Nate Silver's Blog, page 9
October 19, 2022
Do Americans Actually Get Fed Up And Move To Canada?
In part 1 of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew debates if Americans really do move to Canada, or to different U.S. states, for political reasons.
October 17, 2022
Politics Podcast: The U.S. House Districts To Watch In 2022
There are somewhere in the range of 50 potentially competitive House district races in the upcoming midterm elections. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew explains why they consider four of those districts to be bellwether elections for which party will win control of the House. They also break down a handful of common factors in House races that could help Republicans.
The team also debates if Americans really do move to Canada, or to different U.S. states, for political reasons.
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.
October 14, 2022
Nevada Or Georgia … Which Senate Race Is Most Important?
With less than a month before the midterm elections, we’re tackling some of the most common questions about how last-minute polling and political shifts could affect the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecast.
In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke break down why there is a gap between many states’ Senate and governor forecasts and which states they actually consider purple. They also answer some listener questions on how the model factors in undecided voters and how they personally would rate Senate candidates with similar odds.
Betting Markets Are Treating The Midterm Elections Like It’s A Presidential Election
By Nate Silver
Oct. 14, 2022, at 11:15 AM
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER
For the past few weeks, we’ve been trying to figure out to what extent, if any, Republicans have regained ground in the race for control of Congress. And the answer is … probably some, but not necessarily as much as the conventional wisdom holds.
In FiveThirtyEight’s Deluxe forecast,1 the GOP now has a 34 percent chance of recapturing the Senate. That’s up from a low of 29 percent in mid-September.
In betting markets, there’s been a much sharper shift. In fact, the markets have the race at nearly even, with Republicans having a 49 percent chance of Senate control. That’s up from a low of 33 percent in late August. The markets were in pretty good alignment with FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for most of the cycle; now they’re not.
How come? Well, as I wrote two weeks ago, I don’t think it’s crazy for the markets to be concerned about systematic polling bias. It’s also not crazy for markets to have anticipated some fallout for Democrats from Thursday morning’s worse-than-expected inflation report.
But the gap between the markets and the models is big — and growing. And it’s not just FiveThirtyEight’s model. Several other models are similar or don’t even show a Republican rebound at all.
I wouldn’t care about this much if there had been a steady gap between the markets and the models. If the markets want to take the hypothesis of predictable polling bias more seriously than the models do, or to put more weight on the long history of the president’s party having a poor midterm, that’s fine by me. Aggregating different hypotheses is a strength of markets generally.
Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeigh...
The markets and the models are also telling very different stories about the trajectory of the race, though — and I think this gets at two potential ways in which political betting markets sometimes aren’t that smart.
One weakness of these markets is that they tend to follow the media narrative about the race more so than they do the underlying evidence. The source for this claim: yours truly, because I’ve been doing this for a very long time.2
My impression for the past few weeks is that media coverage has been leaning into the Republican-rebound story. (So has ours, to be unhypocritical about this.) And in some ways, this coverage is justified. Republicans have unambiguously gained ground in the Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada Senate races — and those are important contests! The steady improvement in political fortunes that Democrats experienced in the summer is over.
But the Republican position hasn’t really improved in Arizona’s Senate race, and Herschel Walker has probably lost ground in Georgia. In Ohio and North Carolina, momentum is murky, and any poll movement is hard to distinguish from statistical noise. The generic ballot and President Biden’s approval rating have also not shifted very much. The outlook in the House continues to favor Republicans but hasn’t changed much in either direction.
It’s a messy story. People tend not to click on headlines such as “Republicans Gaining Ground In A Few Key Senate Races, But With A Setback In Georgia; National Trends Unclear, Perhaps Some Hint Of A Republican Rebound, But It Could Just Be Noise ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.”
The other weakness in these prediction markets is that the traders don’t have a lot of technical sophistication about election forecasting. That’s not to say they aren’t sophisticated in general. Traders may know a lot about politics, they may have a good sense for market psychology, and they may be smart people who are good general-purpose estimators. But there are some questions for which actually going through the process of building a model helps a lot, such as in determining how much an election forecast should shift in response to a modest but noisy shift in the polls.
Most of these traders aren’t building election models themselves. I’m confident about that, because I know the sort of people who bet on elections. Poker players, sports bettors, quantitatively minded academics — they all have a lot of overlap with Nate World and I often encounter them in personal and professional settings. They’ll mention that they bet on elections, they’ll mention that they follow FiveThirtyEight and other forecasts, but they usually3 aren’t building election models from scratch.
Nor should they be building them, frankly, because doing so wouldn’t be greatly time-consuming. Building a halfway decent election model would take — I’d estimate from my own experience — a couple of months of hard work if you had a lot of help, and more than that if you didn’t. It’s not a great investment when an election is held only once every other year. You’d be better off working on models to do options trading or to bet on football, where there’s more liquidity and more frequent opportunities to make money.
A lot of the value the models provide, as I mentioned, is in looking at all the polls and not just the ones that get highlighted in the media, which are often a highly nonrepresentative sample.
The models also understand an important fact about midterms: They tend not to turn on a dime, in the way that presidential elections sometimes do. (Although even for presidential elections, most “game changers” are false alarms.) If you hear about momentum shifts in midterms, you should generally be wary.
Why? Well, voters aren’t paying all that much attention. Yes, you’re paying attention because you’re a FiveThirtyEight reader. But the general public pays much less attention to midterms than to presidential elections. Take a look, for example, at Google searches for the word “polls”:
The spikes for presidential elections are much bigger, about three or four times bigger. People certainly notice big stories such as inflation or Roe v. Wade being overturned, but they aren’t following daily news stories in the way they do in presidential years. What happens on cable news tends to stay on cable news.
That’s why, we’ve found, you should be cautious in interpreting shifts in the generic ballot; your default should be to assume that the public’s preference for which party controls Congress is fairly steady, even more so than for whom they’d like to see elected president. It takes a lot to move the needle.
Another dissimilarity between midterms and presidential elections is more obvious but still worth mentioning: There are different candidates on the ballot in every state and district. A scandal involving Biden or former President Donald Trump will spill over into every state; one involving Herschel Walker will probably have an impact only in Georgia. Unlike in presidential races, it is very much not safe to make inferences about how one state is moving based on how others are; a change in the polls in Pennsylvania tells you approximately nothing about one in Arizona.
It’s probably bad for FiveThirtyEight site traffic to say this, but the final few weeks of the midterm campaign may not be all that climactic or action-packed. Certainly, a lot of the individual races are quite fascinating, but “October surprises” that affect one race may not affect others. There may be some changes in the big-picture, topline numbers, but probably not huge ones. And that means we’ll enter Election Day with a lot of uncertainty about which party will emerge with control of Congress.
2022-23 NBA Predictions
How this works: These forecasts are based on 100,000 simulations of the rest of the season. Elo ratings — which power the pure Elo forecast — are a measure of team strength based on head-to-head results, margin of victory and quality of opponent. Our CARMELO forecast doesn’t account for wins and losses; it is based entirely on our CARMELO player projections, which estimate each player’s future performance based on the trajectory of other, similar NBA players. Read more »
Design and development by Jay Boice, Rachael Dottle, Ella Koeze and Gus Wezerek. Statistical model by Nate Silver. Additional contributions by Neil Paine. Illustration by Elias Stein.
October 13, 2022
Politics Podcast: Is Oregon Going To Elect A Republican Governor?
With less than a month before the midterm elections, we’re tackling some of the most common questions about how last-minute polling and political shifts could affect the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecast.
In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke break down why there is a gap between many states’ Senate and governor forecasts and which states they actually consider purple. They also answer some listener questions on how the model factors in undecided voters and how they personally would rate Senate candidates with similar odds.
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.
October 12, 2022
From Gas Prices To The Threat Of Nuclear Conflict … What Is Shaping The Midterms?
It’s October, and the surprises are rolling in. OPEC+ announced it’s cutting oil production by two million barrels a day, President Biden is talking about the threat of nuclear “Armageddon” and shoes keep dropping in the Georgia Senate race. To round up everything that’s going on, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew tries to rank the electoral significance of some of the biggest stories in the news right now.
They also ask whether a longstanding metric from Gallup — which shows strengths for Republicans — is a good use of polling.
October 10, 2022
Politics Podcast: Which News Stories Will Matter For The Midterms?
It’s October, and the surprises are rolling in. OPEC+ announced it’s cutting oil production by two million barrels a day, President Biden is talking about the threat of nuclear “Armageddon” and shoes keep dropping in the Georgia Senate race. To round up everything that’s going on, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew tries to rank the electoral significance of some of the biggest stories in the news right now.
They also ask whether a longstanding metric from Gallup — which shows strengths for Republicans — is a good use of polling.
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.
October 7, 2022
How Our Midterm Forecast Takes Candidates’ Scandals Into Account
On Monday, The Daily Beast reported that Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia who has campaigned on being anti-abortion, paid for his then-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009. Walker has denied the allegation. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how the scandals surrounding Walker have evolved over the course of his Senate campaign and how this could affect the outcome of the race. They break down how candidate misconduct is generally factored into the FiveThirtyEight model and if this newest allegation will even be considered a scandal by the model’s standards.
Nevada Could Be Senate Republicans’ Ace In The Hole
By Nate Silver
Oct. 7, 2022, at 1:13 PM
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER
On the surface, Nevada seems to validate the otherwise somewhat unsuccessful hypothesis of the 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” Authors John Judis and Ruy Teixeira predicted that Nevada would become a light-blue state as Democrats held onto their unionized, working-class base and demographic change brought new Democratic voters into the fold.
Although Democratic nominee John Kerry narrowly lost to George W. Bush in Nevada in the following presidential election, Barack Obama carried the state by a whopping 12.5 percentage points in 2008, and Democrats have won the state in every presidential election since. Nevada’s senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, are both Democrats, as is its governor, Steve Sisolak, and three of its four U.S. representatives.
So, Nevada is usually a pretty reliable state for Democrats, right? Well, not so fast. Cortez Masto, up for reelection this year, is narrowly trailing in the polling average against her Republican opponent, Adam Laxalt, the state’s former attorney general.1 Our forecast has this race at about as close to 50/50 odds as it gets.
And just to be clear about the stakes here, Nevada couldn’t be much more important in determining which party controls the Senate. It is Republicans’ most likely pickup opportunity, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast2 — and the GOP’s second-best target, Georgia, took a big hit this week after new allegations surfaced that Republican nominee Herschel Walker paid for his then-girlfriend to get an abortion in 2009.
The math is fairly simple. If Democrats pick up a seat in Pennsylvania, where Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is favored to win, Republicans will need two pickups to gain control of the Senate, and Nevada and Georgia are the easiest targets. If Fetterman loses, they’ll need one of the two. According to our interactive,3 Republicans’ chances of flipping the Senate shoot up to 56 percent if they win Nevada but are just 11 percent if they don’t. So let’s take a deeper look.
Nevada isn’t that blueConsider Nevada’s presidential, congressional and gubernatorial elections since 2000, as the following table shows.
In Nevada, narrow Democratic wins are punctuated by big lossesDemocratic margin of victory or defeat for presidential, U.S. Senate, U.S. House and gubernatorial elections in Nevada, 2000 to 2020
Cycle President Senate, Class I Senate, Class III House* Governor 2000 -3.5 -15.4 — -18.1 — 2002 — — — -25.9 -46.2 2004 -2.6 — +25.9 -11.0 — 2006 — -14.4 — +4.8 -4.0 2008 +12.5 — — +8.1 — 2010 — — +5.7 -5.6 -11.8 2012 +6.7 -1.2 — -0.4 — 2014 — — — -17.4 -46.7 2016 +2.4 — +2.4 +0.9 — 2018 — +5.0 — +5.4 +4.1 2020 +2.4 — — +2.3 —*Results for U.S. House elections reflect combined results from all congressional districts in Nevada.
Sources: Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, Nevada Secretary of State
Several things stand out. First, although Democrats have a four-election winning streak in presidential races, their record in congressional and gubernatorial elections is checkered. Sisolak was the first Democrat elected governor there since 1994. And even though Cortez Masto’s Class III Senate seat was in Democratic hands for some time thanks to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Rosen’s Class I seat was held by Republicans between 2001 and 2019. House races in Nevada have been swingy, meanwhile. As recently as 2014, Republicans won the state’s combined popular vote for the U.S. House by 17.4 points.
And with the exceptions of Obama and Reid — and we’ll come back to what they had in common in a moment — Democratic wins in Nevada have been narrow. Hillary Clinton’s 2.4-point win in 2016 was similar to her national margin of victory in the popular vote — and Joe Biden’s 2.4-point win in 2020 was less than his 4.5-point national popular-vote win. Sisolak and Rosen, meanwhile, won their gubernatorial and Senate races by 4 and 5 points, respectively, in 2018, but both of them underperformed the national political environment that year, which favored Democrats by almost 9 points. Whether you call Nevada blue, red or purple is something of a semantic question. But it certainly hasn’t been a reliable state for Democrats.
Nevada isn’t a great fit for the new Democratic coalitionPaired together as tipping-point states this year, Nevada and Georgia are moving in opposite directions.
Georgia has a sizable share of Black voters and a multiethnic coalition of increasingly college-educated voters in Atlanta and its suburbs. The Black vote there has held up relatively well for Democrats, and they’ve been gaining ground with college-educated professionals in almost every election. If you tried to create a state in a lab where Democratic fortunes improved even as they had problems elsewhere, Georgia would be about as good a formula as you could get.
Nevada, on the other hand, ranks 44th in the share of adults with a college degree, right between Oklahoma and Alabama. Its Black population is below the national average but increasing. It does have a considerable share of Hispanic and Asian American voters, but they are often working-class — subgroups that Democrats have increasingly struggled with in recent years.
Of course, Nevada is sui generis, with several economic and demographic attributes that aren’t that common in other states. On the one hand, it has a massive workforce in the gaming (gambling), leisure and hospitality industries. To give you some sense of the scale, just one hospitality and entertainment company, MGM Resorts International, employs 77,000 people in Nevada, roughly as large a share of its workforce as Ford Motor Company employs in Michigan. These are mostly working-class and middle-class jobs, often unionized, often held by employees of color. But Nevada doesn’t have as many jobs in culturally progressive industries like media and technology.
On the other hand, Nevada is a major destination for out-migrants from other states who are attracted to its warm weather,4 lack of state income tax and laissez-faire lifestyle. Only 26 percent of Nevada residents were born in Nevada, easily the lowest of any U.S. state. Nevada has traditionally had a big third-party vote — it was one of Ross Perot’s better states, for instance.
This latter group of voters can also be relatively apolitical. If people migrate to Colorado for its crunchy, progressive politics, and to Florida for its YOLO conservatism, the prevailing attitude in Nevada is live-and-let-live, which sometimes borders on political apathy. Political participation is relatively low. Its turnout rate in 2020 was 65.4 percent, lower than the 66.8 percent in the U.S. overall — which is unusual because swing states usually have high turnout. By comparison, for instance, turnout was 71.7 percent in Florida in 2020 and 76.4 percent in Colorado.
Turnout could be Democrats’ saving graceLet’s return to that question I teased earlier. What did Obama and Reid, the two big Democratic overperformers in Nevada, have in common? For that matter, what about Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who never got to compete in a general election in Nevada but performed extremely well in the state’s Democratic caucuses in 2020?
Well, Reid, Obama and Sanders relied heavily on organization, turnout and the state’s union-backed Democratic machine. It’s hard to know whether Cortez Masto — and Sisolak, who is also in a very tight reelection race — will be able to pull off the same. But if you have two large voting blocs in Nevada, and the more conservative of the two is somewhat politically apathetic, turnout at least potentially works to Democrats’ advantage.
Indeed, this may be a race where Democrats need the turnout edge because the other dynamics of the campaign don’t work in their favor. Though he’s an election denier who served as one of then-President Donald Trump’s Nevada campaign chairs in 2020, Laxalt has a relatively traditional resume as the state’s former attorney general — an exception among Republicans in competitive Senate races this year — and in recent polling, he has decent personal favorability ratings.
Although abortion is a strong issue for Cortez Masto in a relatively irreligious state like Nevada, voters in the Silver State rank the economy as their top issue. It’s understandable in a state that was hit hard by the housing bubble and that relies on highly cyclical industries like the casino business, which suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On the turnout front, a CNN/SSRS poll yesterday had both good and bad news for Cortez Masto, depending on how you squint at it. In the survey, she led by 3 points among registered voters but trailed by 2 points among likely voters. Polls among likely voters are usually more reliable, and so the +2 number for Laxalt is the one in our polling average and forecast. But it does suggest a gap that could be closed by a strong turnout operation.
Reid, for instance, won comfortably in 2010 despite trailing in the polling average. Cortez Masto may need a little bit of Reid magic to hold onto her seat.
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