The 5 Big Takeaways From Our House Forecast Aug. 17,

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The 5 Big Takeaways From Our House Forecast

Aug. 17, 2018, at 7:24 AM

By Nate Silver



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Theme No. 1: A broad consensus of indicators point toward Democrats performing well

In contrast to our presidential forecasts, which are heavily dependent on polling, our House model uses a broad mix of polling and non-polling indicators, including factors such as fundraising totals and historical trends in midterms. Those indicators look both pretty good for Democrats and remarkably consistent with one another:

◾The Lite version of our forecast, which focuses as much as possible on district-level and generic ballot polls, projects Democrats to win the popular vote for the House by 7 or 8 percentage points.
◾The Classic version of the model, which incorporates a lot of non-polling metrics such as fundraising and past voting in each district, also shows Democrats winning the popular vote by 7 or 8 points.
◾The generic ballot, which influences all three versions of our forecast, has generally shown Democrats with a lead of … 7 to 8 percentage points.
◾And finally, our model calculates a starting assumption about the race based on historical trends in midterms since 1946 and presidential approval ratings. It also implies that Democrats “should” win the House popular vote by about 8 percentage points — just what the other metrics show.

So you’d expect Democrats to do pretty well based on the historical propensity of opposition parties to gain ground in midterm elections, especially under unpopular presidents. And Democrats are doing roughly as well as you’d expect them to according to most indicators of the national environment.

There are a couple of exceptions — indicators that are a little out of the consensus — but both of them fall on the better-for-Democrats side of the consensus. First, Democrats have done really impressively in fundraising.

Their candidates have raised more in individual contributions than Republicans in 71 of the 101 districts rated as competitive by the Cook Political Report, despite the fact that about two-thirds of these districts feature Republican incumbents. That’s unusual. Most challengers significantly trail in fundraising at this point in the cycle.

Meanwhile, the results of special elections have been very good for Democrats. Our model doesn’t actually use special election results in its forecasts, but they’re part of a coherent alternative narrative in which there’s upside for Democrats relative to what our forecast shows.

Donating money and voting in special elections are tangible indicators of voter engagement, and it’s possible that they point toward a Democratic enthusiasm advantage that could become clearer later on in the cycle.


Theme No. 4: Potential Democratic gains are broad-based, across all regions of the country

One factor helping Trump in 2016 was that he really needed to beat his polls in only one part of the country, the Midwest, to defeat Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College. (Outside of the Midwest, the polls were reasonably accurate and even underestimated Clinton in some states.) By contrast, Republicans are facing a multi-front assault in the House this year:

◾In the Northeast, they have a lot of exposure in New York and New Jersey, which were once bastions of moderate Republicanism but which have become increasingly inhospitable to it — and in Pennsylvania, where court-ordered redistricting resulted in a bad map for Republicans and where a lot of GOP incumbents have retired.
◾In the South, they face pressure because of demographic change in states such as Georgia and Virginia — and increasingly in Texas.
◾In the Midwest, there’s the risk of reversion to the mean with Trump off the ballot, especially as the GOP coalition in these states has come to rely on non-college voters who don’t always participate in midterm elections.
◾And in the West, there are 14 Republican incumbents in California and another four in Washington who are increasingly running against the political current as the Pacific Coast becomes a somewhat literal “blue wall”.

As it happens, projected Democratic gains are almost evenly distributed between the four Census Bureau regions: The Classic version of our model projects them to gain nine seats in the Midwest, nine in the South, nine in the Northeast, and nine in the West. Note that Democrats could completely flop in any one of these regions and yet still (just barely) win enough seats to take the House.