The Red Wave Didn't Happen
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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. I'm Nate Silver. And this is Model Talk. I didn't know we had a Model Talk in the middle of the night. I know. This is very much an impromptu Model Talk. As folks who are watching on YouTube can probably tell, we just pulled you off air. So this is actually going to be a very abbreviated podcast because you're going to have to go back on ABC to explain what's going on.

the nation. So I'm glad we could pull you away, but we have a lot to discuss and not all that much time to do it. Characterize the night so far, Nate Silver. This is a night where you are somewhere between a very good night for the pollsters and a polling error favoring Democrats or an anti-democratic polling bias, right? Democrats in the House have flipped three seats so far that we classified as likely Republicans, so more than a 75% chance.

It looks like they are going to win this toss up race in Pennsylvania in the Senate. They have held their own Senate seats so far. They've held most, though not all, of the House seats where they were favored. So like they're having a pretty good night. It's also a pretty good night for the polls. But, you know, this is like in the thick part of the distribution. People like, oh, my God, this is so crazy. Now, if Democrats do really well out West and keep the House.

then that's more unlikely, but not crazy unlikely. So let me just lay down some markers. It is currently 1238 at the time that we are recording this podcast. And we have had calls in New Hampshire, Florida, Ohio, a bunch of the states that we sort of expected

would lean one way or the other. The places where we don't have calls are, importantly, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and that's kind of where the- And Wisconsin. And that's kind of where the game is for the Senate. And that's where the game has been all along.

Yeah. I mean, in some ways, this is kind of like the core scenario you always expected where it comes down to Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia. Wisconsin and Arizona have some chance of affecting things, but are a little bit more marginal. You would clearly rather be Ron Johnson, Wisconsin. You'd rather be Mark Kelly in Arizona. It looks to me as though Georgia is going to go to a runoff, I think. Right. It's like forty nine point one to forty nine.

It's hard to actually pick up a full percentage point given what's out there. It doesn't seem to be, seems to be maybe a little stronger for Walker, but not by enough to pick up a whole point. And so basically though, we could find out control of the Senate potentially before that runoff. If Nevada also goes to Democrats, but it's looking like Nevada could be super, super close. Yeah, if Democrats sweep Pennsylvania, Nevada, and, uh,

uh, in Arizona, then the runoff is just for 51. Right. Um, or if they win Wisconsin, which I wouldn't count on the point at which we're recording, there are no votes in, in Nevada. And so all of the sort of prognosticating we can do is based off of, I think the New York times needle, which shows. And Nevada is a state where, uh,

There was low turnout on Election Day. Democrats did not show up to polling places. And the question is, is there enough mail votes? Because the early voting was pretty even like it usually is in Nevada. The GOP crushed it and actually turned out to the polls. But there are drop boxes that unions encourage Democrats to use. And there's mail vote that hasn't been tallied yet. Right. And so...

So that could be pretty slow, right? I mean, that's, you know, we may be waiting on Nevada and Georgia are the two that are going to take a while. Well, which is part of the reason we're recording the podcast right now, because it's in part to say like, hey, we're probably not going to get a call in the Senate tonight. We might not even get a call. I don't think we will get a call. The reason why is that we haven't had a House race that's this in the House. We don't think we're going to get a call in the House tonight.

I don't think so, because you have all these vote by mail states. I know exactly how many competitive seats there are in California, Oregon and Washington. Right. And Colorado and Hawaii. But all these vote by mail states in a close race, there's not going to be enough vote to project it the day of. And so networks might differ there.

and how conservative they are about making inferences from California based on partial returns, for example. But if you're being conservative, you probably couldn't call the House tonight. Okay, so the Senate is on a razor's edge. It could be a 50-50 proposition. It could be a 51-49 proposition. It will end up in that range, the range that we have been talking about for a long time. The House, though, the number of seats, what are we looking at there?

I think you're looking at like 10 to 15, right? Kind of at the start of the night, it looked like kind of, you know, 15 to 20 was the core of the range. In terms of Republican pickups. Right. And so if you say it's close to the polls, but a little bit for Democrats, 10 to 15, because it's not totally even. Democrats have picked up three likely Republican seats, but also Republicans have won some of the toss-ups and the lean Ds. Sean Patrick Maloney, for example, looks like he might lose. That was either a lean D or a toss-up in our numbers. And so like...

So it's not like they're winning every single race and Democrats almost had to win like every single race in the House. But, you know, you can have regional shifts. Democrats did terribly in Florida tonight. Right. So if they're doing better out in the western part of the country, maybe it's a little bit more libertarian. Maybe abortion is a bigger deal out there. I don't I don't know. I'm making up stories at this point. Right. We don't have we don't have any. It's not crazy to think the Democrats could could win the House. I would.

I think the more likely upside scenario is that Kevin McCarthy has this tiny dysfunctional majority. But there's nothing mathematically certain about the GOP winning the House. And you mentioned upsets. Two of those upsets were in Ohio, where the Ohio 1st and 13th were both likely Republican in our forecast. And the Democrats won both of those seats.

Do they have Tim Ryan to thank for that? Or is that just sort of the national environment was not quite as Republican? For sure. They have Tim Ryan to thank for that. Right. I mean, he really overperformed the Democrat, the governor's race there, which, by the way, kind of if we are getting ahead of ourselves here.

If Georgia is tied with Brian Kemp on the ballot, the stronger the two GOP nominees, right? If Kemp's not in the ballot, then is that enough to let Warnock win the runoff? I don't know. That seems like a very important question. Well, because originally, I think our forecast suggested that if that race went to a runoff, that Walker would be favored because of the sort of structural advantages that Republicans oftentimes have in a runoff environment. But these results would cause us to sort of reconsider that.

I mean, if you don't have Ryan Kemp as kind of a compromise candidate out there, then I don't know. I mean, Stacey Abrams also didn't do well tonight in her kind of vaunted turnout machine. Is that helpful despite her not having done very well tonight? I don't know. I'm not sure I'm ready to digest the implications of a Georgia runoff again. So you said that probably Republicans are going to end up controlling the House with a narrow majority. Do you feel comfortable saying how you feel about where the Senate's going to end up?

I mean, if you look at the Scottish teenagers at betting markets, they're doing the math and thinks Democrats are favored because they are pointing Pennsylvania out.

in Fetterman's column, right? That's a plus one now for Democrats. Which honestly, that's not far out on a limb. If you look at the New York Times needle right now, it shows that, you know, Fetterman has a greater than 95% chance of winning and by a margin of four points. So if they win Pennsylvania, the Democrats have to break even, win two out of four, two out of four from Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona. You would bet

Against them, I think, in Wisconsin and on them in Arizona. But wait, is that right? Am I getting that right? Yeah, you're getting 51. They have to win two out of four or they have to win. One of the four is not enough. Then they go right after winter out of the four. That's basic math, right? If they win two out of four coin flips, assuming Pennsylvania goes as expected, then they keep the Senate and you can run the numbers on that and that gets into 75 percent roughly.

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So what does it all mean? Because narratives are going to start forming tonight. And so I want to hear yours early. It means that the GOP is being punished for these extremist candidates.

Right. And Democrats are in some races being punished for their candidates, too. Right. But like, yeah, this is kind of the reckoning for underperforming GOP candidates that people became too cynical to accept as a possibility. You see a lot of split ticket voting. I mean, Tim Ryan lost. Right. A lot of split ticket voting, though, in Ohio. Oh, yeah. New Hampshire, a ton of split ticket voting. DeWine sailed, sailed to victory. You know, in Georgia, in Pennsylvania. Yeah.

a lot of these states. Can I try to put a finer point on this? The Democratic president, the incumbent president has an approval rating of 42%. That is historically low and it sort of rivals Trump and Obama when they had their shellackings at the midterms. We have 40-year high inflation,

overwhelmingly Americans are not happy with the economy, even think that Republicans would do a better job on the economy. There's sort of like all of these broader historical indicators that would suggest that Democrats would get slammed in this midterms and yet they haven't. I mean, that's I think we should take like a minute to just recognize how different this is. Yeah. If it's GOP plus 12 in the House and Democrats zero, so they hold the Senate, right? Or Democrats plus one in the Senate?

I mean, that's not a very good outcome for Republicans. What we don't know is, is this because Democrats did a better job than usual of keeping the turnout gap down? Or are they winning over independent swing voters or some combination thereof, right? That will take longer to sort out because we'll have to see not just who voted, but how many people voted. So here's one district that I was looking at to try to get a sense of that, which is North Carolina's 13th district. It was...

For a long time, according to our forecast, the likeliest tipping point district in the House that was called relatively early on in the evening for the Democrat. Yeah. OK. That's like Raleigh suburbs. That's like swingy voters. It's like high education levels. I mean, you can't necessarily tell a story about turnout versus persuasion there, but it is the kind of district that is like the persuadable district.

I mean, the other story that's funny here is it may turn out that the light forecast is better than the lights. Wait, I called this. What did I tell you on our final model talk recording? I was like, if it's the light forecast that does better, you're going to be pointing to that one all day long. Because the vibes were very... And the vibes this afternoon, people are like, oh my God, have you seen these turnout numbers in Florida? And it's like, Florida is now a, like, apparently...

Deep red state. It's bad news for Democrats. Don't don't dismiss that. Well, let's talk about Florida, because that was I mean, honestly, all the props to Florida. They count their votes extremely quickly. We got the results there. You know, Republicans flipped two seats there, got on their way to their House majority. DeSantis and Rubio won handily. I mean, what's the lesson from all of that? And should I say should I just mention 2024 just to like, of course, this is put a marker in it.

About the best possible. This is like a 99 out of 100 for Ron DeSantis, right? He wins by some gigantic margin. And then all this Trumpism and these Trump endorsed candidates underperform cost the GOP at least some margin in the Senate, maybe the Senate itself, maybe even the House. I mean, this is like this gives Ron DeSantis a very strong electability argument. And for Trump to declare that.

Two days later, when probably at least one chamber won't even be called yet. Right. And now he'll talk about like the fraud and stuff like that. I mean, this is like very bad for for Trump. OK, one more thing that I brought up in our final model talk before I let you get back to the sort of big folks over at broadcast is I suggested that.

The polling average was masking a disagreement between the institutional pollsters and the Republican-leaning pollsters. The institutional pollsters showing better numbers for Democrats and a lot of these partisan pollsters showing, you know, Fetterman losing, showing, you know, Warnock losing. Well, it's showing Kathy Hochul losing and showing Patty Murray losing in Washington, right? I mean, this is not a good night for Trafalgar. But this is a good night for the institutional pollsters, right?

Or did they still overestimate Democrats? No, they'll probably do pretty good. They'll probably do pretty good, right? But we'll have to check. I mean, it takes a while. Also, when you're looking at polling bias, the late trickling in votes that don't matter in non-competitive races but still affect the averages. But, like, yeah, no, for sure. This is a big revenge night for... Revenge of the nerds? Is it revenge of the nerds? Is it?

I mean, it's like that mantra that you repeat that people don't fucking understand

that like it's just a fucking sample size of like one election right there's only so much information you can gain from from one election so now we're going to have you know 2016 uh democratic bias in the polls 2018 no bias 2020 democratic bias 2022 probably mild republican bias um just a sample size of four right um you can't over narrate devise it too much apart from being like pollsters have a strong incentive to um to

to get the right answer. And I think we probably are certainly out of the golden age of polling where it was just kind of you follow the gold standard and it's easy, right? But I do think pollsters were like, look, we're going to re-examine our methods and then, you know, it's not the worst thing if you're running a polling average to have some Trafalgar's. But people were like double counting, right? They were saying, okay, we already have all those GOP pollsters. That might kind of conveniently wipe out the bias we've seen in past years. But like now you're adding GOP bias

On top of that, it's kind of the situation where the vibes overtook, I think,

more rational analysis. Okay, two things before we go. One, there's still a lot we don't know. That should be the main message of this podcast. We have general trends, but we ultimately don't know who is going to win the Senate or the House. And so we are going to be back here in the forthcoming days to break that all down as we get more information. So hang with us. One. Two, Nate, what are the questions that you're trying to still figure out over the coming days as we get more and more data?

I mean, I haven't had time to sit down and say, what is the range of possible competitive seats in the House? Right. Yes, it's mathematically possible for Democrats to do it. Are there enough seats that you'd feel good about for it to be kind of a realistic possibility? Right. And this question earlier, I want to know what turnout was in this election. I want to know, was this a big turnout or a small turnout? There were very conflicting reports about turnout throughout the day. And that takes a long time until we actually have complete turnout data.

All right. Well, we're going to leave it there and we will be back with more tomorrow. In the meantime, thank you, Nate. Thank you, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Sophia Leibowitz, Tony Chow, and Emily Vanesky are in the control room. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store.

or tell someone about us, let me reiterate here that we are going to keep on live blogging. We're going to have more videos out for you in the YouTube channel. We're going to have more podcasts. So if this is feeling reminiscent of 2020, I feel it too. But in the meantime, thanks for listening and we will see you soon.