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According to FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver.
Summing the probabilities of each race yields an estimate of 51 seats3 for Republicans. That makes them very slight favorites — perhaps somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-40 — to take control of the Senate, but also doesn’t leave them much room for error. This bottom line is not much changed from our forecasts in June or in March (or even the one we issuedlast July).
The mainstream media has been hyperventilating and driving a narrative of off year elections being biased against the incumbent Party in the executive. All these biases are factored into the current polls. Many models consider a likely voter one that has voted consistently in consecutive elections. That misses the type of voter drives currently in effect in states like Texas where new voters that are still entering the rolls are not a part of the polling data.
FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver given probabilities on national TV with bad data?
In fact Sam Wang of Princeton Election Consortium (PEC) says the following.
I’ve been asked why the PEC Senate poll snapshot is more favorable to Democrats than forecasts you’ll find elsewhere: NYT’s The Upshot, Washington Post’s The Monkey Cage, ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight, and Daily Kos. All of these organizations show a higher probability of a Republican takeover than today’s PEC snapshot, which favors the Democrats with a 70% probability.
Today I will show that in most cases, added assumptions (i.e. special sauce) have led the media organizations to different win probabilities – which I currently believe are wrong. I’ll then outline the subtle but important implications for a November prediction. …
Longtime readers of PEC will not be surprised to know that I think the media organizations are making a mistake. It is nearly Labor Day. By now, we have tons of polling data. Even the stalest poll is a more direct measurement of opinion than an indirect fundamentals-based measure. I demonstrated this point in 2012, when I used polls only to forecast the Presidency and all close Senate races. That year I made no errors in Senate seats, including Montana (Jon Tester) and North Dakota (Heidi Heitkamp), which FiveThirtyEight got wrong.
Nate Silver appeared on ABC’s ThisWeek. In the video above it illustrates why the media is flawed. More importantly it proves that Nate Silver may have been forced to join the hyperventilating fray to stay relevant.
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