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Where Should The Big Ten Expand Next? We Crunched The Numbers.

Where Should The Big Ten Expand Next? We Crunched The Numbers.

By Nate Silver

Aug. 25, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Should Notre Dame or Clemson be headed for the Big Ten next?

Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images

If it were up to me — and I grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, where you could literally hear the roar of the crowd from Spartan Stadium in my backyard on game days — the Big Ten would have stopped expanding after 12 teams. Penn State, added in 1990, and Nebraska, in 2011, were natural-enough fits: big, public Midwestern1 research universities with good academics and excellent sports.

Instead, in 2014, we got … Rutgers,2 which was supposed to deliver the New York metro market to the Big Ten. I’m a huge sports fan who’s been living in New York since 2009, and I have had exactly zero conversations about Rutgers sports. Since joining the Big Ten, the football team’s conference record is 12-58.

Having given up on the Big Ten being a Midwestern conference, I’m actually on board with its newest additions: UCLA and USC. At least they’re schools with great football traditions — and historical connections to the Big Ten through frequent Rose Bowl matchups.

So screw it. At this point, it’s a big game of “Risk” with two superconferences, and the Big Ten is playing for keeps against the Southeastern Conference. Which schools should the Big Ten add next?

The Action Network recently reported that the Big Ten is considering these seven programs: Notre Dame, Miami, Florida State and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Oregon, Washington, Stanford and California. Is that a logical list of schools to want? Do other programs also belong in this tier? And are there good backup options if the Big Ten is spurned by this group?3 

Let’s consider a broad universe of possibilities — pretty much every plausible expansion candidate. Specifically, we’ll evaluate:

All current Atlantic Coast Conference schools.All current Pac-12 schools except UCLA and USC.All current Big 12 schools except Texas and Oklahoma, which are leaving for the SEC in 2025.SEC schools Missouri, which reportedly preferred the Big Ten before joining the SEC, and Vanderbilt, which the SEC probably wouldn’t care too much about losing.Football independents Notre Dame and UConn.Group of Five schools Cincinnati, Houston, Rice and SMU. (Yes, Cincy and Houston have already been confirmed to be joining the Big 12, but let’s assume the Big Ten is playing an especially long game in its program-poaching strategy.)

That’s a total of 38 schools. We’ll measure them in three broad categories — sports, fit and market — using a series of quantitative metrics. I’ll describe the process below.4

Sports

Within each major category, schools can score a maximum of 100 points. For instance, Notre Dame has the highest sports rating among potential expansion candidates with 77 points, while Rice has the lowest, with 6. 

This score is determined by rating each school from 0 to 10 in a number of subcategories, each of which has a multiplier based on its relative importance.5 Those scores are calculated based on the school’s placement relative to the nation’s highest and lowest values in each category.6

In sports, the subcategories are:

Recent football performance (3x multiplier): The football program’s performance over the past 20 years according to Sports-Reference.com’s SRS ratings, where the most recent season (2021) was assigned a weight of 20 and 20 seasons ago (2002) is assigned a weight of 1. Historical football performance (3x multiplier): Historical finishes in the final AP poll of each season, where a first-place finish scores 25 points, a 2nd-place finish scores 24 points, and so on.Historical men’s basketball performance (2x multiplier): Getting the balance right between football and other sports was a little tricky. Men’s basketball brings in a fair amount of revenue, and sports like women’s basketball, hockey and baseball also contribute to the bottom line at some schools. But it’s football that drives TV contracts. In any event, I gave some credit for non-football sports in the sports category. To evaluate historical men’s basketball performance, I counted each NCAA tournament appearance, plus a 3x bonus for each Final Four appearance and a 5x bonus for each national championship.Total NCAA championships in all Division I team sports (2x multiplier). This varies greatly by school. For instance, Stanford leads the pack with 131 NCAA championships across all team sports, while Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech and Kansas State have never won a championship in anything.

Here, then, are the sports ratings for every possible expansion candidate.

Which Big Ten candidates have the most athletic excellence?

Sports ratings among selected Big Ten expansion candidates, according to weighted averages of football and men’s basketball success and total team NCAA titles

School▲▼ Football, recent (3x)▲▼ Football history (3x)▲▼ Men’s Basketball (2x)▲▼ NCAA Titles (2x)▲▼ Sports score▲▼ Notre Dame 9 10 5 5 77 Oklahoma State 9 4 6 7 65 North Carolina 5 4 10 7 61 Oregon 9 5 3 6 60 Stanford 7 4 3 10 59 Clemson 10 7 1 2 57 Florida State 7 8 2 3 55 Utah 8 2 5 5 50 Washington 7 6 2 3 49 West Virginia 7 4 4 4 49 Miami 7 7 1 2 48 TCU 8 6 0 2 46 Arizona State 6 5 1 5 45 California 4 4 4 6 44 Duke 2 4 9 4 44 Missouri 7 5 3 1 44 Pitt 6 6 4 0 44 Georgia Tech 5 6 3 0 39 Houston 4 3 5 4 39 Louisville 5 2 8 1 39 Baylor 6 4 2 2 38 Virginia Tech 7 5 1 0 38 Kansas State 6 3 5 0 37 Cincinnati 6 1 6 1 35 Colorado 2 5 2 5 35 Syracuse 2 3 6 4 35 NC State 5 2 5 1 33 Arizona 3 1 6 4 32 Virginia 3 1 4 6 32 Kansas 1 1 9 3 30 Boston College 4 3 2 2 29 Iowa State 5 0 3 3 27 Texas Tech 5 2 2 1 27 Wake Forest 4 1 3 3 27 Oregon State 3 2 3 2 25 UConn 0 0 7 5 24 SMU 2 3 1 2 21 Washington State 4 2 0 1 20 Vanderbilt 2 0 1 2 12 Rice 0 2 0 0 6

Sources: Sports-reference.com, NCAA

No one totally maxes out this category. Although several current Big Ten schools (such as Ohio State) have strong sports programs across the board, most expansion candidates excel at either football or non-football sports, but not both. Still, Notre Dame comes the closest, scoring a 77. Oklahoma State, which has had excellent football results in recent years and has also won lots of championships in sports like wrestling and golf, is next with 65 points, followed by North Carolina (61) and Oregon (60).

Fit

I already discussed some of the characteristics that describe current Big Ten schools. They are mostly public schools7 with very large enrollments and good research programs (all but Nebraska are members of the Association of American Universities, or AAU). No current Big Ten members have a religious affiliation. Most are flagship schools in their states. They’re all at least decent academically, and some have good or great academics.

And geographically? Well, they used to be Midwestern, but when your last four additions are Rutgers, Maryland, UCLA and USC, you’ve pretty clearly given up on that. Because I tried to replicate the Big Ten’s thinking rather than describe what I’d prefer, there’s no category in my fit index for geographic proximity to current Big Ten members. However, I did consider rivalries against current (and newly incoming) Big Ten schools, which are geographically driven to some degree.

More specifically, these factors make up the fit component:

Academic ranking (3x multiplier), from U.S. News & World Report.AAU membership (1x multiplier), The Big Ten has sometimes spoken of AAU membership as a near-prerequisite for addition to the league. Maryland and Rutgers were AAU members, as are UCLA and USC. However, I think we need to take this with a grain of salt. Nebraska was kicked out of the AAU after it had accepted a Big Ten invitation but before it officially joined the conference. The Big Ten would clearly be head-over-heels for Notre Dame, which is not an AAU member. And rumored targets such as Florida State and Miami are also not in the AAU. So I assigned this factor only a 1x multiplier. Still, it has more impact than you’d think, because I treated it as an absolute: a school got 10 points for being in the AAU and 0 otherwise.Enrollment (2x multiplier). Total enrollment at a school’s main campus. Note that the current Big Ten schools8 have very large enrollments, with an average of just under 44,000 students (Northwestern is the smallest with about 22,000, which is still relatively large for a private school). SPF: Secular, Public, Flagship (2x multiplier). This SPF isn’t about sunscreen: it’s a bunch of minor categories rolled into one. A school got 4 points if it’s a public university, 3 points if it’s a state flagship university and 3 points if it has no religious affiliation. Rivalries (2x multiplier): Rather than evaluate this subjectively, I simply added up the total number of football games each school has played against current Big Ten members, plus incoming USC and UCLA. Notre Dame easily tops the list with 460 all-time games against Big Ten opponents — that’s actually more than Penn State, which has been in the Big Ten for 29 seasons! Which Big Ten candidates are the best “fit”?

Fit ratings among selected Big Ten expansion candidates, according to weighted averages of various academic ratings, total enrollment and rivalry history with current Big Ten schools

School▲▼ Academics (3x)▲▼ AAU (1x)▲▼ Secular, public, flagship (2x)▲▼ Enrollment (2x)▲▼ Rivalries (2x)▲▼ Fit Score▲▼ California 9 10 10 8 7 87 Washington 7 10 10 9 7 83 North Carolina 9 10 10 5 3 73 Virginia 9 10 10 4 4 73 Arizona 5 10 10 9 4 71 Pittsburgh 7 10 7 5 8 71 Colorado 5 10 10 7 5 69 Stanford 10 10 3 2 7 64 Missouri 4 10 10 5 6 64 Oregon 5 10 10 3 6 63 Georgia Tech 8 10 7 6 1 62 Kansas 4 10 10 5 5 62 Utah 5 10 10 6 2 61 Florida State 8 0 7 8 2 58 Duke 10 10 3 2 3 56 Arizona State 4 0 7 10 4 54 NC State 6 0 7 7 4 54 Iowa State 4 0 7 7 6 52 UConn 7 0 10 5 0 51 Vanderbilt 10 10 3 1 1 50 Virginia Tech 6 0 7 7 2 50 Syracuse 7 0 3 4 7 49 Notre Dame 9 0 0 1 10 49 Oregon State 3 0 7 6 6 47 Clemson 6 0 7 4 2 44 Washington State 2 0 7 6 6 44 Cincinnati 3 0 7 8 2 43 Rice 9 10 3 0 0 43 Miami 8 0 3 2 3 40 Wake Forest 9 0 3 0 3 39 West Virginia 0 0 10 4 5 38 Houston 2 0 7 9 0 38 Kansas State 3 0 7 3 4 37 Boston College 8 0 0 2 3 34 Texas Tech 1 0 7 8 0 33 Oklahoma State 2 0 7 4 2 32 Louisville 2 0 7 3 0 26 SMU 7 0 0 1 1 25 Baylor 6 0 0 2 1 24 TCU 6 0 0 1 1 22

Sources: U.S. News & World Report, Association of American Universities, stateuniversity.com, oglethorpe.edu, sports-reference.com

The top fit score belongs to Cal with 87 points. It checks pretty much every box as a flagship state school and AAU member with a large enrollment and very good academics; it even does OK in the rivalries category because of its long tenure of matchups against UCLA and USC. 

Other state flagship universities with strong academics follow just behind it: Washington (83 points), North Carolina (73) and Virginia (73).

Market

While the Big Ten gives a lot of lip-service to academic and athletic “fit,” here’s what I suspect it cares about most: a school’s market size, popularity and TV ratings. So any measure of conference candidacy must also give heavy consideration to those factors.

Before we proceed further, there’s a twist that affects all of the ratings in this category: They’re adjusted to account for projected population growth through 2040.9 Conference-building is a very long-run process: Though it doesn’t always work out that way, you’re hoping to keep schools together for decades (consider that the current Big Ten was founded in 1896). And different parts of the country are expected to grow at much different rates. Population growth in the Big Ten’s traditional footprint, the Midwest, has stagnated, while states like Texas (35 percent projected population growth between 2020 and 2040, according to the University of Virginia’s Demographics Research Group), Florida (32 percent) and Colorado (32 percent) are expected to become considerably more populous. That may help explain the Big Ten’s interest in expanding westward and southward.

With that caveat out of the way, here are the components of our market ratings: 

College football TV ratings (3x multiplier). As listed here and here from the diligent work of sports journalist Zach Miller, this reflects the school’s average TV viewership between 2015 and 2021, skipping the COVID-19-affected year of 2020.10 This method may appear biased toward weak schools in strong conferences since they can piggyback off matchups against stronger rivals, but that’s not really how it works. The SEC is not going to waste a prime-time slot on Vanderbilt, even if the Commodores are playing the Crimson Tide. So considering how much TV contracts drive revenue and everything else in college sports, this is one of the more robust categories.Media market footprint (2x multiplier). This one’s complicated, but the idea is to evaluate which media markets the school is the dominant college football brand in, using The New York Times’s college football fandom map from 2014.11 However, I also gave credit to schools for their immediate metro areas even if they aren’t the dominant football brand there, although with a penalty if the school is competing against other current Big Ten members.12 In doing so, I tried to replicate the Big Ten’s thinking in adding Rutgers (its nominal presence in the New York media market, despite schools like Notre Dame having a bigger following in NYC).All-sport revenues (2x multiplier). Using data from CollegeRaptor.com — not related to our RAPTOR NBA projection system, so don’t ask it about the Boston Celtics — the university’s earnings across all sports.13Popularity on Google Trends (3x multiplier). The combined number of searches for the school’s football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball teams since 2015 using Google Trends topics data.14 Football tends to dominate here, although men’s basketball moves the needle at schools like Duke and UNC, and women’s basketball makes some difference for UConn.Which Big Ten expansion candidates have the best markets?

Market ratings among selected Big Ten expansion candidates, according to weighted averages of total revenue, TV ratings, popularity and media footprint

School▲▼ All-Sport Revenues (2x)▲▼ Football TV Ratings (3x)▲▼ Football + Basketball Popularity (3x)▲▼ Media Footprint, FOOTBALL (2x)▲▼ Market Rating▲▼ Notre Dame 8 10 9 10 93 Florida State 10 8 8 7 82 Oregon 7 7 8 9 77 Clemson 6 9 10 3 75 Miami 8 7 7 7 72 North Carolina 7 4 9 9 71 TCU 9 7 3 9 66 Washington 9 5 5 8 64 Baylor 8 6 6 4 60 Utah 6 6 4 4 50 Texas Tech 5 5 5 4 48 Virginia Tech 4 5 4 6 47 Arizona State 5 4 4 6 46 Louisville 7 5 5 1 46 Syracuse 6 2 4 7 44 Duke 8 1 8 0 43 Virginia 6 3 5 3 42 Oklahoma State 4 7 3 1 40 West Virginia 2 5 5 2 38 Houston 1 4 2 8 36 NC State 5 4 3 2 35 Stanford 3 6 1 4 35 Kansas 2 1 7 3 34 Colorado 4 3 2 5 33 Iowa State 3 4 5 0 33 Missouri 3 2 3 6 33 Arizona 5 2 4 2 32 SMU 4 1 1 9 32 Georgia Tech 2 3 2 6 31 Washington State 4 5 2 1 31 Pittsburgh 3 3 2 2 25 California 2 3 1 4 24 Boston College 3 1 1 5 22 Kansas State 1 3 3 0 20 Vanderbilt 5 1 1 2 20 UConn 1 0 3 3 17 Rice 0 0 0 8 16 Oregon State 3 1 2 0 15 Cincinnati 0 2 2 1 14 Wake Forest 2 2 0 2 14

All market ratings are adjusted for projected population growth through 2040. Popularity measured by Google Trends.

Sources: Zach Miller, Google Trends, The New York Times, CollegeRaptor.com, University of Virginia Cooper Center

The market category correlates pretty closely with the schools the Big Ten is most interested in, according to the Action Network’s report. Notre Dame dominates with 93 points — nearly a perfect score. Florida State (82), Oregon (77), Clemson (75) , Miami (72) and UNC (71) are next.

Next up, let’s look at the composite rankings for all expansion candidates, broken down into five tiers. But before we do that, let’s inspect how current Big Ten members would score in all of these categories.

Ratings for existing and incoming Big Ten schools School Sports Fit Market Composite Ohio State 86 94 98 93 Michigan 81 95 90 89 Penn State 67 87 93 82 Wisconsin 67 92 73 77 USC* 78 73 74 75 Michigan State 67 82 66 72 UCLA* 76 81 51 69 Iowa 60 80 57 66 Minnesota 42 91 49 61 Nebraska 55 53 64 57 Illinois 33 94 41 56 Indiana 36 89 43 56 Maryland 46 75 42 54 Purdue 30 86 38 51 Northwestern 30 72 31 44 Rutgers 8 79 38 42

*Incoming conference member.

As you’ll see when we get back to the expansion candidates, these scores won’t be easy to beat. It’s not just Michigan and Ohio State, either: College sports are a very big deal throughout the Midwest, so even middle-of-the-road Big Ten members such as Iowa and Minnesota are huge, revenue-generating institutions.

But here are some numbers to keep in mind when thinking about the candidate tiers: The average composite rating among current Big Ten members — including UCLA and USC — is 65. The lowest rating (42) belongs to, of course, Rutgers, so we’ll call this the “Rutgers Line.” 

I also considered a rating of 50 to reflect what the Big Ten probably thinks of as its “replacement level.” All Big Ten members except Rutgers and Northwestern are above this line, and Northwestern was always sort of a weird fit (of course I’d say that as a graduate of the University of Chicago, Northwestern’s academic rival). Notably, the Big Ten has previously spurned both Missouri and Pitt — logical, regional fits for the Big Ten that fall below this 50-point threshold.

All right, let’s break the candidates down into five tiers. You can probably guess the highest-ranked school:

Tier 1: Notre Dame School Sports Fit Market Composite Notre Dame 77 49 93 73

Do I really need to go into detail here? The Big Ten would take Notre Dame in a heartbeat.

It’s worth noting that Notre Dame’s composite score isn’t that much higher than the four schools in the next tier. That’s because it would be a fairly big outlier for the conference as a private, religious, non-AAU school with a fairly small enrollment — although it makes up for that in the fit category with a strong academic score and by being a football rival to many current Big Ten programs.

But it blows everyone else away in the market category. There might be a lesson here: With a big enough market, your fit doesn’t need to be perfect — rather, it just needs to be good enough that you can squint and see it. Good academics plus strong rivalries against many current Big Ten members is likely enough for Notre Dame to pass the squint-and-see-it test in the conference’s eyes, despite its other oddities.

Tier 2: No-Brainers School Sports Fit Market Composite North Carolina 61 73 71 68 Oregon 60 63 77 67 Florida State 55 58 82 65 Washington 49 83 64 65

North Carolina, Oregon, Florida State, Washington. I call these no-brainers because they all rate as at least average relative to current Big Ten members.

Why does that matter? Well, the Big Ten faces somewhat conflicting incentives. On the one hand, it wants to expand the pie as much as possible. There’s no harm in adding a TV household in Seattle just because you already have one in Des Moines. On the other hand, it does sometimes need to divide that pie. Of course, this can be subject to negotiation: whether new members get a full share when the conference signs a huge TV contract. But you run some risk of dilution if a school takes from the league more than it brings in.

I don’t think that’s a risk with these four schools. For one thing, as I mentioned, they all have at least average overall ratings relative to current Big Ten members. And they all have above average market ratings (the average market rating among current Big Ten members, plus UCLA and USC, is 59). To some extent, the other categories would probably also improve over time.15

North Carolina, Oregon and Washington are also schools that fit the paradigmatic Big Ten template of public flagship schools which are AAU members and the dominant college brands in their states. Beyond that, there are some variations on a theme. Oregon has the lowest U.S. News ranking and the smallest enrollment of these schools, but the best sports program. Washington brings the Seattle market and 47,400 students. Both schools would also provide natural rivals to USC and UCLA.

North Carolina’s position might be more surprising here, given that it wasn’t on The Action Network’s short list. But in many ways, it’s comparable to Oregon and Washington, or perhaps even a superior option in some respects. North Carolina is a big state and getting bigger, UNC has improved on the gridiron to the point where it’s at least usually making bowl games, and it’s excellent in the non-football sports.

Florida State isn’t in the AAU, but it has a pretty good academic ranking and a huge enrollment. I’d put it like this: if you think Notre Dame is a good enough fit for the Big Ten because of its other attributes, then Florida State has to qualify as well; it has a better fit rating than Notre Dame, in fact. And it has the second-best market rating after Notre Dame.

OK, now let’s discuss some of the more borderline cases:

Tier 3: How big should the Big Ten be? School Sports Fit Market Composite Clemson 57 44 75 59 Utah 50 61 50 54 Miami 48 40 72 53 Stanford 59 64 35 53 Cal 44 87 24 52

All five schools in this tier rate above replacement level (a 50-point composite score) but below the 65-point average of current members. Let’s briefly discuss their individual strengths and weaknesses, since they each have a unique case.

Clemson hasn’t been discussed much in the context of Big Ten expansion, probably because it’s a more intuitive fit for the SEC. If the Tigers were interested in the Big Ten, though, I’d assume the interest would probably be mutual. Yes, there are some risks; Clemson’s case rests heavily on having been a dominant football team lately and getting high TV ratings as a result. They haven’t been so great historically, don’t offer much in the other sports and play in a small state in a small market. They also have a worse fit rating than Notre Dame, and you could argue that they don’t quite pass the squint-and-see it test. Still, they have a higher composite rating than other members of this tier — and more to the point, stealing Clemson from the clutches of the SEC would be such a coup that I have to assume the Big Ten would do it.

Miami has been a rumored expansion target. That may in part reflect that it’s an easier “get”; the University of Florida would reportedly object to its presence in the SEC. And perhaps Miami feels more “on brand” for the Big Ten, which has a presence in other big urban markets (New York, Chicago and now Los Angeles). Still, it’s a fairly small private school that’s not an AAU member, albeit one with pretty good academics. It actually has a lower fit rating than Clemson. Then again, its market rating is well above the current Big Ten average, which probably matters most for the league.

Stanford and Cal rate lower than I would have expected. They’re great fits — yes, Stanford is private, but its academic prestige and AAU membership are probably enough to make up for that — and Stanford has an excellent athletic program (that’s less true for Cal).

But they just aren’t very big as sports brands. There are several problems: The Bay Area has low interest in college football, and these programs have little following outside that region, even as compared to schools like Fresno State and Oregon (not to mention incoming Big Ten members USC and UCLA). Also, there are two of them. Maybe the Bay Area is worth planting a flag in, but is it worth doing so twice over? Cal does particularly poorly in the market category, with a score of just 24. Stanford at least gets a 35, which is well below the current Big Ten average but is at least higher than Northwestern’s, a peer school in many respects.

Then there’s Utah, which rated higher than I expected. It has a few things going for it: The football program has turned from terrible to very competitive in recent years; it recently joined the AAU; and the state is growing prodigiously.

Now that we’ve covered all of the teams the Big Ten might realistically consider for expansion, let’s zoom out to the schools that clearly aren’t great candidates but might be worth at least thinking about:

Tier 4: Strategic reaches School Sports Fit Market Composite Virginia 32 73 42 49 Arizona State 45 54 46 48 Duke 44 56 43 48 Missouri 44 64 33 47 Pitt 44 71 25 47 Colorado 35 69 33 46 Oklahoma State 65 32 40 46 Arizona 32 71 32 45 TCU 46 22 66 45 Virginia Tech 38 50 47 45 Georgia Tech 39 62 31 44 Syracuse 35 49 44 43 Kansas 30 62 34 42 West Virginia 49 38 38 42

Would I be hugely surprised to wake up to the news that the Big Ten had added Duke, Arizona or even Oklahoma State? No, not really. I’d assume the Big Ten had some sort of strategic rationale. Maybe not a good rationale, but a rationale nevertheless. (Remember, all of these candidates rate higher than Rutgers.)

For the most part, the universities in this tier fall into the “good fit, mediocre sports and market” category. Virginia, Missouri, Pitt, Colorado, Arizona, Georgia Tech and Kansas all meet this description, for instance. The fact that the Big Ten has historically spurned both Missouri and Pitt should make the other schools in this category feel worse about their chances, although I would asterisk Georgia Tech as a high-upside play as an AAU member in the Atlanta market that used to have pretty good football.

What about the other programs? Arizona State is a well-rounded candidate in a state with a growing population; its case is pretty similar to Utah’s, though it isn’t an AAU member or a flashship university (but does bring the Phoenix market). Duke’s case depends entirely on how much you care about academics and basketball. Oklahoma State has an excellent sports rating but is a big stretch in terms of both fit (largely because of its poor academic rating) and market (although, if the Big Ten were desperate to add members in the South and couldn’t get the ACC to split up, it’s one of the only palatable options). TCU is in the very desirable Dallas market but has the worst fit rating of any of the 38 schools I tested.

Finally, there are some candidates in Tier 5 that fell below the Rutgers Line:

Tier 5: Let’s be honest, there are better choices School Sports Fit Market Composite Baylor 38 24 60 41 NC State 33 54 35 41 Houston 39 38 36 38 Iowa State 27 52 33 37 Louisville 39 26 46 37 Texas Tech 27 33 48 36 Washington State 20 44 31 32 Cincinnati 35 43 14 31 UConn 24 51 17 31 Kansas State 37 37 20 31 Oregon State 25 47 15 29 Boston College 29 34 22 28 Vanderbilt 12 50 20 27 Wake Forest 27 39 14 27 SMU 21 25 32 26 Rice 6 43 16 22

There’s not much to see here. Getting into New England could be interesting for the Big Ten, but the only Division I football programs in the region are Boston College, Connecticut, and UMass, and BC and UConn rated poorly enough that I didn’t even bother testing UMass.

And in the very long term, Houston — which will soon join the Big 12 — could be interesting as a big public university in a very big market. Time to join the AAU, Cougars!

Ultimately, this is all a question of how “big” the Big Ten wants to be, and I can’t really answer that. Does the conference risk brand dilution if it’s in every nook and cranny of the country, or is that exactly what it wants?

But from a football perspective, my personal view is that once you get past the point where every school can play one another in football every year or at least most years — something that’s already hard once you’ve expanded to 16 teams — I don’t know that there are any particularly bright dividing lines. For instance, expanding to 24 schools — say, by adding everyone in Tiers 1, 2 and 3 — might even work better than 20, since you could split them into four fairly geographically balanced divisions:

Pacific: Cal, Oregon, Stanford, UCLA, USC, Washington

Great Plains: Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern, Wisconsin

Great Lakes: Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Purdue

Atlantic: Florida State, Maryland, Miami, Rutgers, North Carolina, Penn State

You could also use a promotion-and-relegation system. Split into a First Division and a Second Division. With the 24 schools listed above, for instance, maybe you’d start with something like this, given each school’s recent football performance:

Upper Division: Florida State, Iowa, Miami, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, USC, Wisconsin

Lower Division: Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Nebraska, North Carolina, Northwestern, Purdue, Rutgers, Stanford, UCLA, Washington

Get as creative as you want; the dividing lines could be somewhat porous. In a nine-game conference schedule, for instance, each team could play six members of its own division, two members of the other division and one designated rivalry game. You could have a four-team conference playoff featuring the top three finishers in the Upper Division and the first-place finisher in the Lower Division. To facilitate promotion and relegation, the top team in the Lower Division could be promoted to the Upper Division, and you could have a one-game playoff for the second promotional slot. Some teams could also earn immunity from relegation if, say, they’d made the College Football Playoff Top 25 in two of the last three seasons.

However the Big Ten wants to approach things, it’s clear that its days as a concentrated group of Midwestern schools are over. The SEC versus Big Ten arms race is on. The only question is which side of the battle lines your school lands on — if it’s invited to the fight at all.

Do You Buy That … Democrats Have A Chance Of Winning Senate Races In Ohio And North Carolina?

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver breaks down Democrats’ chances of keeping Senate control on ABC’s “This Week.”

Can Tim Ryan Really Win Ohio’s Senate Race?

Can Tim Ryan Really Win Ohio's Senate Race?

By Nate Silver

Aug. 19, 2022, at 10:02 AM

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER

Ohio is the type of Senate race that Democrats shouldn’t have much business competing in. The state is increasingly red, having voted for former President Donald Trump by 8 percentage points in 2020. True, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown was reelected in Ohio in 2018 — but that was in a strongly Democratic environment that is unlikely to be replicated this November, in what’s expected to be a Republican-leaning year.

And yet, Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan had led in five consecutive polls since late July until an Emerson College poll this week put J.D. Vance — the Trump-endorsed venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy” — ahead. Ryan still holds a narrow 1-point lead in our polling average.

Our election forecast is … confused. The Lite version of our forecast, which just uses the polls, sticks to our polling average and has Ryan as a slight 56 percent favorite.1 The Classic version, which incorporates “fundamentals” such as Ohio’s Republican lean and Ryan’s fundraising advantage so far, puts Ryan’s chances at 39 percent and Vance as a slight favorite. And the Deluxe forecast, which also accounts for expert race ratings — in essence, the conventional wisdom that the race is an uphill climb for Democrats — has Ryan’s chances at 21 percent, making Vance a clear favorite.

I’ll save the value of expert ratings and the differences between the Classic and Deluxe versions of the forecast for another time. But suffice it to say that they do add to our forecast’s accuracy — or at least they’re supposed to. So there’s no need to, say, blend the Classic and Deluxe forecasts together; the Deluxe forecast should be the one you’d bet on. It already puts the “right” amount of weight on the expert ratings, based on what would have produced the best forecasts empirically.

Still, even a 21 percent chance isn’t nothing. So let’s step back and ask a more basic question: Is it plausible that Ryan could win in a state like Ohio in a political environment like the one we’re likely to see in November?

Ohio is 12.4 points more Republican than the country as a whole, based on FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric, which is derived from the past two presidential elections and recent state legislative elections.2 And it’s not as though Ohio just had a special thing for Trump, either; lately, it’s been GOP across the board, except for Brown. All of its statewide elected officeholders are Republicans, and both the state House and Senate are strongly Republican.

To better understand the odds Ryan faces, we can create what I call a “simple fundamentals” forecast by adding a state’s partisan lean to the generic congressional ballot’s margin, or the margin by which one of the two parties is winning the race for Congress. (This differs from the more complicated fundamentals formula that our forecast uses, but it still serves as a good sanity check.) And if we add Ohio’s 12.4-point Republican lean to Democrats’ 0.5-point lead on the generic ballot, the simple fundamentals forecast predicts that Vance will win by 11.9 points.3

But of course, the political climate may not look like this by November. Our forecast, for instance, still thinks it’s more likely than not that the political environment ends up being somewhat Republican leaning. And if, say, the environment winds up favoring the GOP by 3 points, the simple fundamentals forecast would predict Vance wins by around 15 points.

This raises the question of whether there are recent examples of a Senate candidate outperforming the simple fundamentals forecast by 15 points? Or for that matter — let’s say the political climate remains pretty decent for Democrats — even 10 or 12 points?

The short answer is: Yes. But 10 points versus 15 points makes a pretty big difference.

Let’s go back to the last midterm in 2018. Here’s what a simple fundamentals forecast would have shown in each Senate race (excluding a handful of unconventional races)4 based on FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean as we calculated it at the time, and the generic ballot, which favored Democrats by 8.6 points that year. (Conveniently, the generic ballot was very accurate that year: Democrats also won the House popular vote by 8.6 points.)

Where Senate candidates over- and underperformed in 2018

Projected 2018 Senate results based on the state’s partisan lean and the generic ballot (the “simple fundamentals” metric), as compared to the actual results

State Inc.
Party Simple
Fund. Actual
Result Difference West Virginia D R+22 D+3 D+25 North Dakota D R+25 R+11 D+14 Minnesota (Klobuchar) D D+11 D+24 D+14 Montana D R+9 D+4 D+13 Tennessee OPEN R+20 R+11 D+9 Virginia D D+9 D+16 D+7 Texas R R+8 R+3 D+6 Pennsylvania D D+7 D+13 D+6 Ohio D D+1 D+7 D+6 Missouri D R+10 R+6 D+5 Wisconsin D D+7 D+11 D+4 Indiana D R+9 R+6 D+3 Maryland D D+31 D+35 D+3 New York D D+31 D+34 D+3 Arizona OPEN R+1 D+2 D+3 Wyoming R R+39 R+37 D+2 Connecticut D D+19 D+20 D+1 Minnesota (Smith) D D+11 D+11 EVEN Delaware D D+22 D+22 EVEN Nevada R D+7 D+5 R+2 Hawaii D D+45 D+42 R+2 Florida D D+3 R+0 R+3 Washington D D+20 D+17 R+3 Michigan D D+10 D+7 R+4 Nebraska R R+16 R+19 R+4 Utah OPEN R+23 R+32 R+9 New Jersey D D+22 D+11 R+11 Rhode Island D D+34 D+23 R+11 Mississippi (Wicker) R R+7 R+19 R+12 Massachusetts D D+38 D+24 R+14

Figures may not add exactly due to rounding.

We excluded 2018 Senate races in California, Maine, Vermont, New Mexico and the Mississippi special election from our analysis.

Out of 30 conventional Senate races, the simple fundamentals prediction was off by 10 points or more in eight races. Democratic incumbents outperformed the fundamentals by double digits in Minnesota (Sen. Amy Klobuchar), Montana (Sen. Jon Tester), North Dakota (Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, although she lost anyway) and West Virginia — with Sen. Joe Manchin beating the simple fundamentals projection by an astounding 25 points.

Meanwhile, Democratic incumbents underperformed the simple fundamentals by at least 10 points in Massachusetts (Sen. Elizabeth Warren), New Jersey (Sen. Bob Menendez) and Rhode Island (Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse), while Republican incumbent Sen. Roger Wicker outperformed them by 12 points in Mississippi.

In other words, what we can learn from the 2018 midterms is that even in this era of high partisanship, meaningful divergences from the simple fundamentals aren’t that uncommon in midterm years. With that said, they aren’t routine either, and they usually require something a little bit different to be going on.

Being an extremely popular incumbent is one way a candidate can overperform the fundamentals, but that doesn’t apply to Ryan. And for what it’s worth, while his margin of victory in his House district was quite spectacular in 2016 — 36 points, in a district that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won by just under 7 points that year — it was less spectacular in 2020, when he drew a more competitive challenger and won by about 8 in a district that President Biden won by 3 points.

Moderate candidates also sometimes outperform the fundamentals, as Manchin and Heitkamp did in 2018, whereas right- or left-wing candidates can underperform them, as in the case of Warren. Does that apply in Ohio? Maybe, but it’s a little bit of a stretch. Ryan’s website brands him as a “post-partisan populist,” but he’s no Manchin. Instead, he has a fairly typical Democratic voting record — he’s voted with Biden 100 percent of the time in this current Congress, for instance.

Then again, Ryan’s current advantage in Ohio may have less to do with him and more to do with Vance. Inexperienced candidates tend to underperform in Senate races, and Vance has never run for office before.

Ryan might also have some success in portraying Vance as being too far to the right — Vance previously supported cutting Social Security and Medicare — and Ohio has a history of preferring relatively moderate Republicans, such as outgoing Sen. Rob Portman and former Gov. John Kasich. However, in Vance’s case, perhaps it’s safer to say that his views have been all over the place as he was willing to change course to win Trump’s endorsement.

Finally, another way to underperform the fundamentals is to be tinged by scandal, as Menendez was in 2018 (although the corruption case against him ended in a mistrial). But there’s nothing comparable in Vance’s case.

With that said, there’s nothing that says you need “one neat trick” to win a Senate race. You can grab a little bit from different buckets. Maybe Ryan isn’t Manchin, but maybe he succeeds in presenting himself as a populist moderate, outperforming a generic Democrat by a few percentage points. Maybe Vance’s inexperience makes him easier to define, and Ryan can characterize him as the worst of both worlds: too much of a sell-out to Trump for Kasich-voting moderates in the suburbs and too much of a sell-out to Wall Street for blue-collar voters in the exurbs. Ohio is red, but it isn’t Mississippi or Wyoming. It isn’t that high a hurdle to overcome.

So there are two things I think we can be certain about. First, this will be much easier for Ryan to pull off if the political climate in November winds up favoring Democrats by a couple of points rather than favoring Republicans instead. Yes, it’s a small sample size, but there were plenty of candidates in 2018 who beat the “simple fundamentals” by 10 points; only Manchin did so by more than 15 points, however. Second, Ryan would be much better off if the election was held today instead of in November.

It’s not that I don’t necessarily believe the polls now, although it’s certainly worth mentioning that Ohio is in a part of the country where the polls have done quite poorly in recent elections. Biden trailed Trump by only 1 point in FiveThirtyEight’s Ohio polling average, for instance, but lost the state by 8 points.

But even if I were convinced that pollsters have fixed their problems in the Midwest, there are a couple of things that would make me nervous as a Democrat. One is the relatively high number of undecided voters in the race. In our polling average, Ryan has 43.9 percent and Vance has 42.7 percent, meaning that 13.4 percent of voters are not committed to either candidate. That’s on the high side at this stage for a Senate race. It may reflect the fact that Vance is not a terribly familiar name, but Republican voters in Ohio may not care once they see the “R” beside it.

This relatively narrow polling advantage for Ryan is also coming at a time when Ryan is using his fundraising advantage to dominate the airwaves. Reinforcements are coming for Vance, though, so Ryan might lose that advantage by November.

So does Ryan have a chance? Yes, absolutely. But I think the Deluxe version of the forecast probably does a pretty good job of pegging Ryan’s chances to roughly 1 in 5.

Politics Podcast: Why Have Democrats’ Odds Of Winning The Senate Improved?

In the past week, Democrats’ odds of keeping control of the Senate after the midterms have ticked up to around 60 percent, according to our Deluxe forecast model. In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss the news events and polling that have contributed to this change. They also ask whether there is reason to expect the current environment to hold as we get closer to Election Day and whether we should be skeptical of the polls showing Democrats performing well in parts of the Midwest where polls have repeatedly underestimated Republicans.

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The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. 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.

Are Democrats Really Going To Win In Ohio And Wisconsin?

In recent weeks, Democrats’ odds of keeping control of the Senate after the 2022 midterms have ticked up to sixty percent, according to our deluxe forecast model. In this installment of “Model Talk,” Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss the news events and polling that have contributed to that change. They also ask whether we should be skeptical of polls showing Democrats’ performing well in parts of the Midwest where polls have repeatedly underestimated Republicans.

Will This Be An Asterisk* Election?

Will This Be An Asterisk* Election? *It takes something unusual for the president’s party to do well in the midterms.

By Nate Silver

Aug. 12, 2022, at 8:18 AM

In 2020, we took pains to emphasize that, although he was a significant underdog in our forecast, former President Donald Trump could absolutely win reelection. Frankly, I’m not sure we’ve taken the same care this year when it comes to Democrats and the U.S. House. Their chances to hold the House started out in the Trump-in-2020 vicinity when we launched our forecast — 13 percent — and now they’ve risen to 20 percent amidst an improving political environment for Democrats.

It’s still not terribly likely Democrats win control of the House. But it also means that a GOP takeover is far from a foregone conclusion. So let’s talk about that 20 percent chance.

Democrats started out with 222 House seats following the 2020 election, four more than the number required for a majority. According to our model, there’s a seven percent chance that Democrats wind up with fewer than 222 seats after November, but still enough seats to maintain a narrow majority. Meanwhile, there’s a 13 percent chance that they actually gain seats.1 Those numbers combined give them their 20 percent chances.

Time for a quick historical gut-check. In 19 midterm elections since World War II, the president’s party lost fewer than five seats in the House once, in 1962. And they gained seats twice, in 1998 and 2002. That means three out of 19 times the president’s party would have a successful enough midterm to keep the House, or 16 percent of the time. That squares pretty well with our model’s 20 percent estimate. Of course, the closer we get to the election, the more we can rely on data specific to this year — but it’s good that we’re somewhere in the ballpark.

But what about the exceptions when the president’s party had a good midterm? Did they have anything in common and moreover, is there anything they can tell us about this midterm cycle? Let’s take them one by one.

Democrats’ strong performance in the 1962 midterms under former President John F. Kennedy — they lost only four House seats and gained three Senate seats — is often attributed to the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, which happened in late October, 1962. The Cuban missile crisis might be overlooked by Americans who came of age after the Cold War, but Kennedy himself thought that there was about a one-in-three chance that it would end in a nuclear war, so its resolution was one of the more pivotal moments of the 20th Century.

There are reasonably clear parallels between 1962 and 2002, when there was a huge rally-around-the-flag effect following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and former President George W. Bush’s Republicans actually increased their House majority. 

The 1998 midterm, however, wasn’t precipitated by a threat to American security. Instead, there were special political circumstances: The House launched an impeachment inquiry into then-President Bill Clinton in October 1998 in what would later become the first impeachment trial against a president since 1868.2

And if we go back to midterm elections before the end of WWII, the last time the president’s party gained seats in the House at the midterms was in 1934, in what historians interpret as a show of support for former President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program following the Great Depression.

In short, all these elections featured some sort of special circumstance: the Great Depression, the Cuban missile crisis, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the first impeachment of a president in 130 years. But such a definition is inherently fuzzy as you can potentially retrofit almost any political or news development to constitute a “special circumstance,” in the same way that almost every election gets called “the most important election of our lifetimes.”

Take the 2010 midterms, for example. A Democratic president with an ambitious agenda had been elected two years earlier following a global financial crisis. But unlike in 1934, former President Barack Obama’s Democrats didn’t gain seats in the House. Instead they lost 63, the steepest defeat for any party at the midterms since 1938.

Or consider the 1990 midterms. Former President George H.W. Bush was already fairly popular, but there was a further rally-around-the-flag effect following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, sending his approval ratings into the mid-70s amidst before slipping back into the 50s by November. Still, that might seem to qualify as a special circumstance. Yet, Bush’s Republicans lost seats in the House. Then again, they lost fewer seats than usual (eight seats) along with just one Senate seat, so maybe that counts as a partial validation of our theory.

In any event, if Democrats do keep the House, I don’t think historians will have any trouble giving 2022 the special circumstances asterisk, like they do now for 1998 and 2002. But what is the special circumstance?

It might be noted that the 2022 election is taking place amidst the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which is unquestionably one of the most important events in every American’s lifetime given the widespread death and disruption to daily life. With that said, most people have stopped caring about COVID-19; only 1 percent of Americans regarded it as the most important issue facing the country when asked about it by Gallup in June. Perhaps if the delta and omicron variants had never come along, Democrats could have campaigned on some miraculous return to normal. Instead, the return has been bumpy, epidemiologically, economically and otherwise. So that’s not the special circumstance I’m referring to, although the pandemic may have hard-to-measure knock-off effects on politics and society.

Nor is the special circumstance an international or security crisis, although there are some conflicts that could boil over by November — that’s part of the intrinsic uncertainty in an election forecast. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t having any obvious effect on the U.S. midterms for now, but if there were use of nuclear weapons or any direct American or NATO military engagement, that could change. Meanwhile, Chinese-U.S. tensions over Taiwan are also rising following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit there.

Instead, I’m keeping my eye on the potential for a special political circumstance, more like what we saw in 1998, like when the public responded to increasing Republican partisanship and their efforts to impeach Clinton.

Republicans swept to power in Congress in 1994 on an unusually substantive platform including the “Contract with America,” and even achieved a number of policy successes with the centrist, triangulating Clinton. So for them to turn around and make the 1998 midterms about Clinton’s personal conduct was probably a mistake. Although the Monica Lewinsky scandal seems almost quaint by current standards, the impeachment trial and other investigations into Clinton, reflected a significant escalation of partisanship under then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one that has continued through today.

Of course, partisanship alone doesn’t guarantee an electoral backlash. Near-universal Republican opposition to Obama’s agenda didn’t hurt them at all in the midterms in 2010. Instead, what differentiated 1998 is that Republicans were on the attack and not merely trying to block Democrats from getting their own agenda implemented. Relative to the standards of 1998, impeachment was a dramatic step and one that allowed Clinton to gain significant public sympathy.

This time, Republicans are exercising power not through the Congress but through the courts: most importantly, through the decision by a 6-3 majority of Republican-appointed judges on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Immediately after the court overturned Roe, Democrats began to gain ground on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they’d support in an election, and it’s now translated into some electoral successes, too. In Kansas last week, voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have allowed the legislature to restrict abortion in the state amid very high turnout. And in Minnesota this week, Republicans won a special election in the 1st Congressional District by only 4 percentage points, a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2020. Likewise, on June 28, just a few days after Roe was overturned, Republicans won a special election in Nebraska’s 1st District by only 5 points in a district that Trump carried by 15 points.

Sure, you can make excuses for Republicans on a case-by-case basis — the Kansas ballot measure was confusingly worded, Nebraska’s former Republican representative had been mired in scandal and that Minnesota district has historically been bluer in races for Congress than the presidency. I’d be conservative in putting too much stock in these since it’s a small sample size, too. But at the very least these are hardly the sorts of results you’d associate with a “red wave,” and they suggest that something different might be going on.

It’s not just the courts, either. Republicans are also aggressively exercising power through state governments, especially on abortion, gay and transgender rights and education policy. And although voters don’t regard Jan. 6 as an event as important as Sept. 11 — public opinion about it is also much more polarized — it’s a reminder that Republicans can also potentially seek to achieve power through extralegal means.

If nothing else, Democratic voters have no shortage of motivation to turn out: Many feel as though their basic rights are being threatened, something a party’s voters ordinarily aren’t concerned about when it controls both the presidency and Congress. The “enthusiasm gap” often accounts for much of the presidential party’s disadvantage at the midterms, but it’s not clear it exists this year after Roe was overturned.

All that said, Republicans are still fairly clear favorites to keep the House. Notably, President Biden is quite unpopular despite a modest improvement in his approval ratings, whereas FDR, JFK, Clinton and GWB were all popular at the times of their midterms. The public still has very negative views about the economy and the direction the country is headed in, and that’s usually rough for the party in power to overcome.

But the circumstances of these midterms are also potentially unusual, with high uncertainty, and that’s why Democrats keeping the House is a thinkable outcome.

It’s Hard To Win A Senate Race When You’ve Never Won An Election Before

It’s Hard To Win A Senate Race When You’ve Never Won An Election Before

By Nate Silver

Aug. 5, 2022, at 1:55 PM

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER

Politics doesn’t have a farm system in the way that professional baseball does. But it has a hierarchy of its own for cultivating political prospects. The path usually goes something like this: First, a candidate wins some relatively minor, local office like city council or state representative. Then, they either win a seat in the U.S. House or a statewide office like attorney general. Only then do they run for U.S. Senate or governor.

Most of the Democrats running in competitive Senate and gubernatorial races have followed a version of this course. For instance, John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, was the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, for 13 years before being elected as the state’s lieutenant governor in 2018.

But most of the Republicans haven’t. As a group, they have little experience running for office, and even less experience at actually winning general elections. Historically, such candidates have a poor track record — and in 2022 they could cost Republicans key gubernatorial races as well as control of the Senate.

FiveThirtyEight’s model evaluates candidate experience as part of our “fundamentals” calculation.1 Specifically, for Senate and gubernatorial candidates, we use a four-tiered system based on the candidate’s highest elected2 office:

Tier 3: U.S. Senator or governorTier 2: U.S. representative or statewide elected office (e.g., secretary of state) or mayor of a large cityTier 1: Any other nontrivial elected office (e.g., state senator)Tier 0: Has never held any nontrivial elected office

The reason that experience in winning past elections can send a valuable statistical signal isn’t necessarily that experience in elected office is valuable unto itself. (For instance, candidates who are appointed to the U.S. Senate following a vacancy have poor track records at winning a Senate term for themselves.) Rather, it’s the act of winning an election that counts, since it’s a sign that a candidate is acceptable to some reasonably large group of voters.

Let’s take a look at the experience level of nominees and presumed nominees running in competitive3 Senate races:

Democratic Senate candidates have far more elected experience

FiveThirtyEight’s experience ratings for candidates in competitive U.S. Senate elections

Democrats Republicans State Candidate name Tier Candidate name Tier Arizona Mark Kelly i 3 Blake Masters 0 Colorado Michael Bennet i 3 Joe O’Dea 0 Florida Val Demings 2 Marco Rubio i 3 Georgia Raphael Warnock i 3 Herschel Walker 0 Nevada Catherine Cortez Masto i 3 Adam Laxalt 2 New Hampshire Maggie Hassan* i 3 Donald Bolduc* 0 North Carolina Cheri Beasley 2 Ted Budd 2 Ohio Tim Ryan 2 J.D. Vance 0 Pennsylvania John Fetterman 2 Mehmet Oz 0 Wisconsin Mandela Barnes* 2 Ron Johnson* i 3 Average 2.5 1

* Presumed nominee
i  Incumbent

Democrats have an average experience score of 2.5 in these races, and all the candidates they’ve nominated or are projected to nominate qualify in at least the second tier of experience. Republicans’ average experience rating is just 1.0, by contrast. That’s partly because they have fewer incumbents running, but even if you exclude incumbents from the average, there’s still a huge gap: non-incumbent Democrats have an average experience rating of 2.0 versus 0.5 for Republicans.

Indeed, the Republican nominees for Senate in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania have never held elected office before. Nor has the party’s presumed nominee in New Hampshire, Donald Bolduc.4

Having held elected office is not a prerequisite for higher office, and one can think of plenty of candidates, from Elizabeth Warren to Ted Cruz, who won races for the U.S. Senate as first-time candidates. Even so, some of them had pedigrees in politics or politics-related fields. Cruz had been solicitor general of Texas, for instance — an unelected office but one that gave him a significant public profile. Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent in Arizona, won a Senate race in his first election in 2020, but he had been an astronaut (often a successful launching pad for political careers) and is the husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

This year’s crop of Republican nominees doesn’t have those advantages. For instance, Democrats have a variety of potential attack lines against Blake Masters, the newly minted Republican Senate nominee in Arizona, from his ties to controversial billionaire Peter Thiel to his suggestions that he might privatize Social Security. Ohio’s J.D. Vance has had trouble raising money, a sign that he may lack the donor networks of more experienced politicians. Pennsylvania’s Mehmet Oz has fallen well behind in polls as he has been unable to fend off Fetterman attack ads that emphasize his New Jersey residency.

How about gubernatorial races? Here are the experience ratings in elections for competitive gubernatorial seats:5

Democratic gubernatorial candidates are also more experienced

FiveThirtyEight’s experience ratings for candidates in competitive U.S. gubernatorial elections

Democrats Republicans State Candidate name Tier Candidate name Tier Alaska Les Gara* 1 Mike Dunleavy* i 3 Arizona Katie Hobbs 2 Kari Lake 0 Connecticut Ned Lamont i 3 Robert Stefanowski 0 Florida Charlie Crist 3 Ron DeSantis i 3 Georgia Stacey Abrams 1 Brian Kemp i 3 Kansas Laura Kelly i 3 Derek Schmidt 2 Maine Janet Mills i 3 Paul LePage 3 Michigan Gretchen Whitmer 3 Tudor Dixon 0 Minnesota Tim Walz* i 3 Scott Jensen* 1 Nevada Steve Sisolak i 3 Joe Lombardo 1 New Mexico Michelle Lujan Grisham i 3 Mark Ronchetti 0 Oregon Tina Kotek 1 Christine Drazan 1 Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro 2 Doug Mastriano 1 Wisconsin Tony Evers i 3 Rebecca Kleefisch 2 Average 2.4 1.4

* Presumed nominee
i  Incumbent

You can see another big gap there: Democrats have an average experience rating of 2.4, as compared to 1.4 for Republicans. Excluding incumbents, Democrats have an average rating of 1.7, versus 1.0 for Republicans.

It’s important to note that we shouldn’t regard this as some sort of unlucky fluke for the GOP. Rather, this is part and parcel of the modern Republican Party. Former President Donald Trump didn’t have much political experience when he ran against the party establishment in 2016. Since then he has repeatedly intervened against candidates who he thought were insufficiently loyal to him, regardless of their political pedigrees.

Sure, there are Republicans who challenge Trump — like New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. But that’s a case in point: Sununu chose not to run for the U.S. Senate. That seat is now pretty likely to be retained by the Democratic incumbent, Maggie Hassan, since she’s likely to be running against an inexperienced Bolduc.

Indeed, Democratic chances to keep the Senate continue to inch upward and are now 59 percent according to our Deluxe forecast and 71 percent in the Classic version of our model. First-time candidates like Oz, Masters and Georgia’s Herschel Walker could blow races that Republicans would ordinarily be poised to win.

CORRECTION (Aug. 5, 2022, 2:44 p.m.): The second table in this article has been updated to correct the spelling of Kari Lake’s and Michelle Lujan Grisham’s first names.

CORRECTION (Aug. 5, 2022, 3:13 p.m.): The first table in this article has been updated to indicate that Donald Bolduc is not an incumbent in the U.S. Senate.

CORRECTION (Aug. 5, 2022, 6:57 p.m.): The first table in this article has been updated to indicate that Mandela Barnes and Ron Johnson are still presumed nominees.

What The Pro-Abortion Rights Win In Kansas Means For Other Elections

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses why the Kansas amendment that would have ended state constitutional rights to abortion failed by such a wide margin. They also consider whether abortion as an issue will motivate voters in other elections this fall and look at the primary winners in Arizona, Missouri, Michigan and Washington.

The Justice Department Is Investigating Trump’s Connection To Jan. 6

In Part 4 of this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew weighs the implications of the Washington Post’s report that the Department of Justice is looking into former President Donald Trump’s actions in its Jan. 6 criminal investigation.

How Successful Would A New Third Party Be?

In Part 3 of this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the relaunch of Andrew Yang’s Forward Party, which has joined forces with some centrist groups.