What does a chance feel like?
Click the button below to randomly simulate a hypothetical election. While the Democrats may be favored to win, there's a lot of variation in how many seats they may gain or lose.How the odds have changed
The model works by using economic indicators, structural factors (like whether it is a midterm year, or the party that controls the White House), and national polling data to estimate what the nationwide popular vote (adding up all the votes for each party in all 435 districts) and the seat breakdown will be.
Of course, there is a lot of uncertainty in elections and polling. The model takes this into account, combining uncertainty across all of these factors to arrive at an overall distribution of the number of seats that the Democrats will win. From this distribution, we can figure out the chances that the Democrats win at least 218 seats and keep their majority.
The model is updated regularly as new economic and polling data come in. The charts below show how the forecast has evolved over time.
The Democrats have a chance of winning a majority, but only a chance of winning more seats than the 235 they won last election. The chart below shows the estimated range of Democratic seats, and how it has changed over time. The range will narrow as we approach the election, because we will have more information, and there will be less time for the race to be upended by an economic or political development.
The outer band below is an 90% credible interval, meaning that based on the information available at the time the forecast was made, there was an 90% chance that the Democrats would win a number of seats somewhere in that interval. The inner band shows a 50% credible interval.
National Polling
The best predictor of the House race, and the one that has the potential to change the most between now and November is the so-called “generic ballot,” where polling firms ask voters which party they plan on voting for in their local House race.
Since November 2019, generic ballot polls have been conducted. As new polling data arrive, the model re-estimates how the Democratic share on the generic ballot has evolved over time, and forecasts how it could change toward Election Day. The model makes an initial guess of the Election-Day popular vote based on the structural and economic factors mentioned above. Right now, it estimates that the Democrats have a chance of winning the popular vote.
In estimating the popular vote from polling data, the model also takes into account the tendency of certain kinds of polls to over- or under-estimate the support for each party. For example, polls of likely voters are generally more accurate than polls of all registered voters, and the latter tend to lean more Democratic.
In addition, certain polling firms have a pattern of producing polls that lean toward one party or another. These “house effects” are estimated by the model and used to make adjustments in estimating overall public opinion. Negative house effects (red) mean that the firm’s polls overestimate Republican support; positive effects (blue) mean that the firm overestimates Democratic support.
| Firm | Polls | House Effect | |
|---|---|---|---|
Methodology
The “model” is actually three separate models: a prior model for public opinion, a voter intent model for polling data, and a results model for the number of seats won by each party.
The prior model is a linear model which predicts the House popular vote on Election Day (on a logit scale) based on the president’s approval rating, earnings growth, GDP growth, the unemployment rate, which party controls the White House, and whether or not it is a midterm election (along with some interaction terms). The model uses House elections since 1974 to make its predictions.
The voter intent model predicts the true state of public opinion at every week of the race, up to and including Election Day. The main parameter of interest is latent support for the Democratic party (on a logit scale). The results of each poll are assumed to be drawn from a binomial distribution with this latent probability, adjusted for the polling firm’s house effects, the type of respondents (registered voters, likely voters, or all adults), poll-specific error, and national polling error. Each of these adjustments is a parameter that the model estimates. National polling error cannot be estimated from polling data, and essentially just adds noise to the model. Its distribution is estimated from past elections’ polling errors.
Latent voter intent is assumed to follow a random walk from week to week, with Gaussian increments. The prior model sets a distribution of the walk on Election Day, and the walk then evolves backward in time. It is this backward evolution of the walk, combined with the Election Day prior, which keeps the variance of the public opinion estimates from growing linearly from the present day.
The results model is a linear model which predicts the number of Democratic seats won based on the seats won in the previous election, the share of the national popular vote won by the Democrats, which party controls the House and the presidency currently, and whether it is a midterm election (along with some interaction terms). Like the prior model, the results model uses House elections since 1974 to make its predictions.
Both linear models use Cauchy(0, 2.5) priors on the coefficients of centered and scaled predictors. Models were fit using Stan. Model code and data are available online. Email me with any questions.