Jul.28

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

100 Days

Election Day is 100 days from today. Let's check in and see what the state of affairs is.

First up, the U.S. Senate. The good news for the Republicans here is that they can afford to lose up to three seats (or more, if they flip Democratic-held seats), and they will still retain control, by virtue of J.D. Vance's tiebreaker vote. The good news for the Democrats here is that Senate results tend to roughly correlate with each other, and a big night for one party or the other is more likely than a split decision. Also good news for the Democrats is that you can't gerrymander Senate seats.

Here's a rundown of the "battleground" Senate seats, and (up to) six different forecasts for them (* - incumbent). The Score column lists the Republican first.

If the election were held today, and if you were to make your predictions based on our admittedly crude scoring system, here's what would happen:

• 0 Democratic-held seats would be flips
• 3 Democratic-held seats would be holds: Georgia, Minnesota, New Hampshire
• 1 Democratic-held seat would be too close to call: Michigan
• 2 Republican-held seats would be flips: North Carolina, Ohio
• 5 Republican-held seats would be holds: Florida, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, Texas
• 2 Republican-held seats would be too close to call: Alaska, Maine

If all the "too close to call" races went the Democrats' way—and again, the results tend to correlate with each other—then the Democrats would net four seats, and would take the Senate.

That said, the real story here is that it's just too hard to tell what is going to happen. Fully 7 of the 26 candidates (27%) aren't even known yet. Many of the races are not yet being polled, or are not being polled very much. Several other races, most obviously Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas, sit on razor's edge. We've said it a million times—a week in politics is a lifetime. That means there are still a little over 14 lifetimes until Election Day.

And now, let's take a look at the generic House ballot. Here are the last 10 polls of that question, all of them from the last two weeks:

That averages out to Democrats +5.8%.

Here is how the various aggregators have it:

That averages out to Democrats +5.4%.

There are two bits of good news for the Republicans here. The first is that it would generally take a 3-4 point Democratic advantage to flip the House, but this year's gerrymandering might make it more like a 5-point Democratic advantage to flip. And so, by that metric, the GOP has a puncher's chance to hold. Also, at this point in 2018 (i.e., the other Trump midterm), the Democrats were up about 7.5 points in the generic House ballot. Donald Trump may be more unpopular than he was back then, but so are the Democrats.

And now the good news for Democrats. What the topline numbers are hiding is that Democrats are much more enthusiastic this year about voting than are Republicans. That will start to show up in the topline numbers, to an extent, once the various pollsters switch from tallying registered voters to tallying likely voters. So, don't be terribly surprised if, once primary season is over, the Democrats' average jumps a couple or three points. If that does happen, it almost certainly means the House is lost to the GOP.

And finally, here's how the three main U.S.-based betting markets have it right now:

So, by all available indicators, the House is looking good for the blue team, even if it's not quite a done deal yet. The Senate, by contrast, is going to be a barnburner. (Z)