Nate Silver's Blog, page 6
December 5, 2022
Do You Buy That … McCarthy Will Eventually Become Speaker?
Nate Silver breaks down Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s chances of becoming House Speaker on ABC’s This Week.
November 21, 2022
DYBT … Trump Is The Frontrunner For The 2024 GOP Nomination?
Nate Silver breaks down former President Donald Trump’s odds of securing the 2024 GOP presidential candidacy on “This Week.”
November 16, 2022
Will Trump Win The Republican Nomination, Much Less The Presidency?
On Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump announced his plans to run for president in 2024. And while he has kept a tight grip on the GOP since 2016, his support is no longer unanimous, especially among party elites.
In this emergency installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how Trump’s campaign will impact the upcoming Republican primary for president, and if this early announcement strategy will pay off during his 2024 campaign.
Emergency Podcast: Will Trump Win The GOP Nomination?
On Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump announced his plans to run for president in 2024. And while he has kept a tight grip on the GOP since 2016, his support is no longer unanimous, especially among party elites.
In this emergency installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how Trump’s campaign will impact the upcoming Republican primary for president.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player 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 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.
Why DeSantis Is A Major Threat To Trump’s Reelection
By Nate Silver
Nov. 16, 2022, at 6:00 AM
GIORGIO VIERA / AFP via Getty Images
The case for Donald Trump as the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination is incredibly obvious. As my colleague Nathaniel Rakich pointed out after the former president announced his reelection bid, Trump has extremely strong favorability ratings among Republican voters. He’s remade the GOP in his image. And predictions of his demise have a notoriously poor track record: I was one of those people who was far too skeptical of his chances for the 2016 Republican nomination for far too long.
And yet, since the midterm elections, something seems to have shifted. People putting money on the line have moved away from Trump in the last week. He now has only a 35 percent chance of winning the 2024 nomination according to prediction markets, down from what it was before Election Day, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is up to 40 percent (though DeSantis has slightly fallen and Trump has risen immediately after Trump’s announcement to run for president).
If I were allowed to bet on politics, I might buy some Trump stock at that price: These prediction markets aren’t always so wise (they did comparatively poorly in the midterms, for instance), and it’s hard to imagine that, given all the influence he still has over Republicans, Trump’s chances are less than 1 in 3.
But I think there’s a pretty solid case to be made for Trump and DeSantis as co-favorites.
It’s not so obvious who’s leading in the pollsAs Rakich points out, Trump has led in the vast majority of polls of Republican voters since the 2020 election. Believe it or not, these early polls do have some predictive power.
However, polls since last week’s midterm show a shift in the race. For example, a YouGov poll released last week found DeSantis leading Trump among Republicans, with 42 percent to Trump’s 35 percent. And a poll by the Canadian firm Leger had DeSantis ahead 45-43 among Republicans, although it had a tiny sample size.
By contrast, a Morning Consult poll from this week found Trump still ahead among potential Republican primary voters, 47-33, although that reflects a gain for DeSantis; two preelection Morning Consult polls found Trump ahead 48-26 and 49-24.
A series of post-midterm polls sponsored by Republican-aligned groups have found DeSantis ahead in early primary states. I am a wee bit skeptical of these partisan polls because people who prefer DeSantis may be trying to spin a “DeSantis has momentum!” narrative. But as I said, DeSantis has also looked pretty good in nonpartisan polls since the midterms. Perhaps it’s a short-term bounce, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the midterms are an inflection point or a wake-up call for Republican voters given all the incorrect predictions of a “red wave.”
And here’s something else: The study of early primary polls that I referred to earlier found that the polls have more predictive power if you adjust them for name recognition. DeSantis’s name recognition is high, but not universal like Trump’s. For example, a Quinnipiac University poll from July found that 35 percent of voters hadn’t heard enough about DeSantis to form an opinion about him.
So I don’t know how much longer “just trust the polls” will be an argument in Trump’s favor. They may go through some wild swings in response to the midterms and Trump’s 2024 announcement. But given Trump’s much wider name recognition, having DeSantis polling fairly close to Trump — or even ahead in some surveys — does not strike me as particularly good news for Trump.
Influential Republicans could help DeSantisI’ll probably publish about a million stories between now and the first primaries about how much the views of Republican “party elites” matter. By that phrase, which is borrowed from the book “The Party Decides,” I refer to influential Republicans and conservatives ranging from elected officials to talk-show hosts. It’s important to clarify that by “party elite,” I’m not necessarily referring to some fuddy-duddy senator who was first elected to office 40 years ago, but rather the broader universe of Republicans and conservatives that GOP primary voters might find trustworthy. Some media figures who were pro-Trump and anti-establishment in 2016 have begun to express reservations about Trump.
In 2016, of course, Trump famously bucked the wishes of the Republican “establishment” and undermined “The Party Decides” view of the race on his way to the nomination. But I think people should be a bit careful about overgeneralizing from that election. In 2016, the party never coalesced around an alternative to Trump; this year, they potentially have one in DeSantis. And every nomination contest has its own dynamic. As bad as “The Party Decides” looked in both the Republican and Democratic primaries in 2016 (given Sen. Bernie Sanders’s vigorous challenge to Hillary Clinton despite virtually zero party elite support) it did great in 2020, when Jim Clyburn and other party elites flocked to Joe Biden right around the South Carolina primary, and Biden rapidly won the nomination after having lost the first three contests. This time, Trump will not have the element of surprise that he and Sanders did in 2016.
We don’t know who GOP voters will see as the most “electable” candidateFrom the standpoint of demonstrating the ability to win elections, the midterms couldn’t have gone any better for DeSantis. He won Florida by 19 points; the state has swung so far right during DeSantis’s time in office that it can no longer really be considered a swing state. By contrast, Trump-endorsed candidates like Mehmet Oz, Don Bolduc, Blake Masters lost key Senate races, while Herschel Walker has his work cut out for him in the Georgia runoff. The gap in candidate quality was plausibly responsible for costing Republicans control of the Senate.
The rebuttal I usually hear to this is that Republican voters must not care about electability since they nominated Trump in 2016. But polls of Republican voters throughout 2015 and 2016 consistently found they did see Trump as electable; in fact, they thought of him as the most electable candidate.
What’s going through the head of a typical Republican voter these days is hard to say. In the modern primary era,1 no previous general election loser has sought a party nomination.2 A party generally wants to move on from its losing candidates; it’s not like there were a ton of Democrats clamoring for Hillary Clinton to run again in 2020, for instance. But of course, GOP voters may not think of Trump as a loser given that a majority of Republicans believe Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. This all starts to get pretty weird: If you’re a Republican who does think the election was stolen, you still have to wrestle with the fact that Biden is president while DeSantis is beginning his second term in the Florida Governor’s Mansion.
We could go into more detail — it certainly won’t hurt DeSantis that Florida has a winner-take-all primary, for instance — but there will be plenty of time for that later. For now, both DeSantis and Trump look like extremely plausible nominees, and anyone else is a distant third.
November 14, 2022
Who Will Have The Advantage In The Georgia Runoff?
This weekend, Nevada’s Senate race was projected for Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, ensuring Democrats will keep their majority in the chamber. In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how the Senate outcome impacts the upcoming Georgia Senate runoff and the projections for key U.S. House races that will determine control of the chamber.
They also break down how pollsters did this cycle, including how partisan pollsters over-projected Republican gains. Finally, they answer some listener questions, including why New York and Florida were the exception to the national trend towards Democrats.
Politics Podcast: Why Democrats Beat Historical Trends In 2022
This weekend, Nevada’s Senate race was projected for Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, ensuring Democrats will keep their majority in the chamber. In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how the Senate outcome impacts the upcoming Georgia Senate runoff and the projections for key U.S. House races that will determine control of the chamber.
They also break down how pollsters did this cycle, including how partisan pollsters over-projected Republican gains. Finally, they answer some listener questions, including why New York and Florida were the exception to the national trend towards Democrats.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player 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 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.
Do You Buy That … Sen. Raphael Warnock Is Favored In Georgia’s Senate Runoff?
On “This Week,” FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver breaks down odds for the upcoming Georgia runoff election.
November 9, 2022
Candidate Quality Mattered
By Nate Silver
Nov. 9, 2022, at 4:48 PM
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER
On Monday, I wrote about my three key questions heading into Election Day. I’ll address the first two — about polling error and turnout — at length once results are a bit more final. But the third question, about whether candidate quality would matter, is the easiest to answer: It’s a resounding yes.
For one thing, just look at the large difference between Senate and gubernatorial results in states with both types of races on the ballot. In the nine states with battleground1 Senate races in states that also had a gubernatorial race on the ballot, there were significant discrepancies between the performance of the candidates:
Ticket-splitting abounded in key Senate and gubernatorial racesMargin between Democratic and Republican candidates as of 3 p.m. Eastern on Nov. 9 in battleground Senate races that also had a gubernatorial race on the ballot
Margin State Senate Governor Difference New Hampshire D+9.6 R+15.7 25.3 Ohio R+6.6 R+25.6 19.0 Pennsylvania D+3.4 D+13.4 10.0 Georgia D+0.9 R+7.6 8.5 Colorado D+12.2 D+17.1 4.9 Wisconsin R+1.0 D+3.4 4.4 Arizona D+5.0 D+0.7 4.3 Florida R+16.4 R+19.4 3.0 Nevada R+2.7 R+4.8 2.1Source: ABC News
We could wind up with as many as five of the nine states where one party wins the governorship and the other wins the Senate race. It’s already happened in New Hampshire and Wisconsin. It could happen in Nevada and Arizona depending how the remaining vote comes in. And it will also happen in Georgia if Democrat Raphael Warnock wins the Dec. 6 runoff after Republican Brian Kemp comfortably won the gubernatorial race.
Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeigh...
And even in states where there weren’t split-ticket winners, there were still big gaps in candidate performance. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, won reelection by nearly 26 percentage points at the same time the GOP Senate candidate, J.D. Vance, won by just 6.2 In Pennsylvania, Democrat John Fetterman did well enough in the U.S. Senate race against Mehmet Oz, but Josh Shapiro nonetheless won by a much larger margin against Doug Mastriano in the gubernatorial contest.
Alternatively, we can benchmark candidates against the partisan lean index in each state, which measures a state’s partisan baseline and is mostly based on recent performance in presidential races. For this comparison, we’ll use the projected final Senate results as estimated by The New York Times/Upshot’s “Needle”3:
Democratic Senate candidates outperformed state partisan leanDifference between FiveThirtyEight partisan lean index and projected final margin for Democratic candidates in battleground Senate races
State Democratic candidate Republican candidate 538 PLI NYT Needle Proj. Diff. AZ Mark Kelly* Blake Masters R+7.1 D+2.8 +9.9 NH Maggie Hassan* Donald C. Bolduc D+0.6 D+9.0 +8.4 GA Raphael Warnock* Herschel Junior Walker R+7.4 D+0.5 +7.9 CO Michael Bennet* Joe O’Dea D+6.7 D+14.0 +7.3 PA John Fetterman Mehmet Oz R+3.0 D+4.0 +7.0 OH Tim Ryan J.D. Vance R+12.1 R+6.6 +5.5 NV Catherine Cortez Masto* Adam Paul Laxalt R+2.5 D+0.4 +2.9 WI Mandela Barnes Ron Johnson* R+3.8 R+1.3 +2.5 NC Cheri Beasley Ted Budd R+4.8 R+3.7 +1.1 WA Patty Murray* Tiffany Smiley D+14.2 D+11.0 -3.2 FL Val Demings Marco Rubio* R+7.4 R+16.0 -8.6*Incumbent
Source: The New York Times
If The Upshot’s estimates are right, then Democrats will outperform the partisan lean of the state in all but two battleground Senate races: Washington, where Republican Tiffany Smiley held her own against incumbent Democrat Patty Murray, and Florida, where Marco Rubio cruised to reelection by double digits.
This measure isn’t perfect. States like Colorado and Florida may be trending in different directions relative to their historic norms, so results like these may say as much about the electorate as the candidates. We also don’t know what the overall national environment was on Tuesday. Maybe Democrats beat their partisan lean everywhere on Tuesday and not just in these battleground Senate races, although an initial estimate from Pattrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights suggests that Republicans will win the popular vote for the U.S. House, which would make Democrats’ strong performances in Senate battlegrounds even more impressive by comparison.
None of this is surprising — in fact, it’s common: In the 2018 midterms, the results in a number of major Senate races also significantly diverged from the partisan lean of the state. Republicans nominated a series of inexperienced Senate candidates, and such candidates tend to underperform statewide benchmarks. And although the incumbency advantage is smaller than it once was, some of the strongest-performing candidates, such as Rubio and New Hampshire Democrat Maggie Hassan, were incumbents. And candidate quality almost certainly matters less than it once did, given the high partisanship of the modern political era. We’ve even made some changes to our forecast model to reflect this.
Still, another feature of modern American politics is exceptionally close races. So a candidate who underperforms by even 2 or 3 percentage points — let alone 5, 10 or more points — will often cost their party the election. Sometimes, quality has a big effect on quantity.
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