump +5Quinnipiac UniversityClinton +1Clinton +4Trump +3RKM ResearchClinton +2Clinton +2—Selzer & CompanyTrump +2Clinton +11Trump +13SurveyMonkeyClinton +5Clinton +4Clinton +1USC Dornsife/LA TimesTrump +4Trump +1Trump +3YouGovClinton +3Clinton +3—National polls added since Sept. 24

On average, Clinton is ahead by only 1.3 percentage points in these polls — right where our forecast shows the race. And the trend lines are mostly negative for her, with Clinton polling an average of 2.6 points below the previous editions of the same polls.

Meanwhile, here are the state polls we’ve added since Saturday. The list excludes the latest editions of the Ipsos/Reuters and CVOTER International 50-state tracking polls, which our model uses but assigns a relatively low weight.

STATEPOLLSTERNEW POLLAVG. OF PREVIOUS POLLSTRENDAriz.Data OrbitalTrump +2Colo.CNNTrump +1Colo.Gravis MarketingTrump +4Clinton +1Trump +5Colo.YouGovClinton +1Clinton +1—Fla.Cherry Comm.Clinton +2Trump +4Clinton +6Ga.JMC EnterprisesTrump +6Clinton +7Trump +13Ga.Landmark Comm.Trump +4Trump +1Trump +3IowaLoras CollegeTrump +1Clinton +13Trump +14La.JMC EnterprisesTrump +10Trump +16Clinton +6MaineU. of New HampshireClinton +4Clinton +7Trump +3Mass.YouGovClinton +13Minn.SurveyUSAClinton +7Minn.Gravis MarketingTieMo.YouGovTrump +9N.H.Amer. Research GroupClinton +4Clinton +5Trump +1N.Y.Marist CollegeClinton +21Clinton +29Trump +8N.C.High Point UniversityClinton +1N.C.Gravis MarketingClinton +1Trump +1Clinton +2OhioGravis MarketingTrump +1Clinton +2Trump +3OhioTargetSmart/Wm. & MaryClinton +3Pa.CNNClinton +1Pa.Harper PollingClinton +2Clinton +5Trump +3Pa.Gravis MarketingClinton +3Clinton +2Clinton +1Pa.Mercyhurst UniversityClinton +1Clinton +8Trump +7Pa.Muhlenberg CollegeClinton +2Clinton +7Trump +5UtahDan Jones & AssociatesTrump +9Trump +7Trump +2Va.Christopher Newport U.Clinton +6Clinton +9Trump +3Va.YouGovClinton +8Clinton +12Trump +4W. Va.Just Win StrategiesTrump +27State polls added since Sept. 24

These tell pretty much the same story. On average among this weekend’s polls in what we consider swing states, Clinton leads by only 1.2 percentage points. And the trend has moved in Trump’s direction by an average of 2.9 percentage points. Again, that’s right in line with what our forecast shows.

Unfortunately for Clinton, her state-by-state polls are configured in a way that makes her Electoral College position relatively vulnerable. Particularly problematic for Clinton were the numbers in Colorado, where two of the three new polls this weekend had her trailing Trump. A couple of those pollsters (Gravis Marketing and CNN) have Trump-leaning house effects, but still, it’s a close race there, and Clinton leads by only 1.6 percentage points in our Colorado forecast. Without Colorado in her column, Clinton would need to win a state that she currently appears to trail in, such as North Carolina or Florida.

There were also five polls of Pennsylvania that showed Clinton ahead by only 1 to 3 points there. She leads in Pennsylvania by 2.4 percentage points in our forecast.

Not every poll was bad for Clinton: She led fairly comfortably in two new polls of Virginia, although they showed negative trend lines for her. She got relatively good polls in Florida and Ohio. And as with any long list of polls, this one contained a mix of good and not-so-good pollsters. But there was no clear pattern of better pollsters showing better numbers for Clinton, or vice versa. For instance, the single poll that hurt Clinton the most in our forecast was a national survey from Selzer & Co. on behalf of Bloomberg Politics, which showed her trailing Trump by 2 percentage points. Selzer is one of our highest-rated pollsters and had shown strong numbers for Clinton earlier in the cycle.

Recently, FiveThirtyEight has shown better better odds for Trump than other models have, for several reasons. First, our model is generally quicker to update than others, because of its use of the trend-line adjustment. That allows us to make inferences about how the polls are moving in every state, even when they haven’t been polled recently. For instance, the model correctly anticipated significant tightening in Colorado and Pennsylvania, even after we went a long stretch without many new polls there.

A good test of whether a model is too conservative, too aggressive or “just right” is whether it does a good job of matching new polls as they come out in a state. So far in this election, the FiveThirtyEight and Daily Kos Elections model — which also uses a trend-line adjustment — have done a good job of this, while other models sometimes lag behind the trend.

A good, related question is whether polls are mean-reverting. Clinton has generally led Trump by more than the 1 or 2 percentage point lead she has now. Does that mean she’s more likely to gain ground than to lose ground from this point onward?

Our polls-only model makes no assumptions about this, instead taking the polls at face value. Polls-plus does account for mean reversion, but it assumes that polls revert toward a mean established by an index of economic conditions, rather than the long-term average of polls. Because economic conditions project a very close race right now, the polls-plus forecast is about the same as polls-only.

One could argue for reverting polls toward a long-term average instead, as at least one other forecaster (Princeton Election Consortium) does. We’re not totally sold on the empirical case for this, but theoretically it’s perfectly sound: A model could have the race as a dead heat in the event of a hypothetical election held today but nonetheless have Clinton favored on Nov. 8.

FiveThirtyEight’s models also generally account for more uncertainty than other models — or at least they do in this election because of the presence of a large number of undecided and third-party voters, who contribute to polling volatility. That helps Trump’s odds, since he’s (narrowly) the underdog in our forecast.

Another difference is whether one uses the version of the polls with third-party candidates included, as FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts do. Clinton’s leads are often slightly larger in two-way matchups. But those two-way matchups describe a hypothetical election — in actuality, Libertarian Gary Johnson will be on the ballot in every state, and the Green Party’s Jill Stein will be on the ballot in all but a handful of them. That’s why we prefer the version of the polls that include their names. It’s up to Clinton and Trump to earn those votes and not up to us to make assumptions about how those voters will behave.

So to summarize:

FiveThirtyEight’s models are faster to incorporate new data and identify trends than most others. For the time being, this helps Trump, since he’s been gaining in the polls.FiveThirtyEight’s models account for more uncertainty than most others. For the time being, this helps Trump, since he’s the underdog — although it potentially also means we give Clinton a better chance of a landslide than other models do.FiveThirtyEight’s models use the version of the polls that include third-party candidates. For the time being, this helps Trump, since he’s losing less to third-party candidates than Clinton is.

None of these will necessarily help Trump permanently, however. It hasn’t always been the case that third-party candidates so disproportionately hurt Clinton, for instance. And if Clinton gains following the debates, FiveThirtyEight’s models will probably be among the quicker ones to detect it.

For now, however, the polls show a very close race. Clinton leads in the majority of national polls, but not by much, and there are several that have Trump ahead. Likewise, she leads in the narrow majority of swing state polls, but there are many Trump leads in the swing state polls as well, and Clinton does not have clear leads in enough states to win the Electoral College. Therefore, the race is close. This ought to be clear whether you’re looking at relatively simple averages like those at RealClearPolitics or considering more complex methods like FiveThirtyEight’s.

What’s At Stake For Both Candidates In Tonight’s Debate

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The FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast crew previews the first 2016 presidential debate. In a lightning round of questions, the team looks at what’s on the line for both candidates.

And there’s much more FiveThirtyEight debate coverage in the works: We’ll be live-blogging throughout the debate, beginning at about 8 p.m. EDT. And the podcast team will regroup after the debate ends to talk about what went down (that podcast will be streamed on Facebook Live).

We tried to do this lightning-round style. Quick questions, quick answers. Here were the main questions. https://t.co/LBQroni5QP pic.twitter.com/bQb068GsNh

— Jody Avirgan (@jodyavirgan) September 26, 2016

The podcast team is preparing for a live show in New York City on Oct. 24. You can find details and ticket information here.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling"? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Election Update: Where The Race Stands Heading Into The First Debate

Whatever arguments we’ve had about the polls this week will soon be swamped by the reaction to Monday’s presidential debate. As a rough guide, I’d expect us to have some initial sense of how the debate has moved the numbers by Thursday or Friday based on quick-turnaround polls, and a clearer one by next Sunday or so, when an array of higher-quality polls will begin to report their post-debate results as well.

But in the meantime, let’s take one more step back and ask our usual collection of 10 questions about where the presidential race stands. Think of these as time capsules of a sort; you can find previous editions here (July 15), here (Aug. 15) and here (Sept. 6).

1. Who’s ahead in the polls right now?

Hillary Clinton, but tenuously. There were some semantic debates on Twitter this morning after ABC News and the Washington Post released their new national poll that showed Clinton 2 points ahead of Donald Trump. Did the Post convey the right impression in describing the race as a “virtual dead heat” in its headline?

I might have chosen slightly different vocabulary: “Clinton has razor-thin advantage,” or something like that. But it’s basically correct, at least based on the FiveThirtyEight forecast, to characterize the election as both close and competitive. The ABC News/Post poll is typical of recent national polls, which have Clinton up by about 2 points on average. (That average includes some high-quality polls that have Clinton ahead by as many as 6 points, but also a handful of others that show Trump with a lead.) Meanwhile, in the Electoral College, Clinton is leading in the states she needs to win, but only in those states, and not by all that much. Trump is one string of good polls in Pennsylvania or Colorado or New Hampshire away from erasing that advantage.

To put it another way, a narrow Trump win would not count as a major polling foul-up if the election were held today: It would be within a reasonable range of disagreement among pollsters. A clear Trump win — or for that matter, a Clinton landslide — would be more of a problem for the polls.

With that said, Clinton is a pretty good bet at even-money. As of Sunday morning, she’s a 58 percent favorite according to both our polls-only and polls-plus models.

2. What’s the degree of uncertainty?

It remains fairly high. This is the point that we really can’t emphasize enough, and it’s why FiveThirtyEight shows somewhat better odds for Trump than most other forecast models. Not all 2-point leads are created equal, and Clinton’s is on the less-safe side, certainly as compared with the roughly 2-point lead that President Obama had over Mitt Romney on the eve of the 2012 election.

Perhaps the most important reason for that is the higher-than-usual number of undecided and third-party voters. Clinton leads Trump roughly 42-40, based on our national polling average; late in the 2012 race, by contrast, Obama led Romney about 48-46. That means about 18 percent of the electorate isn’t yet committed to one of the major-party candidates, as compared with 6 percent late in 2012. The number of undecided and third-party voters has a strong historical correlation with both polling volatility and polling error — and in fact, the polls have been considerably more volatile this year than in 2012.

We also have a wider playing field of swing states this year — with states ranging from Georgia to Maine having been competitive at various points of the campaign. Thus, there’s a good chance that the polls (and the polling aggregators) will “call” several states wrong instead of getting 48 or 49 or 50 of them right, as they did in 2008 and 2012. That introduces important assumptions about how the errors between states are related. FiveThirtyEight’s model assumes these errors are somewhat correlated, especially in demographically similar states. If Trump beats his polls in Wisconsin, for example, he’s also likely to do so in Michigan.

Finally, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that we still have a fairly long way to go. With the party conventions held early this year, everyone’s sense of timing was thrown off, and the 44 remaining days in this campaign are going to feel like an eternity.

It’s important to underscore that this uncertainty cuts in both directions. We give Trump better odds of winning than most other models, but we also assign higher odds to a Clinton landslide.

3. What’s the short-term trend in the polls?

In the very short-term — i.e., what the polls look like as compared with a week ago — it’s not clear. Clinton had appeared to be regaining some ground on Trump, but the polls that came in over the weekend were middling for her, including surveys showing just a 1-point Clinton lead in Colorado and a 2-point lead in Pennsylvania. Whether these changes reflect voters reacting to events in the news cycle or are just random fluctuations is hard to say.

4. What’s the medium-term trend in the polls?

It’s been toward Trump for a long time now. Clinton’s position peaked on Aug. 8 in the polls-plus model and Aug. 14 in polls-only. Trump has slowly and fairly steadily gained ground since then, closing his deficit by about 1 percentage point a week, to narrow Clinton’s lead from about 8 points in mid-August to 2 points now.

5. Which states shape up as most important?

There’s not any one key state, which is part of the reason the election remains uncertain — and exciting. Instead, the various swing states are currently lined up on either side of a gap, with Clinton leading in states representing 272 electoral votes and Trump ahead in states totalling 266 electoral votes.

If any of the states just to Clinton’s side of the gap slips toward Trump — Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan are the most plausible candidates — he’ll pull ahead in the Electoral College. But conversely, Trump leads by less than 1 percentage point in Florida and by barely more than that in North Carolina and if either of those were to fall to Clinton, his electoral math would become very difficult. The same is theoretically true for Ohio, although Trump’s lead has been more consistent there.

6. Does one candidate appear to have an overall edge in the Electoral College, relative to his or her position in the popular vote?

It’s complicated. There could plausibly be an Electoral College-popular vote split in either direction, but our models say that Trump is somewhat more likely to benefit from this.

Right now, Clinton is ahead by 2.0 percentage points in our national popular vote estimate. She’s also ahead by 2.8 percentage points in Colorado, which is currently the tipping-point state — the state that would give her just enough votes to win the Electoral College. That’s a potential advantage for Clinton, but it requires the polls to be pretty much exactly on the mark.

By contrast, Clinton’s position overall in swing state polls has not been especially good, in part because they tend to have a high proportion of white working-class voters — Trump’s best group. In particular, she’s gotten some pretty awful numbers in Ohio, Iowa and Nevada lately, and her position in North Carolina seems to be worsening. If instead of treating Colorado as definitely being the tipping-point state, we instead weight the states by their probability of being the tipping-point state, Clinton’s lead over Trump is 1.2 percentage points in the average swing state, less than her national margin and therefore a potential Electoral College disadvantage for her.

Basically, it’s a question of whether you’d rather have pretty good polling in exactly enough states to win 270 electoral votes, at the cost of pretty bad polling in the swing states overall. Our models say that isn’t a great trade-off for Clinton because having one good path leaves too little room for error. But this calculation is somewhat sensitive to our model’s assumptions. At a minimum, it’s another source of uncertainty.

7. How do the “fundamentals” look?

Non-polling factors such as economic conditions suggest that a race between a “generic” Democrat and a “generic” Republican ought to be close. In that sense, it shouldn’t be hard to see how Trump could win. He either becomes normalized enough that he performs about the same as a generic Republican would, or he significantly underperforms a generic Republican but Clinton’s problems are just as bad.

8. How do FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts compare against prediction markets?

In general, FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus model has closely tracked betting markets — more closely than any other major forecast (including our own polls-only model). There’s a modest gap between them now. Whereas polls-plus gives Clinton a 58 percent chance and Trump a 42 percent chance, Betfair gives Clinton a 62 percent chance and Trump a 34 percent chance (reserving a 4 percent chance that someone other than Clinton or Trump somehow becomes the next president, a possibility that FiveThirtyEight’s models do not consider).

For a variety of reasons, ranging from the fact that that gap isn’t all that large to that betting markets can plausibly account for some factors that FiveThirtyEight’s models don’t, I’m not sure about whether I think there’s enough edge there that I’d actually advocate laying money down on Trump. I suppose I wish there were a betting market open only to political journalists and commentators, though. My hard-to-prove sense is that they underrate Trump’s chances as compared with both betting markets and our forecasts.

9. What would keep me up late at night if I were Clinton?

You mean, other than the fact that the election keeps getting closer every time I look?

As I put it in July: “I’d be worried that Americans come to view the race as one between two equally terrible choices, instead of Trump being uniquely unacceptable.” In particular, I’d be worried that my brand has irrevocably been tarnished with a reputation for dishonesty. Between Trump’s knack for exploiting this weakness (“Crooked Hillary”), the news media’s tendency to frame events as contributing to my honesty and trust problems, and some left-over hard feelings from the primaries — Clinton has yet to win over many of the millennials who voted for Bernie Sanders — I’m generally losing when polls ask who the more trustworthy candidate is.

In the short term, I’d be worried that the talk of Trump’s “low expectations” at the first debate is a tip-off that the media hivemind might frame a debate tie as a Trump win.

10. What would keep me up late at night if I were Trump?

Trump’s concerns also aren’t all that different from those he had in July.

If I were him, I’d be worried that even at my best moments, I’ve never really pulled ahead of Clinton, instead only drawing to within a point or two of her. I wouldn’t be that worried because it’s not clear how predictive those patterns are. But it certainly wouldn’t thrill me, especially given that the debates make for natural turning points and if the pattern holds, the next turning point will be back toward Clinton. I’d continue to be worried about my ground game, or lack thereof. It’s hard to say exactly how much that’s worth, but underperforming my polls by even half a percentage point in the swing states would make my Electoral College path meaningfully harder.

Election Update: The Case For And Against Democratic Panic

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Last Friday, I wrote an article titled “Democrats Should Panic … If The Polls Still Look Like This In A Week.” Well, it’s been a week — actually eight days — since that was published. So: Should Democrats panic?

The verdict is … I don’t know. As of a few days ago, the case for panic looked pretty good. But Hillary Clinton has since had some stronger polls and improved her position in our forecast. In our polls-only model, Clinton’s chances of winning are 61 percent, up from a low of 56 percent earlier this week, but below the 70 percent chance she had on Sept. 9, before her “bad weekend.”

The polls-plus forecast has followed a similar trajectory. Clinton’s chances of winning are now 60 percent, up from a low of 55 percent but worse than the 68 percent chance she had two weeks ago.

I’d love to give the polls another week to see how these dynamics play out. Even with a fairly aggressive model like FiveThirtyEight’s, there’s a lag between when news occurs and when its impact is fully reflected in the polls and the forecast. But instead, Monday’s presidential debate is likely to sway the polls in one direction or another — and will probably have a larger impact on the race than whatever shifts we’ve seen this week.

There’s also not much consensus among pollsters about where the race stands. On the one hand, you can cite several national polls this week that show Clinton ahead by 5 or 6 percentage points, the first time we’ve consistently seen numbers like that in a few weeks. She also got mostly favorable numbers in “must-win states,” such as New Hampshire. But Clinton also got some pretty awful polls this week in other swing states: surveys from high-quality pollsters showing her 7 points behind Donald Trump in Iowa, or 5 points behind him in Ohio, only tied with him in Maine, for instance. The differences are hard to reconcile: It’s almost inconceivable that Clinton is both winning nationally by 6 points and losing Ohio (for example) by 5 points.

I usually tell people not to sweat disagreements like these all that much. In fact, most observers probably underestimate the degree of disagreement that occurs naturally and unavoidably between polls because of sampling error, along with legitimate methodological differences over techniques such as demographic weighting and likely-voter modeling. If anything, there’s usually too little disagreement between pollsters because of herding, which is the tendency to suppress seeming “outlier” results that don’t match the consensus.

Still, the disagreement between polls this week was on the high end, and that makes it harder to know exactly what the baseline is heading into Monday’s debate. The polls-only model suggests that Clinton is now ahead by 2 to 3 percentage points, up slightly from a 1- or 2-point lead last week. But I wouldn’t spend a lot of time arguing with people who claim her lead is slightly larger or smaller than that. It may also be that both Clinton and Trump are gaining ground thanks to undecided and third-party voters, a trend that could accelerate after the debate because Gary Johnson and Jill Stein won’t appear on stage.

In football terms, we’re probably still in the equivalent of a one-score game. If the next break goes in Trump’s direction, he could tie or pull ahead of Clinton. A reasonable benchmark for how much the debates might move the polls is 3 or 4 percentage points. If that shift works in Clinton’s favor, she could re-establish a lead of 6 or 7 percentage points, close to her early-summer and post-convention peaks. If the debates cut in Trump’s direction instead, he could easily emerge with the lead. I’m not sure where that ought to put Democrats on the spectrum between mild unease and full-blown panic. The point is really just that the degree of uncertainty remains high.

The Key States In The Contest For Senate Control

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The Senate is the focus of this week’s forecast update from the Elections podcast. Politics editor Micah Cohen and editor-in-chief Nate Silver take a look at the races that will be key in deciding which party will control the Senate in 2017. They also explain how uncertainty plays an important role in how the model translates the polls into win probabilities.

The regular podcast team is preparing for a live show in New York City on Oct. 24. You can find details and ticket information here.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling"? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Clinton’s Leading In Exactly The States She Needs To Win

Here at FiveThirtyEight, our favorite election-related chart is what we officially call the “winding path to 270 electoral votes” and unofficially call the snake. Designed by my colleague Aaron Bycoffe, it lines the states up from most favorable for Hillary Clinton (Hawaii, Maryland) to best for Donald Trump (Wyoming, Alabama) based on the projected margin of victory in each one. The snake is bisected by a line indicating 269 electoral votes: cross this line — meaning you get 270 electoral votes — and you win the election.

Right now, Clinton is over the line by exactly one state. As of this writing, that state — what we also call the tipping-point state — is New Hampshire. But a group of states are closely lumped together, and Pennsylvania, Colorado and Wisconsin have all taken their turn as the tipping-point state in recent weeks.

If she wins all those states and everything toward the blue end of the snake, Clinton would finish with 272 electoral votes, even assuming she loses the 2nd Congressional District of Maine. (Maine and Nebraska split their electoral votes by congressional district.) That’s two more than she needs to win the election.

But in different ways, that both understates and overstates how precarious Clinton’s position is. It understates it because Clinton has no margin to spare. Clinton’s polling has been somewhere between middling and awful in most of the other swing states lately, and they all at least lean toward Trump at the moment, narrowly in some cases (such as Florida) and more clearly in others (such as Iowa). If Clinton loses any of the states on the blue side of the snake without picking anything up on the red side, she’ll be stuck on 269 electoral votes or fewer.

On the other hand, Clinton’s leads in the states she needs to win appear to be pretty solid. As of late Thursday afternoon, she’s ahead in our forecast by 3.1 percentage points in New Hampshire, and by slightly more than that in Colorado (3.3 points), Pennsylvania (3.4 points) and Michigan (also 3.4 points).

Put another way, you might as well saw the snake in half. There’s a big gap between the New Hampshire/Colorado/Pennsylvania group of states and the next ones, where Clinton is losing.

So does that mean Clinton could win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote? Yes, it’s possible. If every state swung by exactly 2.5 percentage points toward Trump, for instance, that’s exactly what would happen.

But that exactitude is a big assumption, especially given that we still have 47 days — and three debates — to go until the election. Even if it were Election Day, in fact, it would be unrealistic to expect such high precision. State polling averages have been pretty good for the past few presidential elections, but “pretty good” still provides for plenty of times when they miss by 2 to 4 percentage points. If one of those misses is in Trump’s favor in Pennsylvania or New Hampshire or Colorado, especially if the race shifts a bit further to Trump overall, then Clinton will go from being in a pretty good Electoral College position to having a total mess on her hands.

Furthermore, the way in which the states are aligned right now doesn’t make all that much sense based on their demographics. In the table above, you can find regression-based estimates for the outcome in each state, which are derived based mostly on how they voted in 2008 and 2012 and to a lesser degree based on their region and demographic makeup. (This regression is combined with the polling average in each state to make our forecasts, although it receives a low weight in well-polled states like these.)

There’s an apparent discrepancy between Pennsylvania and Ohio, for example. In our polling average, they’re separated by 5.2 percentage points: Clinton leads in Pennsylvania by 3.5 points but trails in Ohio by 1.7 points. In 2012, by contrast, the states were separated by only 2.4 points, and so our regression model is confused as to why the gap is so much bigger this year. Perhaps that means the polling gap between them will close — good news for Clinton if Ohio moves toward Pennsylvania, but a problem if it’s the other way around.

Likewise, how safe can Clinton feel in Colorado given her poor polling in Nevada? Can she be entirely comfortable in New Hampshire given that Maine is surprisingly close? Does the sharp tilt toward Trump in Iowa tell us that Wisconsin or Minnesota have the potential to turn red?

Between the unusual nature of Trump’s electoral appeal, the disagreements between pollsters, the large number of undecided and third-party voters, and the wider range of swing states than in 2008 or 2012, this is not a year to expect tremendous precision. Instead, the actual map is likely to be a little messier than polling averages indicate, with the probability of modest errors in either direction. For the time being, Clinton is more likely to be hurt by those errors than to be helped by them. She has one really good Electoral College path, but it’s only one path, instead of the robust electoral map that President Obama had in 2008 and 2012. That’s why our models estimate that Trump is more likely to benefit from an Electoral College-popular vote split than Clinton is, although either outcome is possible.

Senate Forecast: The Map Favors Democrats, Ever So Slightly

The battle for control of the U.S. Senate is close to being a tossup, but with perhaps a very narrow advantage for Democrats, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast, which launched this week. In fact, control of the chamber could easily be determined by the presidential election because of the possibility of a 50-50 tie in the Senate, which would be broken by the incoming vice president.

Each party entered the cycle with its own set of advantages. For Democrats, the principal asset is opportunity: Of the 34 seats up for grabs this year, 24 are held by Republicans. Furthermore, Republicans last won or defended these seats in the wave election year of 2010, which featured heavy Republican turnout amid dissatisfaction with President Obama’s health care bill and his performance during his first two years in office. The climate is unlikely to be as favorable to the GOP this time around.

By contrast, Republicans’ biggest advantage is the inertia of incumbency — plus the fact that they have some room to spare. Although Congress as a whole remains near record-low levels of popularity, some individual Republican senators, such as Rob Portman of Ohio and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, remain relatively popular. Meanwhile, only two Republican incumbents, Dan Coats of Indiana and David Vitter of Louisiana, are retiring from the Senate, and none lost in a primary challenge. That cuts down on the number of targets for Democrats, who have to pick up somewhere between four and six seats to regain control of the chamber, depending on whether they hold on to one of their seats, in Nevada, and whether they win the presidency — itself an increasingly uncertain prospect.

All told, Democrats have a 59 percent chance of controlling the Senate in 2017, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus forecast, the default version of our newly relaunched Senate model, which is based on a combination of state-by-state polling and “fundamental” factors, such as the partisanship of each state. Democrats’ odds are the same, 59 percent, based on our polls-only forecast, which is a new feature this year and, as its name implies, is based on polling alone in states with a sufficient number of surveys. These forecasts include about a 15 percent chance that the Senate will be split exactly 50-50. In these cases, our models draw from our presidential election forecasts to estimate the chance that Tim Kaine or Mike Pence will be the new vice president and give his party Senate control.

To see why the race is relatively even, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of Democrats’ most plausible pickups. You may have heard elsewhere that the Democrats’ magic number is four seats. But that assumes they hold onto all their seats and win the presidency, and as I hinted at above, that’s not a safe assumption; instead, they’ll require somewhere between four and six seats. Their first problem is Nevada, where they’re defending the seat held by retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. In theory, Nevada should lean slightly blue in a presidential year, but it hasn’t done so in either the presidential or the state’s Senate race so far; recent polls there show the Republican Senate candidate, U.S. Rep. Joe Heck, slightly ahead of Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, a former Nevada attorney general. Thus, Nevada is, at best, a tossup for Democrats, meaning that they might require five Republican gains instead of four.

Democrats will require yet another seat if Donald Trump wins the presidential election instead of Hillary Clinton, potentially raising the bar to six seats. While it’s somewhat far-fetched to think that Democrats could reclaim the Senate in the same year that Trump wins the presidency, it’s not out of the question. There are indications from voters of more willingness to split tickets than in recent past elections, with these splits benefiting either party in different states. (Jason Kander, the Democratic Senate candidate in Missouri, for instance, is running ahead of Clinton there.) Furthermore, a Trump win would probably be narrow and could conceivably be caused by defections of Democratic-leaning voters from Clinton to third-party candidates who might still vote Democratic down-ballot.

Below are Democrats’ pickup opportunities in order of likelihood, with percentages taken from the polls-plus version of our forecast.

Likely Democratic pickupWisconsin (94 percent)

This is the only possible pickup that seems close to a sure thing for Democrats. Former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold is in a rematch with Republican incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson, whom Feingold lost to in 2010 despite having relatively good approval ratings. Polls have consistently shown Feingold ahead this year, and he stands to benefit from Wisconsin’s traditionally high presidential-year turnout.

Probable Democratic pickupsIllinois (76 percent), Indiana (75 percent)

Both Illinois and Indiana are underpolled, although the states are otherwise very different types of pickup opportunities for Democrats. Illinois is blue enough that even the expressly moderate Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, who has openly denounced Trump, is swimming against a partisan tide. Polls there show Democrat Tammy Duckworth ahead, although there has been only a handful of nonpartisan surveys.

In Indiana, by contrast, former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh is ahead in polls, but such a result would cut against the state’s partisan environment, which is solidly Republican in the presidential race. Also, the size of Bayh’s lead varies based on the sponsor of the poll, with single-digit leads over U.S. Rep. Todd Young in nonpartisan surveys but larger leads in polls sponsored by Democratic-leaning groups. The polls-plus forecast in Indiana, as cited above, gives Bayh a 75 percent chance, although polls-only is considerably more confident in him, putting his chances above 90 percent.

TossupsPennsylvania (59 percent), New Hampshire (58 percent)

If everything else is going well for Democrats — they win the presidency, Nevada and all three of the races above — they’ll need only one of these two seats. Clinton’s polling in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire has held up relatively well even as it has deteriorated elsewhere, but the incumbent Republican senators in both states are running ahead of Trump. In Pennsylvania, Democrats have an inexperienced candidate in Katie McGinty, who has not previously held elected office. But she’s held narrow leads over Republican incumbent Pat Toomey in the majority of recent polls, and Toomey may be too conservative for the state. In New Hampshire, Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte is holding on for her political life against a tough opponent, Gov. Maggie Hassan, while trying to find the appropriate level of distance from Trump.

Plausible Democratic pickupsNorth Carolina (39 percent), Missouri (38 percent), Florida (29 percent)

If the five races I mentioned above were Democrats’ only opportunities, they’d be underdogs to reclaim the Senate. But they have some backup options. In Missouri, first-term incumbent Roy Blunt has long had middling approval ratings, and Democrats may have a talented enough candidate in Kander, the state’s secretary of state, to make up for Missouri’s increasingly Republican lean at the top of the ticket. North Carolina also features an underwhelming Republican incumbent in Sen. Richard Burr, but the circumstances there are otherwise somewhat the opposite of those in Missouri: Democrats don’t have a top-tier candidate (their nominee is former state Rep. Deborah Ross), but the state is becoming bluer. Ross has gained in recent polls, and the state is on the verge of becoming a tossup.

Florida is in something of its own category, with Marco Rubio having decided to run for re-election at the last minute after having flamed out of the GOP presidential primary. The presidential run damaged Rubio’s approval rating at home, but he’s running against a Democratic opponent in Patrick Murphy who’s also somewhat damaged goods, having been caught padding his résumé, among other minor scandals. Murphy has raised an impressive amount of money, however, and will have a chance to close his current, roughly 5-point deficit in the polls.

Long-shot opportunitiesLouisiana (14 percent), Kentucky (11 percent), Arkansas (9 percent), Ohio (9 percent), Arizona (7 percent), Iowa (6 percent)

These states will probably only come into play for Democrats in the event of a late-breaking national wave in their favor. Still, each represents a lottery ticket of a sort — the chance to benefit from a last-minute scandal or gaffe.

Some of them are also interesting on their own merits. Kentucky, for instance, theoretically brings vulnerability for incumbent Sen. Rand Paul, whose image at home suffered during his failed presidential bid. But Democrats have failed to knock off unpopular Republicans in Kentucky in the past, and their candidate this year — Lexington Mayor Jim Gray — is a long shot.

Louisiana holds what’s technically a primary election on Nov. 8, with multiple candidates from both parties appearing on the ballot and the top two finishers advancing to a Dec. 10 runoff unless someone gets a majority of the vote. With 24 candidates on the Nov. 8 ballot — about a half-dozen of whom are regularly tracked in polls — there is the possibility of a crazy outcome, such as Democrats finishing in the top two positions because the Republican vote is divided among several candidates. The Republican candidates include former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, although he has only about 5 percent of the vote in polls. The probability listed by our model in Louisiana, 14 percent, reflects the chance that the Democrats will eventually control the seat, accounting for the dynamics of both the primary and the runoff.

There’s also one race that Democrats should be unhappy about seeing so far down on this list. That’s the one in Ohio, where former Gov. Ted Strickland was supposed to be competitive but where Republican incumbent Rob Portman has jumped out to a double-digit lead in recent polls.

As a reminder, before you get too carried away with individual races, however, the Senate map can and sometimes does break late. In each of the past five election cycles, one party won all or almost all of the Senate races that would have been considered highly competitive at this point in time. (Democrats did so in 2006, 2008 and 2012; Republicans did in 2010 and 2014.) Our model accounts for the possibility of a wave by noting that outcomes and polling errors are somewhat correlated from state to state.

Thus, while the most likely range of outcomes is a net gain of two to six seats for Democrats, there’s an outside chance — about 15 percent — that they’ll pick up at least eight instead. The magnitude of potential Democratic gains is important because the 2018 Senate map is every bit as bad for Democrats as 2016 is good for them, probably necessitating a cushion of a couple of seats to hold the chamber even if they win it this year.

What The Heck Does ‘Winning’ A Debate Even Mean?

In this week’s politics chat, we preview the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, scheduled for Monday. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): This is our last weekly politics chat before the first presidential debate, so Tuesday’s question for your consideration is: Who will win the first presidential debate? We obviously can’t answer this, but it’s a useful frame to talk about each candidate’s strategies and strengths and weaknesses.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Television executives will win the first debate.

micah: That seems very likely. To get us going, let’s talk about how “winning” or “losing” a debate tends to manifest itself in the polls. How much can debates move the needle? (Or, at least, how much have they moved the needle historically?)

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): By recent standards, a 3 or 4 percentage point shift in the polls — which might be more of a “bounce” than something permanent, i.e., it could recede — would be on the high end.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): The most obvious example of a debate truly moving the needle is in 1980. Independent candidate John Anderson put in a poor performance in the first debate against Ronald Reagan (without Jimmy Carter), and fell in the polls. Then Carter did the same against Reagan in the second debate, right before the election, and fell too.

clare.malone: Are debate bounces like convention bounces? Do they fade? (Like a cool haircut or chemical love.)

natesilver: They can, certainly. Mitt Romney’s did in 2012.

Also, there might be a tendency for the media to declare whoever “won” the first debate to have “lost” the second or third debate.

clare.malone: Is there anyone who just killed it at their debate, got a bounce and never looked back? I.e., someone for whom winning the debate was clutch?

harry: Reagan never looked back in 1980, but that final debate was right before the election. This year the debates are further away from Election Day, especially the first one, obviously.

A lot of folks also say that the second Reagan vs. Walter Mondale debate in 1984 was the moment when Mondale knew he was done for.

clare.malone: Why so? Please historicize.

natesilver: Wait, are we pretending that 1984 was close?

harry: No no.

clare.malone: I’m wondering what the theatrics of the debate were that you think did him in? Or showed him that he was done in.

harry: I was just saying Mondale knew he was screwed after the moment Reagan said, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

clare.malone: (I’m sorely behind in my finishing both “The Sopranos” and the 1984 debates.)

micah: They end the same way.

clare.malone: Ambiguously???

micah: Tony is Mondale.

clare.malone: Tony is all of us, Micah.

micah: I’m more of a Meadow.

harry: I think Reagan did so well in 1980 for two reasons. The first is that people saw Reagan on the stage with the incumbent president, Carter, and thought he looked presidential. Meanwhile, Carter looked tired. But really it was about convincing folks that Reagan was a suitable person for the office given that Carter’s approval rating was terrible.

As for 1984, Reagan was already well ahead, but humor always sells in debates and Reagan was great at it. Reagan addressed the concern that he was old and out of touch. For the record, I’m Tony Soprano.

micah: OK, so let’s talk about the Trump vs. Clinton debate. Clinton first. Any educated guesses on her strategy for the first debate?

clare.malone: I’ve said this before, but I think there’s no way these debates aren’t a big plus for her. I think she’s just going to be finding ways to lay out her expertise in a way that’s not too didactic and wonky, and she’s going to be using the “Trump is not fit for office” thing over and over.

I would think, though, that she would avoid the “deplorables” stuff, but she’ll for sure bring up David Duke and his merry men.

natesilver: Couldn’t one way that the debates aren’t a big plus for Clinton be that the media coverage assumes that the debates will be a big plus for her and so judges things on a curve?

harry: Well, of course.

clare.malone: But there could also be a course-correction by media outlets following the criticism of Matt Lauer for taking it easy on Trump.

harry: Then again, the media trashed Trump after many of the GOP primary debates. We tend not to remember that because Trump ended up winning the nomination.

natesilver: I’m not sure that we can predict very much about how the media will score the debate based on how they judged the primary ones. The impulse to grade on a curve is very strong in a general election setting, especially if we start hearing phrases such as “beat expectations.”

clare.malone: I think that it’s likely that a lot of people in the press will be taking some deep breaths and thinking things through right before the debate, planning out how they’ll approach Trump falsehoods, should they occur, etc. Maybe paying more attention to substantive points of fact than his getting in one liners.

This is my hope.

micah: Clare, you can never go wrong underestimating the media.

clare.malone: This is my heavy hint.

micah: What will Trump’s strategy be? (Then we’ll talk more about the media.)

harry: I don’t know if Trump will have a strategy.

clare.malone: OK, so, let’s start with this: Do we think he’s going to employ his primary “counterpunching” strategy? Or is this where his new team’s brainpower will show? (I lean towards the latter.)

Predictit has a lot of side markets about whether or not he’ll use the term “crooked Hillary” in the first debate, and by a lot, I mean one.

harry: I think if she gets under his skin, then he’ll say something he’ll regret. His strategy has to be to not to lose his temper.

micah: Yeah, the conventional wisdom seems to be that Trump’s goal will be to be as normal as possible. Leave aside whether he can accomplish that, is that the right goal?

Or is it more important he put Clinton on the defensive?

And make this race “about” her?

harry: Ooooh, this is very interesting. The more this election is about Trump, the better for Clinton, and vice versa. The danger for Trump is going on the offensive too much risks making the race about him again — it’s a fine line. The goal here is to make the other candidate look bad, without also making yourself look bad. But I do think that’s the goal more than making yourself look that good.

natesilver: Well, if that’s Clinton’s strategy, maybe she’s making a mistake? Right now, she’s doing a great job of making Trump look bad and not a very good job of selling her case to the voters. You could argue the same is true for Trump.

clare.malone: I think in an ideal world, he puts her on her heels about things like her “belief that she is above rules,” etc., etc. Talks about emails — which people love to hate. But I also think that something the Clinton team is surely working on, has devoted a team of psychologists to, is finding points to anger Trump, to throw him off his normalcy routine.

natesilver: Trump definitely has the element of unpredictability working in his favor … you basically have to prepare for two-three different types of Trumps.

harry: See, I’m not sure I agree, Nathaniel. I think Clinton’s biggest problem came when the race became about her over the last few weeks, and Clinton is going to be more prepared for this debate than I am for a big snowstorm. If she loses it, Trump did something very right.

clare.malone: Yeah, I do think there is some proof that Americans don’t personally like Clinton all that much — an argument against her talking too, too much about herself — but they have tended to dislike Trump more, all other things equal in the race, so it would be best from her end to draw attention to his lack of qualification, vacuous, misleading policy ideas, etc., etc., etc.

natesilver: I disagree with your disagreement, Harold. There are LOTS of voters in the camp who find Trump totally unacceptable but aren’t convinced by Clinton, either. And a lot of them, right now, are showing up as Gary Johnson or Jill Stein voters — or they’re being filtered out by likely voter screens because of their low enthusiasm.

Furthermore, Clinton has plenty of opportunities to attack Trump. The media will always amplify attacks. It’s much harder for her to make the case for herself, in a sustained way. The debates and the convention are the best opportunities.

micah: So, to be clear, Harry thinks Clinton should spend the bulk of her time attacking Trump, Nate thinks she should focus on making her own case, and Clare?

clare.malone: I think Clinton has overplayed her hand on Trump criticism a lot, rhetorically. I think what she said about a lot of Trump supporters being basically motivated by racial animus was true, but it doesn’t play well with the public — it looks a bit condescending and can easily be skewed by slanted media outlets to read as “Hillary Clinton thinks half of all Republicans are racist.” So, what she has right now is a Goldilocks problem — her take was too hot before, she can be too cool sometimes; in the debates, she needs to strike her Trump criticism just right. Let’s recall from the convention show that she put on that she really wants to create a permission space for a certain kind of Republican to come on board with her.

natesilver: Clare, we’re making a good tag team — just like at the trivia contest last night when we kicked Harry’s ass.

clare.malone: Whoo! I did nothing on that trivia. Know what I’m killer on, though? Regular old Trivial Pursuit. It is a Malone family pursuit.

micah: Hmm … Harry, I hate to say it, but I’m with Clare and Nate….

natesilver: :thumbsup:

micah: The media/moderators will do some of the work attacking Trump, but they won’t build up Clinton.

natesilver: U-S-A. U-S-A.

harry: Well, then we should change the name of the site from FiveThirtyEight to the three putzes.

clare.malone: Tough Tuesday for Enten.

harry:

micah: Stage note for readers at home: Harry is slumping further and further down in his seat. We’ve beaten the fight out of him. Now he’s taken refuge in his “safe space” — old youtube clips.

clare.malone: I will say, as a side note, that Harry once got me down a Youtube hole of old Mike Wallace interviews, which were a treat. I would suggest everyone google “Mike Wallace, Barbra Streisand.” End side note.

harry: I enjoy my colleagues, and I enjoy a good ribbing.

micah: OK, let’s talk media now. In terms of the effect on the polls, how much influence does the media have versus the actual substance of the debate/performance of the candidates?

harry: I mean, you can give a person some heart medicine to make them perk up, but if that person is dead it ain’t gonna help.

clare.malone: There is definitely the sense that the media can mediate (!) the experience of viewers after the thing has happened. I might be sitting at home in North Carolina, watching the program and think one thing, and then the guy with a tie and “expertise” might come on right after it’s over and say with great gusto that one person or another has done something radical and race-changing that I never even considered. I often think of a great art museum in Boston when I think of these debates re: media mediation of the outcome — Isabella Stewart Gardner

, a wealthy woman way back, arranged for her home to be turned into a museum when she died but left express instructions that there be no captions on any of the pieces of art, so that visitors would only have their own senses and minds with them when they looked at everything. She didn’t want scholars ruining it for them; she wanted the experience to be pure. There’s something to that….

natesilver: The empirical evidence suggests that the post-debate spin matters a lot, although there’s a question about how much the spin matches the reality, or not.

harry: You want an example of the media framing a debate. This. People thought Al Gore won the first debate in 2000, but it was George W. Bush who gained in the polls afterward. If you don’t remember, the media blasted Gore.

natesilver: We’re also in a different media environment than we were in 2000, though.

In 2012, the social media consensus very quickly became that Obama blew it in the first debate. This year, you could have a case where, like, The New York Times’s lead article implies that Trump “beat expectations” and “raised doubts” about Clinton, but twitter might be saying something wholly different, and the CNN panel afterward might be saying a third thing.

clare.malone: Yeah, Twitter is like quick-drying plaster rather than concrete that sets overnight when it comes to perceptions of who’s won and who’s lost.

micah: So is this all reason not to put too much stock in those “instant polls” that tend to get released right after the debate about who won?

natesilver: Well, yes and no. I actually wish the pundits avoided jumping to conclusions and let the instant polls do more of the work.

clare.malone: Wait, what would be best for democracy? In an ideal world, would the media hold off discussing the debates until the next day? Would that make any kind of change? I.e., put in some kind of tracking poll and see how people actually feel, then report it?

natesilver: If I ran the Council on Presidential Debates, in fact, I’d mandate a “cooling off” period when pundits aren’t allowed to talk about the debate for the first 30 minutes after it happens.

harry: Right, and if I were president, I’d demand whole wheat pasta on every corner.

clare.malone: That, of course, takes away some very necessary responsibilities that the media has in these instances, i.e., FACT CHECKING in real time. If Trump/Clinton tells a big lie during the debate, a lie that might be something viewers won’t necessarily know about off the bat, we need reporters/outlets telling people what’s what.

micah: Last point: Neither Johnson nor Stein made it into the debates. What effect will that have on Clinton and/or Trump? And are Johnson and Stein’s gooses cooked?

natesilver: Cooked or baked?

harry: I think it helps Clinton. She has been losing voters to them, and this can help focus the race on just her versus Trump.

micah: Interesting, so Johnson and Stein’s loss may be Clinton’s gain?

natesilver: I mean, it’s not great news for them, obviously. Maybe we need a scenario where we split the difference, and the threshold for getting into the first debate is like 10 percent instead of 15 percent, and it rises to 20 percent as the campaign goes along?

clare.malone: I don’t know. I think that people might still trend towards them if they’re not inclined to like Clinton/Trump, at least for a little while.

natesilver: Yeah, the thing is, Johnson and Stein are serving more as “none of the above” votes for a lot of voters anyway. I’m not sure that people are necessarily on board with their platforms.

clare.malone: Right.

natesilver: But it’s certainly a missed opportunity. Or a denied opportunity, is maybe the better way to put it.

clare.malone: I think they should be in the debates, if only so the American people are more informed about who they are placing their protest vote with.

harry: Johnson is getting a lot of votes from younger voters like Bernie Sanders did. I get the feeling that ideology isn’t their chief concern.

clare.malone: It’s a “fuck the system” vote, which is perfectly valid way to vote any year, and is perhaps more en vogue this year than ever before.

micah: Final thoughts?

harry: We’ll be live blogging these debates, and if you don’t follow us you don’t deserve to eat dinner.

clare.malone: What impact will Brangelina’s breakup have on the race, if any?

micah: Let’s let readers answer that one.

2016 Senate Forecast

Our Live Elections Podcast Previews The First Debate

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On Monday night, our elections podcast crew was joined by a full house at the PlayStation Theater in New York for a live taping in which we discussed the terror attacks in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota and how Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton responded. We then previewed the first debate between Clinton and Trump, scheduled for Monday night. Farai Chideya discussed her FiveThirtyEight series, “The Voters,” and joined the latest round of obscure election trivia.

You can listen to the audio in the player above. We’ll soon be posting a partial transcript of the conversation. Keep your eye on this page.

VIDEO: How will the recent attacks on NYC affect the election?

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— Galen Druke (@galendruke) September 19, 2016

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling"? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.