Uh, oh. Nate Silver who used to be pointed to as the most accurate, nearly flawless pollster by Democrats and progressives, will likely find his methodology questioned again, as he did in March from some former big fans. When partisans on both sides get polls they don’t like, the frequent response is to start questioning the methdology. In modern politics, the only reliable methodology for some partisans is when their party is ahead.
So get ready for the “well, this poll isn’t accurate because,” or even some partisans suggesting he’s somehow swallowing Republican Kool Aid:
We last issued a U.S. Senate forecast in mid-March. Not a lot has changed since then.
The Senate playing field remains fairly broad. There are 10 races where we give each party at least a 20 percent chance of winning,1 so there is a fairly wide range of possible outcomes. But all but two of those highly competitive races (the two exceptions are Georgia and Kentucky) are in states that are currently held by Democrats. Furthermore, there are three states — South Dakota, West Virginia, and Montana2 — where Democratic incumbents are retiring, and where Republicans have better than an 80 percent chance of making a pickup, in our view.
So it’s almost certain that Republicans are going to gain seats. The question is whether they’ll net the six pickups necessary to win control of the Senate. If the Republicans win only five seats, the Senate would be split 50-50 but Democrats would continue to control it because of the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Joseph Biden.
Our March forecast projected a Republicans gain of 5.8 seats. You’ll no doubt notice the decimal place; how can a party win a fraction of a Senate seat? It can’t, but our forecasts are probabilistic; a gain of 5.8 seats is the total you get by summing the probabilities from each individual race. Because 5.8 seats is closer to six (a Republican takeover) than five (not quite), we characterized the GOP as a slight favorite to win the Senate.
The new forecast is for a Republican gain of 5.7 seats. So it’s shifted ever so slightly — by one-tenth of a seat — toward being a toss-up. Still, if asked to place a bet at even odds, we’d take a Republican Senate.
Right now there’s little on the political scene that can cause the tide to shift against the Democrats. The Obama administration, on a host of issues, is playing defense and the GOP has toned down its shrill act just enough so they’re not longer the issue. The Democrats to have something positive that shifts the narrative, or something negative on the GOP side.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.