Nate Silver breaks down how likely Democrats are to win the midterms

You too, Tommy. Listen, if you are not subscribed to Still Counting on YouTube, please subscribe. We have people literally making up fake polls out there and spreading it through the internets. And when you subscribe to Still Counting, you help them get quality information into the YouTube ecosystem. So just please do it. Also, it's free. You shouldn't have to pay for this. This is good stuff.

Well, I went to YouTube. I might have found a fake one that sounded better to me than the real one, you know? It's like when they use fake food in commercials, but we love Flipper here. What sorry, what were you saying about Flipper?

No, no. Although they got rid of McDaniel, so maybe that'll help them.

Well, I want to give people anxiety in some sense because we're not in the type of election where you can say with much confidence what's going to happen in the Senate until November 4th or maybe November 5th or 6th, depending on how long Alaska and other states take to count. But we can say Democrats are favored. They have been at around 75% in Flipper for a couple of weeks now. Other models and prediction markets and things like that are kind of catching up to that number. If you look at Polymarket, Kalshi, it's around 70% or so. The way I kind of think about it is Democrats kind of have two ways to win the Senate, right?

First of all, if just the overall map is really blue, like you had a New York Times Siena University poll this week that had a D plus one generic ballot, right? The average is like D plus nine. Anything at like nine, nine and a half, 10, and certainly above, there's just too much pressure even in these red states. Republicans will probably hold on to all these races, right? The number of people should keep in mind is what if there's an 11 or 12 point swing? In 2024, President Trump won Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, Florida. All these states by around 11 or 12 points, right? And that's when he won the national popular vote by two points. If we're in a D plus 10, that's a 12 point swing, and so even without considering regional stuff or candidates, those states become toss-ups. So people can't kind of wrap their head around what the map would look like when it has such a blue tint, I suppose.

So that's one way, right? If Democrats beat the polls by ten in the generic ballot, then statistically it's very likely they'd win. We cannot say exactly which combination, right? If it's more like a D plus seven or D plus eight, right? Then you're counting on candidate quality advantages for Democrats, right? I, you know, personally I think the two races that if I were a Democrat, I would feel safest about, well, not safest about, least anxious about, well, one, North Carolina, right? After that, probably Ohio because there's proof of concept with Sherrod Brown winning several times statewide, including in 2018 in a midterm environment. He wasn't an incumbent technically. Now people still think he's an incumbent, some of them, but he won in a similar environment in 2018. And Mary Peltola has not become a senator before, but she has also won like statewide races.

You know, Talarico in Texas, I mean, I don't think I'm breaking news by saying that like whoever wins Texas is probably whatever 80 or 90% likely to win the Senate. There's been maybe a point or so of tightening there in the polls. If you look at prediction markets though, Talarico's odds have gone up. I think some people are reading early voting tea leaves and seeming to think it's stronger in Democratic areas and or among infrequent Democratic voters. I always urge a lot of caution about that, right? But you know, some polls show Talarico up four, some showing a tie. Maybe there's a little bit of herding. No one else seems to want to step too far out of line in Texas, right? But they could still like a plus two and like, you know, again, Ken Paxton is one of the most scandal-plagued candidates in, you know, left of George Santos or right of George Santos, I guess, right? And like it's kind of it's not that hard, you know, when Beto O'Rourke lost by two and a half points in 2018 against a candidate who might not have been the most charming guy in the world, but Ted Cruz isn't scandal-plagued, right? And then you take a guy with Ted Cruz's charm and six million scandals, it's like it's not that hard to see why Democrats win by a point instead of lose by two.

I think I've maybe contributed to this theory, right? It's both Fox and Marist also has polls that are using a likely voter or heavy likely voter screen that is more red than the registered voter version of the polls. Look, that's one of the more subjective elements of polling. One of the differences this year is that there are different ways to do likely voter models, right? If you just do it based on who says they're going to vote and who is enthusiastic, you have a huge Democratic lead among likely voters, right? I think in the Times poll it goes from like 11 to like 14 points. If you go by past voting history, then particularly in the more red states, then that fades a bit, right? Maybe it's a plus eight or something. And you know, I think maybe some of these pollsters, given that they have some choice, are herding a little bit toward a tie. We saw a lot of this in 2024 when a remarkable number of polls showed a tie, right? Or Trump or Harris up by exactly one point. This is a little bit different, right? You definitely still do see some polls showing Cal Cunningham winning. You don't see very many polls showing Paxton winning, maybe by a point here and there.

And so I, you know, I kind of trust the process a little bit at the same time. In this era where people are very self-conscious of getting things wrong, particularly being high on Democrats, and they have gotten things wrong, so it's a well-placed anxiety. I sometimes wonder if like the polls three weeks before the election are more informative than the polls in this kind of like three-week window where Silver Bulletin and other sites grade pollsters based on their performance. There's a lot of scrutiny, you know? But yeah, I don't know. Ties... Maybe we should just ban ties, right? You have to show someone up by one point.

You know, I've seen a lot of patterns in my day. I, you know, the sun coming up is I would say a more consistent pattern than systematic polling error. So, models like FiveThirtyEight are usually not purely polling averages. They blend polls with what we call fundamentals. And kind of fundamentals usually start with national polls, a generic ballot, and then the presidential lean of a state, right? So, I'm repeating myself a bit, right? But like, in states like Texas, the fundamentals don't necessarily show a Paxton lead because you were in a D plus nine or nine and a half environment and Texas is an R plus 10 or 11 state, right? And so, there's any candidate quality advantage at all for Talarico, right? We actually have a scandal variable in our model that says like a scandal is probably worth a few points, right? And so, like, there isn't this gap between polls and fundamentals as you would think. Maybe in Kansas a little bit.

Even in Kansas though, you know, we have the fundamentals at R plus four and Adam Hamilton is ahead by a point in the polling average. That's a five-point gap. That's high-ish but within the range of, I mean look, in all these governor's races you have like, you know, between El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson you have a five-point gap, between Houssein and Talarico you have like a four- or five-point gap, right? And so like, you know, a five-point gap versus fundamentals to me is within the realm of plausible. You know, I have a little bit more trouble believing South Carolina for example. But like the other thing too that's funny is like, you know, one of the best polls for Democrats I thought I saw this week was in Nebraska. Pete Ricketts put out a candidate showing, I got the right Ricketts, right? Showing himself up three points over Dan Osborn in Nebraska, right? The fact that Republican internal polls, and by the way, the typical bias in internal polls is three or four points. So like that's consistent with the toss-up in a non-partisan poll. You know, Nebraska is a race that Flipper's skeptical about. The fact that Republican internal polls show their candidate ahead only by three points in Nebraska, which is quite a bit redder than Texas. Like that doesn't seem good for Republicans. And their posture has been very defensive, kind of abandoning the House depending on which articles you read. You know, I mean concerned about South Carolina. I mean again, that's kind of where you know, beyond Kansas is when I start to get a little bit more skeptical. Although he has kind of like quasi independent thing going for him. But I don't think I've ever seen worse vibes from a party than I have from the GOP just based on the public internal polls, the rumored internal polls, and like where the resources are being spent.

No, look, you need to have a total collapse in Republican turnout. And maybe you can, I mean look, you can even go to things like, was it in Kansas where there was like an abortion referendum, right? But like in cases like that where turnout is low and Democrats are really fired up and Republicans aren't, then kind of funny things can happen. I mean, you know, it's not one of the more remembered midterms, but 2014 is a year when you had quite low midterm turnout, especially among irregular Obama voters. And what already looked like a fairly bad year for Democrats in the Senate turned into like a nine-seat rout. Republicans beat their polls by a couple of points because I think in that year Obama had beaten his polls in 2012 and at the time the concern was polls are lowballing Democrats and missing these younger voters and Hispanic voters, etc., right? And younger voters don't really turn out that much in the midterms, right? One of the bigger splits is that, you know, notoriously kind of like 20-something and 30-something men in particular shifted bigly to Trump in 2024, right? The biggest turnout differentials are like those guys are not turning out for Roger Marshall or Ken Paxton probably, right? Trump has this iconic status. I mean, remember we also had like the assassination attempt against Trump in 2024. You know, Trump has this iconic status, you know, I don't want to get into semantic debate like whether he counts as like cool or what, right? But like he's got a certain charisma that Ken Paxton doesn't have. And like, you know, so now I wonder if like having been burned by missing these low propensity Trump voters in three presidential elections in a row, if pollsters are kind of like spotting them credit for an extra field goal that doesn't work when the kicker left the stadium already. We're using a lot of sports metaphors here.