There’s A 6-In-10 Chance One Party Will Control Both Chambers Of Congress 56:47

How are you doing? Good. A little bit tired. Just got here this morning. You got here this morning? Yeah. Were you on a red-eye? Yeah. Oof.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druke. I'm Nathaniel Reed-Silver. And this is Model Talk. As listeners, I'm sure, can tell, we are back in studio together. We were synchronized again on that. How you doing? What's your full name, Galen? My full name is weird. It's Galen Byrne Druke.

B-U-R-N-E? No, B-E-R-N. Oh, like feel the burn? Feel the burn, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Or like short for Bernard or Bernice. One of my parents had a family named Bernard and the other had a family named Bernice and they couldn't like settle on which one to name me. And so they just chose Bern. That's honestly actually why my middle name is Bern. I like that. Yeah. It's all about compromise. Yeah. And it's resulted in me having three names that are all like not real names.

Galen's normal-ish. Is it? I mean, Druke seems kind of made up. Druke definitely feels made up. Yeah. Galen's normal-ish. Burn is literally made up. Yeah. And Galen is rare. Yeah. But my parents knew. My parents knew the kind of person they were naming when they named me Galen. Okay. By which I mean a Greek physician. Is that what a Galen is? No, no. Yeah. I was making a gay joke, Nate. Come on. Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, okay.

But if you have to explain it, it's not funny. Is this the part where we tell the audience that you slept on a red eye last night and that's why my humor isn't landing? Not because I'm not funny? You know, I got some napping in here and there. Okay. I don't feel too bad. More importantly, I can guess the reason that you were on a red eye last night because I saw you on TV.

Yeah. And I purposefully decided not to do any more research. I just only wanted to have the information that was presented to me in this one clip that I saw on Twitter. And apparently you were doing a dirty diaper.

You were on poker TV. It looked very dramatic. You achieved whatever the thing was that you wanted to achieve. And the headline or caption or whatever, which I retweeted. So if folks would like to see what I'm talking about, you can go find me on Twitter. And it said that you did the dirty diaper or you did a dirty diaper. What is going on? What were you doing in Las Vegas? You should have done as a host like a little bit more research. But I wanted this to happen. That's why I didn't do any research. So.

Last fun weekend before the midterms, there is a poker tournament series called the Poker Masters put on by a studio production company called Poker Go. So these tournaments are, if you make the final table, they're televised, right? There were like roughly 75, I think, entries.

played all day saturday made the final six and the final six is televised in this case there's a day off so on on monday that's why you had to run when we're recording the podcast you're like i have got to go yeah i had like i got like i gotta go i'm on poker tv i'm on poker television i had to you know so did the podcast but anyway fortunately i made it down to the final two players um

Competing against an opponent named Adam Hendricks, who's a very nice guy from Alaska, actually is currently the number one ranked poker player in the world, according to the Global Poker Index ranking. Wait, does that mean you're the number two poker player in the world? That's not how that works. No, I'm like 308 or something. And you did a dirty diaper on him. That's not actually... You're like, that's not how the language works. That's not how poker works.

We're playing a hand, and in this hand, it's actually like a fairly technical hand, right? So the flop is, I think, people know what the flop is. I'm overestimating the amount of poker knowledge, right? Honestly, I think most of our listeners probably know more about poker than I do. So for my own sake. We're playing Texas Hold'em. You get five cards.

The first three cards are, I think, like a queen, a nine, and a deuce, all the same suit. I think it was spades. So you had a deuce. I'm sorry, not a queen, a jack, maybe a jack and eight and a deuce, all spades, right? I have three deuce, which is literally the worst hand in poker, but does make a pair. And because you're playing heads up, then sometimes even a pair is a good hand. So my opponent...

Was what's called imposition meaning they act last which is a big advantage in poker, right? If you know what the other person does then That's powerful. However, the person who acts first can block and then if the player bets you can raise a check raises what it's called Right. This hand is weird in that

I check raised on the flop, which is the first three cards. At that point, I might actually have the best hand, but it's a very vulnerable hand. So if you're ahead, then you want him to fold and not have any way to catch up. If you're behind, you're usually giving up, right? But you also have the option to turn your hand into a bluff. Which is what you chose. To try to fold him off a stronger hand, right? And then the fourth card is called the turn. The fifth card is called the river.

Both those cards were good for the range of hands that I'm representing, right? They were good cards for me, for my range, as a poker player would call it. And so I made big bets both times, right? And on the river, I went all in. And this is for my tournament life. He had more chips than me, right? So if I lose his hand, it's over. Mm-hmm.

And he eventually folded, like, a very good hand. He actually folded a flush, the second best possible flush. Damn, you got him. So the dirty duck was just that he was kind of in, like, the shitter about, like, really contemplating whether to call or whether to fold. It was a big bluff in a spot that was successful.

You ultimately came in second. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. We're splitting the weddings, right? That's not my understanding. Not. Okay. Well, that was my understanding. How much did we win? 140,000.

Damn, Nate. Looks like we're going out to drinks tonight. Maybe. Okay, so this is not a poker podcast, but thank you listeners for the portion of this podcast that was a poker podcast. We got to talk about politics. I know it's your favorite topic, Nate. So let's get into it. Okay. The last time we recorded...

the podcast, Republicans odds in the House and Democrats odds in the Senate were at parity. And that is again the case. So Republicans have a 69% chance of winning the House. Nice. Democrats have a although I see that you just pulled it up and Democrats now have a 70% chance of winning the Senate. So maybe they're not at parity anymore. Has it switched a little bit since the last time I checked? It's close enough. It's close enough. Let's not get crazy. 70 ish.

70-ish. So here's the question we're going to start off with. The forecast assumes that as we get closer to Election Day, Republicans standing in the generic ballot will improve.

During the month of September, Democrats standing in the generic ballot has actually, if anything, improved. Not so dramatically, maybe like half a point advantage to 1.3 points ahead today. However, the model has not really gotten any more confident about Democrats' chances of winning elections.

the Senate, for example, because you would think like if this forecast has this prior, the model has this prior, that as we get closer to Election Day, Republicans will start to do better. And that doesn't, in fact, happen. Wouldn't you expect that the forecast would become more confident in Democrats' chances of winning the Senate? Well, it was getting more confident for a long time. I mean, in the past,

like literally week or so. There was, for example, the ABC News Washington Post poll that came out this weekend that had Republicans several points ahead on the generic ballot. So I think I wrote last week for the site, there's not any sign of a shift back to where the GOP yet. I think since then, like this week, there have been a smattering of better polls for the GOP. But with that said, I mean, not that much has changed, right? I think the people who are becoming more worried about Democrats standing are maybe more worried about like

you now have a different series of news events that could have effects in the future, right? Democrats had kind of a very good summer with the backlash to the Dobbs decision with... Falling gas prices. Falling gas prices, with Biden having this string of legislative successes, right? Not clear if that will continue. You have more focus on immigration now, which tends not to be the easiest issue for Democrats to deal with. You have between UK...

fiscal policy and hurricanes and pipelines being blown up, right? You have potential for increases in... Economic volatility? Economic volatility again, right? The stock market has been losing for quite a number of weeks in a row. People are pessimistic that we'll be able to get out of this without either high inflation or a recession or some combination thereof. And so you could argue that actually we're maybe removing from this

hot, wet, democratic summer into an environment that might be a little bit better for the GOP. It might revitalize those kind of fundamentals, so-called, that are pretty good for the GOP. But it hasn't, I mean, has it happened yet? I think not really. I mean, you're kind of cherry picking if you're making that claim right now. Right. Which is why I'm asking, so far, we haven't really seen a turning of the tides in the data, even though if based on news events, you could imagine one happening. My main question here is,

The model is making a sort of like a fundamental assumption that Republicans will perform better in the generic ballot as we get closer to Election Day, right? So it thinks the fundamentals are better for elections. Yeah. Without that happening, shouldn't there be more confidence? But we're talking, I mean, we still have what, like five weeks to go, six weeks to go, right? Six weeks from yesterday. So six times seven is 42, right? I mean, so yeah, I mean, there's like a little of an effect, but it's spread out over...

42 days, right? It's not going to be noticeable. I mean, it is noticeable over time that you've had this steady rise since the beginning of summer in Democrats' chances. You know, and now you've seen polling, it's a bit more equivocal, I think, in the past

week or so, certainly some individual Senate races are pulling a bit more tightly than they might have before, for example. I think we can probably look at Wisconsin as the prime example of that. You know, I'm curious because towards the tail end of wet, hot Democratic summer, as you termed it,

There was a lot of worrying about the state of polling because Democrats were overperforming in states where you truly didn't expect, you know, Mandela Barnes to be pulling six points ahead or so of Ron Johnson in the Senate race there.

Then the polling started getting closer. There were a spate of high quality polls that came out showing Mandela Barnes trailing Ron Johnson by a couple points, etc. We now are polling average shows Johnson leading Barnes for the first time in a while. And

I think that was cause for some more confidence in the polling. Like, okay, this is more what we would expect. But then you look at a state like Ohio, and that hasn't gotten closer at all. Like, Tim Ryan is still doing far better than you would expect from a Democrat in a state like that. So I guess my question is either should we still be concerned about the polling or is Ohio weird? I still kind of...

to this notion that like, that we know what the right answer is and therefore we should be happy when polling matches our... Expectations. Preconceived expectation, right? Yeah, no, you're right. That is kind of like... I mean, like if you're like... Sure, if you're like making a forecast, right? I mean, because we obviously do have like our version of the fundamentals so that implicitly does assume that the polling might be biased in one direction or another. Okay, I mean, like that's fair enough, but like, you know, I want independent information that I can then aggregate together and I don't necessarily need the information...

to match life can be noisy sometimes right um and so yeah i just really object to like

I mean, yeah, I mean, if I'm a betting man, then I would bet on Republicans to win in Wisconsin and certainly in Ohio. But I don't, you know, you don't prejudge the polling until you actually see the results. Let me put this question another way based on a question we got from Hube, which was of the three closest races where the Republican is the incumbent, Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina. If you had to choose which one is the likeliest to flip, which would it be?

Well, I mean, only one of those is actually an incumbent candidate, right? Only Ron Johnson in Wisconsin is the actual incumbent. Yes, exactly. They say incumbent as in currently hold the seat, but in North Carolina and Ohio, the Republican is retiring. I would still bet on Wisconsin because I think Ron Johnson's a somewhat problematic candidate, right? He's been very pro-Trump, right, including on some of the January 6th stuff. He's not the most charismatic guy ever.

Unlike North Carolina or Ohio, Wisconsin did vote for Biden in 2020. So if you have a 2020 type environment in 2022 in six weeks, then it's more purple than the other two states. And so, I mean, that would like that's to me, that's not to have that race tied. Now I'm doing exactly what I criticize people for. Right. To have that race tied seems like not.

Not crazy. Ohio, which is a pretty red state at this point, that would be a bigger deviation. Yeah, for sure. And one thing I've noticed in the polling is that this is not as much the case in Wisconsin. The polling there is tied in the Senate race, but it's tied at around 47 or so percent for both Barnes and Johnson. When you look at Ohio and North Carolina, and then also Nevada, for that matter, a seat that Democrats currently control,

Neither candidate is pulling anywhere close to 50%. Right. Yeah. You're seeing maybe there's a one or two point spread, but it's like one candidate is pulling at 44%. The other candidate is pulling at 43%. Should that increase our expectation of uncertainty surrounding those races? Yeah.

I mean, it's pretty normal that you're going to have some undecideds, right? It is true that if you have more undecideds or more third party votes, the uncertainty is higher, right? None of those races strikes me as unusual. People sometimes invert this. They'll say, well, if an incumbent is not pulling 50%, they're in trouble. That's not true. That's just empirically not true. You want to look at the margin, but there's more uncertainty if there's more undecided voters. And the flip side of that is kind of

true, which is that if you are at 50%, then you're usually pretty safe. Right. And I was looking at some of these competitive Senate races. It looks like the main competitive race where one candidate, as far as the Senate is concerned, is already at 50% is Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Yeah. He's been pulling above 50% in recent weeks and something like, what is it, six or seven points ahead of Oz in that race? He's seven points ahead. And that race has tightened. I mean, we've had Fetterman as much as

11 points ahead. He's actually at 49.5, so he's fallen below 50. But yeah, that's a race where the polls are telling a pretty confident story. Sidebar for a second. Are you aware that The Economist also has a forecast? I think vaguely. Vaguely? Yeah. So they give Democrats an 80 plus percent chance of winning the Senate 10 points better than where we're at. Yeah, I would look to...

pile on republicans at plus uh 400 yeah at 20 i would like invest a lot of money in that how much would you invest i can't actually bet on election forecasts but like yeah i would would you bet your uh winnings from uh the poker tournament a little much a little much yeah i mean yeah because you still gotta buy me drinks you don't want to like lose it all yeah fair enough so i guess that's you've said as much as you will about what you think about that forecast um 80 a lot yeah

Yeah. And we might get there if Democrats, if things haven't shifted by that much in four or five weeks, and we will probably be higher, right? But like right now, I mean, 80% is, I mean, what's the classic model say? I mean, to be fair enough, classics at 77%. You're like, oh, maybe I take that back. No, but I feel much better about like pricing in some...

skepticism about some of these races is what is because we are looking at the expert forecast. The experts are expressing the skepticism about Ohio, Wisconsin, races like that. And that is implicitly assuming that like, yeah, maybe the polling is a little bit funky in some of these states. So I think I think the kind of

deluxe model is well hedged. Well, because actually in the Economist forecast, the modal outcome is still the same number of Senate seats, 51 seats. They're just more confident, I guess. Okay. If that's the case, then I think their model was overconfident in 2020 when they had Biden with a 99% chance of winning the popular vote back in June of 2020, which was insane. Yeah. So they build somewhat overconfident models. But to be clear,

there are a history of models that are a lot worse on this dimension than The Economist. But it's easier to... We won't rehash 2016, don't worry. Oh, no, I never think about 2016. No, but it's easier to like... This is where it gets a little weird, right? It's like... I'm being very inarticulate. I'm sorry. Maybe it is the red eye. You know, we already incorporate some conventional wisdom into this deluxe forecast. So people might want to take our forecast and then hedge further, but it's already hedging. Mm-hmm.

Some to some degree in ways that are a little bit complicated, but I think it's an appropriate hedge. The question is like whether we're hedging too much or not enough. One thing that usually happens around this time in an election is that we get more polls that are based on a likely voter model, which means that we're getting results that have give us some indication of what the electorate will look like based on who will actually turn out.

The assumption, again, has been that once the likely voter model has switched on, Republicans will start doing better. Are we seeing much change between the registered voter model and the likely voter model in polls? I should probably look at what all those polls that list both versions are saying, right? There was a fairly big gap in the ABC News poll. But our model accounts for this, right? It assumes that Republicans will do better in

among likely voter polls. And so already adjust registered voter polls on that basis. So it's not like an extra boost in our forecast because it's already, in theory, priced in to the model. And again, it can be a thing where it has a prior and the prior can be overridden based on what the actual likely voter polls say. So traditionally, Republicans tend to do better among likely voters in general, and the opposition party tends to do better at the midterms. The out party, so-called, is more enthusiastic than the president's party.

Are both of those assumptions true? Well, for one thing, as the GOP has shifted toward a less educated coalition, they may not have the kind of regular suburban Mitt Romney sweater-wearing kind of, you know, first to the polls at six in the morning before they go to soccer practice with their son or daughter. They might not have that kind of like regular Republican traditional suburban voter as much. In fact, those groups tend to be... They turned into the hashtag resistance? They are now the people that have like the...

the rainbow colored in this house we believe science is real blah blah blah that's who they are now right and those people i don't know i don't know politics changes that fast but i appreciate your caricatures so there's some question about like whether the intrinsic kind of republican voters is truly like a more likely voter than democrats anymore right there's another question about like do democrats have enough issues like abortion to motivate their electorate to vote right and so you know so this is actually like

you know, maybe you can argue that assumption is too strong, right? You're kind of making that assumption based on history, politics in a different time, a different coalition. Maybe Democrats will actually not lose that much ground or even gain ground among likely voter polls, but something like that ABC News poll isn't

isn't helping Democrats case for sure. Yeah, I'm looking at the numbers right now. And in the registered voter model, Republicans are leading Democrats by a point 47% to 46%. In the likely voter model, Republicans are leading Democrats by five points, 51% to 46%. So that is the kind of gap you might have seen in a midterm of your, but we obviously want to look at more polls before we assume that that's going to be

the average or the most common outcome. So this wouldn't be 538 if we didn't say we were looking for more data. Nate, with that, are you ready to get even a little bit more wonky? Sure. And maybe even a little bit dramatic? Okay. Wonky and dramatic. Yeah. Can you guess what I'm going to ask you about? No. I'm looking at my script. No, I'm not going to try to guess. It's Trafalgar's polls. Oh, God. Yeah.

Yeah. You ready? Yeah. Okay, so here's the deal. I'm just going to lay it out really quick because we could do a whole normal gossip podcast episode where we talk about all of the drama surrounding Trafalgar's polls since 2016. But essentially, Trafalgar has had some of the most accurate polls in 2016 and 2020 because they basically showed Republicans performing better than the polling averages did.

They drew a lot of skepticism during those cycles in particular because they say they have certain tactics that they use to adjust for social desirability bias. They basically believe in the shy Trump voter theory, which is that there are certain groups of Republicans who don't want to tell pollsters either their true beliefs or they don't answer pollsters calls, etc, etc, etc. Anyway.

They now have an A- in FiveThirtyEight's pollster ratings because they have had relatively accurate pollings. In fact, some of the most accurate polls during the 2016 and 2020 cycle. But there have remained questions about their methods.

Someone named Michael Lee on Twitter pointed out that looking at the response rates in their polls across state, method of polling, and demographics, their response rates are almost always the same. This is highly unusual for polls because different groups of the electorate have highly differential response rates

When pollsters reach out to them, not only that, but from one poll to the next, you just don't often get similar response rates. And in the reporting that SplitTicket.org did on this, they reached out to Nate Cohn and he was like, yeah, when we conduct polls across different groups of voters and different states, we get highly variable response rates. SplitTicket.org reached out to Trafalgar and they were like, what's up? And they basically said, well, we have really good methods of meeting voters.

voters where they are. And so we get really reliable response rates across all different parts of the electorate and all different states, all different times that we poll. That's a lot of information. Do you follow all that? I did. The split ticket article is good. I don't really have... So clearly Trafalgar is not doing anything resembling a traditional approach. And so therefore, things that would make no sense if they were using a traditional approach aren't indicative of that much because they're just kind of like winging it.

We're being honest, right? They're saying, I don't trust traditional polling to produce an accurate result. So we kind of made up our own little method and maybe there's some degree of... Subjectivity. Subjectivity, okay. But if it works, then it works. But does it work because they're just like...

Nah, mainstream pollsters, we don't believe you. We're just going to say what we think it is. Are these real polls? Would you consider these- One thing that people like about the difference between a polling average and the market, to some extent, a polling average is a market. People gain ground by being accurate and they have different bids almost, and people can back up and rationalize

rationales for why they have a certain number or not, whether they publish a number or not, which posts are rewarded in the market by being given more business and so forth. So there are better in the market. What's clearly true is that like if you use like a traditional like, you know, from 20 years ago, polling methodology, then it probably is going to have a bias toward Democrats, right? I mean, if you have one party that is more likely to respond to surveys,

So you're saying that's a problem. They are iterating and they are trying to get a more accurate read. I mean, we have sometimes said, all right, this poll is just straight up a fake poll. They're not backing up these numbers with anything. We've banned them from our averages. Obviously, we haven't banned Trafalgar from our averages. In fact, they get quite a good rating, as I said. Are you skeptical? Like, how skeptical are you about this? So again, I don't want to, I don't like talking about the due diligence we do on pollsters, but there's a reason they're not banned, right?

If I thought they weren't real, then we wouldn't publish them. I think they're unconventional. I think they are taking a big middle finger to traditional polling approaches, but they put their neck out there and they've been right in the last couple of presidential cycles at least, right? And there's accountability. I mean, if, you know, people give them an unfair rap, right?

They say that, oh, well, they have these states in 2020 that where they overestimated how well Trump would do, which is true. But they were still one of the most accurate pollsters because like to miss by a point or two in Wisconsin or something is not as bad as having Biden up by 14 points or something in a state he wins by one. So a lot of the criticism of them is, I think, misinformed.

We do, of course, demarcate in our polling average that Trafalgar is a partisan pollster for the Republican Party.

Or just assume that all their polls are, take the prior that like it is done for a GOP client, right? And we chose, yeah, because, you know, that's technically they are, I guess, not meeting 538 disclosure requirements, right? On the other hand, like people are always a little bit cagey about who they're doing the polling for or what the source of funding is, right? But no, until they are more explicit about whose polls are done for what, for which clients, right? Then we treat them as a,

partisan pollster. And by the same token, if we encounter a situation, again, which surely we will at some point, right? If you have some Democratic pollster that is not clear about when they're doing a polling on their own versus for a client, then we would have to take the same approach. And just to give listeners some sense of the results that Trafalgar is getting in a poll conducted from September 7th to September 9th, the result that they got was Republicans leading by six points on the generic ballot.

One thing that we have seen during this cycle is more polling conducted by partisan or interested organizations and fewer polls conducted by media organizations, universities, academic institutions, etc. One, why do you think that is? Two, is that any cause for concern?

So why is it as polling? It's more expensive than people who have an interest in, frankly, spinning the results. Right. I mean, that tends to be like, you know, campaigns spend a lot of money. Right. So to some extent, like internal polling is part of campaign activity. Campaigns have shitloads of money. Right. And so and so impacts have shitloads of money. So, yeah, I mean, that would just be like a consequence of money.

Our campaign finance laws. Yeah. Liberal campaign finance laws coupled with more expensive ways to do traditional polling, right? To do a telephone poll now when response rates are very low is pretty expensive. You know, it used to be the kind of one-off academic polls had tended to be very good. I think now maybe these are some of the pollsters where like they are not as aware of like

the challenges in the industry, right? And are not subject to the competitive pressure of the ones that are side of the media most often, right? You do a poll once every two years or every four years. You say, this is the kind of textbook way for how a poll works. And we weren't great two years ago, but whatever, we were fine, right? And we're playing it by the book, right? And so those kind of one-off academic polls are polls that I worry sometimes might actually be

bias toward Democrats because they're not adjusting for response bias and who actually answers surveys. Maybe not in some cases even adjusting for educational attainment, which most pollsters do, but a few holdouts do not. But I mean, that's what I'm getting at with this like kind of the marketplace is responsive to the perceived changes in polling. So basically you're saying this trend isn't cause for concern. It's just part of what happens and it might even yield better results for the polling average? Yeah.

It might. I mean, again, the thing about like are the polls biased that I think people miss is that like the composition of polls is not the same as it was four years ago or eight years ago. If you took every pollster and weighted them the same as in 2014 or something, right, then I think you'd have a much more rosy looking forecast for Democrats in the world. But we do have like Trafalgar and Rasmussen and.

Susquehanna, right? A lot of campaign polls and stuff like that. Yeah. Interesting. All right. One more question I have for you before we get into some listener questions, which we got a lot. So we will have to save some for next week or the week after, or maybe we can answer some of them on our Monday podcast. But the latest cost of voting index came out from the Election Law Journal. This is data on what barriers to voting exist across all 50 states. And

And to just sort of cite some of the rankings in that most recent report, the easiest state to vote in was Oregon. The hardest state to vote in was New Hampshire. But in the sort of top 10 and bottom 10, you see some trends. So in the top 10, it's Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Hawaii, Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, Illinois, North Dakota.

not all one party states, but definitely a Democratic trend there. In the hardest states to vote, 50th is New Hampshire, then Mississippi, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Texas, Alabama, Wyoming, South Carolina, Missouri, Ohio. This is data I know we use in the presidential forecast. Do we also use it in the midterms forecast? We don't. They have not, I don't think, traditionally published data at the midterms, so it's good they are. I actually never went back and looked at

at whether this helped the model in 2020 or not, right? Empirically, it had, although let me be more precise, right? What had mattered historically is the shift because the absolute barriers to voting is already priced into whatever we think of the Parson lien as a state, right? A state with like,

strict felony disenfranchisement that can really reduce the size of the poorer electorate a lot, the African American electorate a lot, that can have some fairly big effects. But that's just priced into why we think of a certain state as being blue or- Florida would be a prime example. ... or Florida being an example. So the question is how much do laws change from one year to the next? That's what the presidential model used. And we found that historically from this time, this period covered from '96 to 2020,

but not clearly 2020 election itself that there had been a when voting laws get stricter turn that goes down b when the laws get stricter democrats do worse right the reason i want to before 2024 verify what happened in 2020 is that you do have these kind of shifts in the lecture that we're talking about before where um

You are going to have poorer, less educated parts of the Republican electorate that may also experience barriers to vote. Yeah, you have clearly Democrats still do very well among the black vote. And a lot of these laws are like whether the intent is racist or whether the intent is just political. Right. I mean, they are at least implicitly meant to target black voters. But you also have shifts in like poor Hispanic voters are more Republican than black.

than they had been, right? So I want to actually see kind of how this played out in 2020 with a different type of coalition. But it's definitely data worth looking at for sure. All right. Let's move on and answer some listener questions.

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I love sports. I love them so much, I never want them to stop. But as the playoffs wind down, we get fewer games, and the sports aren't sporting like I want them to. But FanDuel lets me keep the sports going whenever I want. All I have to do is open the app and dream up bets anytime I'm in the mood.

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David asks, do the 70-30, 30-70 chances for Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and House forecasts imply that a split Congress is the most likely outcome in the model? Or are there correlations that mean one party is likelier to control both chambers? No, it's pretty unlikely that. So let me see.

We actually have this. If you go to the main 538 forecast page. We do. It's a great visualization. There is a 30% chance Republicans win both chambers, a 31% chance Democrats win both, and a 39% chance of a split, with a split almost always being the Democrats win the Senate and the GOP wins the House. So it's likelier that one party controls both chambers than that there's a split decision.

that either our House or Senate forecast will be quote unquote wrong, right? So f*** you everybody in advance for criticizing us. Which, okay, we got a great follow-up question from Henry, which was only a 39% chance that the deluxe model calls both the House and Senate correctly, which is what you were just citing there. How do you message that the model will more likely than not be wrong on one of these outcomes? All right, here's your chance to message it. Why do you think I was telling you to...

poker tournament right I'm tired of trying to deal with people you know it's not that hard to message right the message is that like it's pretty hard to hit it exactly on the nose where where if Democrats do even a little bit better than their forecast they start to be competitive in the house that the GOP does even a little bit better than they certainly win the house and can win the Senate as well right so you kind of are like it's a very narrow lane that you have to drive through pass through and even though it is like the center lane right it's it's not a lot of margin for error in that lane

To hit that right in the nose. I guess the good thing is like, we'll probably at least be half right. I'm sure that people will give us credit for that. Yeah, but I don't really give a shit. But I mean, isn't that kind of amazing that that's how statistics works? That if we... I mean, living, you know... Living what? Has your impression of Americans' understanding of statistics? Like, I mean, it's not been very encouraging, I don't think.

When you look at a situation like this, it's not that hard to understand why people might be confused, too. If we're like, there's a 70% chance Democrats win the Senate, 70% chance Republicans win the House. But the likeliest outcome is that neither of those things is the correct outcome. Like, feels you have to really focus on the numbers, the percentages, and not focus on who controls the chambers almost. Like,

We're not saying who controls the chambers is I mean, obviously, for people who care about politics, like, yes, that's the main that's the name of the game. I mean, the key is that these outcomes are highly correlated. Right. I mean, literally in our model, it's just one model that runs Senate House gubernatorial races. You're not much going to have like a different dynamic in the House than in the Senate. And because the Senate is easier in the cycle for Democrats to.

Even though to add to the confusion, ironically, like in the long run, this is probably harder for Democrats to maintain. Right. But like given the races that are up this year, that's the easier for Democrats. So, you know, they would get that first. Then they would maybe if they're lucky, get the House and the GOP is just the reverse. House is still pretty easy for the Republican Senate is very achievable, but but more difficult.

Next question from Will. When your Senate model first launched, you had Lisa Murkowski favored with about an 85% chance of winning and Kelly Chewbacca with about a 10% chance of winning. But since Alaska's August 16th primary election, that has flipped. You now have Chewbacca at 69% and Murkowski at 30%. Why did your model suddenly start favoring Chewbacca? So Alaska's new. This top four system is new this year.

When there weren't any polls, it defaulted toward Murkowski being an incumbent, I think. And now we've seen polls with Chewbacca leading. So that's why it flipped, right? It was at a prior before there were polls. Now we have polls and they show Chewbacca ahead. And they're both Republicans. They're both Republicans, yeah. And so our forecast says that there's over a 99% chance that a Republican will win. That's right. Which is in contrast to the Alaska House race, which is now a toss-up. The issue there is that

The Democrat, Peltola... Is now an incumbent. She's an incumbent, but now there is polling there. She actually will probably lead the first choice vote, right? And the question is whether Palin and Begich, the two Republicans, whether their votes will combine in such a way that whichever one is second overtakes her, right? It's more likely that if it's Begich in second place that he would...

gain Palin's voters the other way around, but they're kind of rivals at this point. There's also one poll that showed the Democrat with 50% of the vote already, in which case you don't have to worry about the right. Right. So, yeah, she's, you know, that race is actually like a toss up. So could you put in like even more work in to our Alaska model? I mean, we probably could. It's not that material really. Right. Like in the Senate,

It's going to be one of the two Republicans we think almost for sure, right? In the House, it's one race out of 435. Although in a marginally controlled Senate chamber, the difference between Chewbacca and Murkowski is pretty significant. That's true. That's true. Yeah. And so what our model is showing is that Murkowski is potentially in trouble. Potentially. I mean, I'm not sure if we're incorporating runoff results from those polls. That would be like kind of a late October edition if they're showing kind of how the two ways would go in those polls that would take

some work that we may or may not have time to do. But Murkowski is, you know, trailing in the first choice vote and that's not great for her. Next question. For House races, do you consider possible coattail effects from Senate or Governor's races when there is more polling? For example, in Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidate for Senate and Governor are doing very well. Does this have spillover effects on the estimates for House races?

Because, to add some context here, we're not really getting a lot of polling on House races. So when we think about who's going to win in these House races, oftentimes we're looking at generic ballot polling, other indicators of the environment, and not a poll that was conducted in Pennsylvania's 4th District or whatever it may be. No, it probably would be smart to account for that, but we don't. Build your own model, people. Um...

All right. There's your answer. Spencer asks, what is the rationale behind placing certain likelihood benchmarks where you did? For example, slightly favored at 55%, favored at 70%, very likely at 98.5%, or likely at 75%. I mean, there's some degree of literature on how people empirically perceive these intuitively and how that translates to natural language. I mean, we actually have big arguments about

this stuff right so think about it carefully yeah again we're just trying to like have like little nudges and you know I know I mean we have one year we had like all those ratios was like oh six out of seven and stuff like that which I kind of like other people didn't like

Also, we used to do like decimal points. Do you remember the 2016 election? Yeah. Do you remember when the... Was it the Nowcast? The Nowcast in the 2016 election showed, I think, like Hillary Clinton with a 66.6% chance of winning and like the devil was speaking through the Nowcast. What happened to the Nowcast? I mean, the Nowcast...

That's a deep cut for longtime listeners, by the way. Wish shot to death by 5e. 5e packs a pistol? I mean, 5e, people hunt foxes, so 5e has to defend himself. That was a good comeback. All right, next question. This is also a pretty wonky one, but I like it. When you launched the forecast, the 80% error, or like the band within which 80% of the outcomes will happen, showed Republicans getting 48 to 54 seats.

in the Senate. Today it shows 46 to 52 seats, both having a spread of six seats, if you follow. Given the high number of polls since the launch, why hasn't the forecast become more certain with a more narrow margin of error? I mean, let me look at what we have. I mean, to some extent, like a lot of the races in the Senate have stayed competitive when you

wouldn't necessarily expect them to, right? So that can be like quirky based on like Ohio remaining competitive, right? Or some pollsters showing Colorado and Wisconsin or Colorado and Washington competitive, right? If you look at the House, which is more, there's less noise because it's just more races, right? There you do see these confidence intervals narrowing in a more intuitively satisfying way. With that said, you know, again,

As we've seen years where the polling was not accurate on Election Day itself, right? A fair amount of the error comes that we don't know that much on in November anyway. Also, we don't know what the final news environment will look like. So kind of between now and November is the kind of home stretch of the campaign. And this is where the model starts to get like get more competent, right? Is kind of in this period through Election Day and not so much, you know, in the summer. That makes sense.

Next question. How much do you think the Democrats' current advantage in the midterm Senate forecast is due to poor candidate selection by MAGA Republicans? They go on to say, I'm wondering if voters are turned off by candidates continuing to ride the Trump train even after he was voted out of office. If there were more boring, classic Romney-style GOP candidates, would their numbers be better? Yeah, I mean, I, I, you probably could back into like a

attempt to quantify candidate quality? No, I think it's probably worth like, combined, it's probably worth like a Senate seat to win a half Senate seats or even two Senate seats. So yeah, no, I think if you had like, quote unquote, more mainstream normal GOP candidates, I think they would be at least 50-50 to win the Senate. But that's not exogenous from the fact that like, it is a Trumpian party. It is a party that doesn't have a lot of respect for traditional

It is a party that cultivates a lot of people that have conspiratorial views about politics, right? And so you kind of, this is not like, oh, some unfortunate circumstance for the GOP, right? Oh, this is so random. Yeah, right. Of course, we've been covering this for how many months at this point? This isn't random. We went primary by primary by primary. This is what you get when you don't really do anything to punish Trump and you don't really take January 6th seriously and you don't, you know, you had the House pass the bill to reform the electoral count

Act, which might make things a little bit better in the event of another January 6th. You know, Kevin McCarthy ripped Republicans in the House against that relatively, frankly, minor act.

It's an important bill, right? But the changes themselves are not that material, right? Right. It literally prevents another January 6th where someone tries to stop the counting in the actual chamber. But it doesn't prevent all kinds of other ways that the elections could happen. Well, it depends. They're different. The House bill and the Senate bill are different. I do not have a comprehensive list of which differences are in which bill. So I can't speak to that in as educated a way as I would like. Well, we'll bring it up on the Monday podcast. It probably will pass.

The Senate, Mitch McConnell has said the Senate version of this with minor tweaks at most, I will approve. And there are enough GOP co-sponsors. Well, that will probably pass. But no, I mean, like the GOP is the chickens are kind of coming home to roost. And now it's kind of up to voters for how much they care about, about these unconventional quote unquote candidates. Right. I mean, the one that is like a little bit weird in just an odd way is like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. I mean, I don't,

I think he's necessarily even that like right wing or Trumpy. It's not clear like why. Well, there's a difference between right wing and Trumpy. It's kind of the whole issue in a way in that like, sure, you know, he supported liberal policies at certain points. I mean, like Trump, I think he supported abortion at one point. Well, in that in that in that one sense, he is like Trump. Right. But I would expect Oz if he got elected somehow. I would expect him to be pretty moderate.

Which is not true for like a JD Vance or a Blake Masters, right? I mean, Vance is also another slightly weird case where you kind of have this brand as a moderate. But like, you know, Blake Masters is like very right wing. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Are you ready for some more fun questions? Okay. Yeah. Craig asks, Craig's bringing the heat. Could 5E beat that guy that Nate lost to in poker yesterday? I mean, 5E is pretty good at poker. Yeah.

But again, I felt like I played pretty well. He's a very good player, by the way. After this great bluff, he had another hand where we both made strong hands. It's called a cooler in poker. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, 5E's a calculating guy. After you shit the diaper, you had to cool off a bit. I thought I was going to win the tournament on this next hand, right? Wait, after the dirty diaper, you were like, I'm going to win this. Well, the next hand, he made trips, which is free of a kind, right? And then I had...

checked behind on the flop. This is, no one's going to understand what all the reasons. Okay. Speak your gibberish. We'll just, for the people who understand that they'll understand it. I won't, but so he made a very strong hand on the flop, but there were no bets put in on the flop. Right. Um, then on the turn, I made a strong hand that was not as strong as the hand he already had made, but it was a strong hand, uh, top pair. So he bet into me twice and I'm like, this is great. Uh,

I caught my perfect card on the turn. I actually intentionally delayed how long I took to call on the turn, on the fourth card, because I wanted to make sure that if he was bluffing... He can clearly be ahead, right? He can have that hand for sure, right? But if he doesn't have that hand, I want to encourage him to keep bluffing. And so I kind of thought I got very acute and just acted like I was pretty unhappy about this. And so therefore that would encourage him...

to bluff if he was losing and had this kind of fairly strong hand. But unfortunately, he had, like, the good hand he was representing. Yeah. And so that shifted things back to him. When I was watching this play out, I mean, I wasn't, sorry, I wasn't watching you in real time. But when I was looking at the clips that they posted afterwards, like, he's up. So he's wearing, like, I think a sports jersey or something like that. He's up. He's walking around. He's, like, putting his hands on the table. Then he's, like, walking back. And you're just sitting there, like, very...

stoic, kind of not moving. Is that not your vibe? Do you ever get up and walk around and manhandle the table and kind of lean back and forth? I don't. I mean, everyone's different, right? It's like grunting in tennis. Some people do it. Some people don't. I mean, first of all, there have been crazy hands throughout this

We had another hand where I had Queens. He had tens Queens ranks higher than tens. I got I know. Okay, I know that much and we got all in before the flop and he hit a 10. He had a set of tens, right? So otherwise he would have been eliminated and I would have played against some other player and he was the best player left at the table, right? So he was the one guy you're really hoping not to have to play against heads up, right? And that's where you end up having to play against him, right? And so, you know, but we had had like

a lot of crazy battles. And so, but the thing is like, no, for me, it's very important to keep your composure and look forward to next hand. Right. Cause especially when you're down to like five players and then three players and then two players you're playing, you're,

Basically every hand right and the decisions you have to make when you're playing heads up just you and I right are difficult it's hard to make a hand in poker so like you're making very marginal bets and very marginal calls and and there's a lot of bluffing and you know someone's tendencies by this point.

Final question of the day comes from Vivian. Why does Nate hate 5eFox? What in his childhood made him like this? I didn't get the impression that you hate 5eFox. I like 5e, yeah. When I was in Maine, by the way. Yeah? You saw 5e? I saw 5e. I have to tell you, 5e is thinking about leaving polling and becoming like a park ranger at Acadia National Park.

that's crazy you know my sister did that really yeah yeah my sister loves national parks like my brother's a lawyer and i do this and my sister was like no like i'm working at a national park no i mean i see i mean both five and i are just made at like at the lack of people's understanding of statistics right and probability and like so yeah no fivey i don't know i don't know um well you know maybe maybe five is the the smart one after all i think so yeah

Well, Nate, it's been another model talk. Thank you, Galen. It has been. We're going to let you go to sleep now. Model and poker talk. Yeah, model and poker talk. There are going to be some people who are really happy about that and some people who are not. But if you didn't understand this, then you're in the same bucket as me because I don't understand poker either. Thank you for listening along nonetheless. And thank you, Nate, for joining me today. Thank you, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Sophia Leibowitz, Michael Tabb, Emily Vanesky, and Kevin Ryder are in the control room. Michael

Michael Tabb is part of the audience, Emily Vanesky is our intern, Kevin Ryder is on audio, Sophia Leibowitz is often on video, and is behind the camera right now. Thank you for making this a more joyful occasion.

Our editorial director is Chadwick Matlin. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. And one more thing. We have a live show on October 25th in Washington, D.C. at 6th and I. There's a link in the show notes. Go get your tickets. It's going to be a fun time.

Bye.