Polling guru Nate Silver has upgraded Democrats’ chances of winning control of the U.S. Senate in November’s midterm elections, with his forecast now giving the party a 75 percent probability of victory.
Silver’s FLIPR 2026 midterm election forecast, published by Silver Bulletin, previously classified Democrats’ chances as “Lean D” as their prospects of retaking the chamber improved. The forecast has now moved into the “Likely D” category, marking a further shift in the model’s outlook.
Silver’s model uses polling data and other indicators to estimate the likelihood of different election outcomes. Its probabilities are estimates rather than guarantees, and the outlook can change as new polling and other information become available, but the latest upgrade suggests the model increasingly favors Democrats in the battle for the chamber.
Why does anyone listen to people like this? More or less the crazy homeless person in the town square shouting to the heavens about the rapture.
VOTE
I’m blocking any references to Nate Silver after Trump vs. Harris
I’m getting pretty tired of hearing about the polling data.
Just vote. Full stop. Just. Vote.
None of this early polling means ANYTHING if you don’t vote. Just vote. Who cares what the data says. Vote.
Yeah don’t count on it, vote vote vote.
Haha, I’ve seen this shit from Nate before
Polls are unreliable imo
I remember reading the night before the election an article he posted about that. How the odds were similar to that of a game of Russian roulette. Sure, 5 in 6 chance there’s no bullet in the chamber. But 1 in 6 that there is.
If it helps, in 2018, Dems had a major victory, and in 2022 the supposed Red Wave was far more of a Red Splash.
Today, the cult is far smaller. Partly due to the price of everything going up, partly because Trump’s core demographic have been meeting their life expectancy. The latter especially sooner as they’ve become so anti-medicine.
You can help tip the scales by voting Dem.
I have issues with Silver too, but to be fair, an 80% likelihood should be wrong one time in five. If it always predicted the winner, the 80% figure would be inaccurate.
I think people confuse predicted chance of winning with predicted poll results, where 82% would indeed predict an unstoppable landslide.
Pretty sure that was the NYT. Silver had her at a 71% chance.
It should be more accurate when predicting the aggregate outcome of multiple races instead of one (assuming weak correlation).
Due to the Electoral College, predicting the outcome of a Presidential election is effectively predicting the aggregate outcome of multiple state races.
Yeah, I removed that point when I realized the forecast was already an aggregate.
The Electoral College and the popular vote are very strongly correlated. The EC only ever comes into play when the election is very close in terms of popular vote, and then polls can’t give a (near) certain answer anyway.
In fact, US elections are much easier to predict using polling than elections in most other places, because a) the US electorate has extremely high voter loyalty compared to typical values elsewhere, especially in functional democracies and b) there is a lot of high-quality polling data available.
Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by more than 2% of the popular vote, which I would say is not “very close” in this context. So I’m not sure I agree with your premise.
Trump’s odds of winning were 19%, similar to the 16% chance of the bad outcome in Russian roulette. I notice people interpret statistics more on the situation than the numbers.
I’ve played a lot of games with random factors. Sometimes you miss that 99% shot three times in a row. People kind of assume anything above 80% is 100%, which is silly.
X-COM?
I actually never played much XCOM, but I did play a lot of final fantasy tactics. And the original fallout.
I think Baldur’s gate 3 cheats though, since with karmic dice off I rolled four natural 1s in a row, twice.
BG3 does do funky things with rolls but I don’t recall the details
This. He got put on a pedestal there and I think he’d have to do a lot to earn trust again after that colossal fuck-up.
Of course, it’s always possible it was not even close to his fault, and the election was just outright stolen.
You really should learn how statistics work. It’s a common problem. And not all of it is easy. But let’s round that down to 80% to make the numbers easier to understand: It means that if there are five universes where that election took place, four of them should go for Clinton and one should go for Trump. On average. Really, it’s more like if there were 5000 universes, not 5.
But assuming the prediction was correct - that’s still 20% of the time - one time out of five - that it was predicted to go how it went.
That is not shocking or odd or wrong at all.
Nate said Kamala Harris was 50-50 with Donald Trump in 2024. In reality, Trump won every swing state. It wasn’t neck and neck.
He also called it for Trump the night before the election.
And that again misunderstands statistics going on here.
The prediction was who won, not by how much they won. In fact, his prediction was that it was a 60% chance that one or the other of them would win six out of the seven close races.
This stuff IS difficult to understand. Some of it is pretty intuitive, and some of it really is not.
edit: Fucking go LEARN before you fucking downvote. I am correct. So feel free to try and prove me wrong. But if you’re just going to downvote, fuck you and fuck off. Stop being willfully ignorant. Jesus christ.
If Trump wins every swing state there was never a 50-50 chance Kamala could’ve won.
That is not how statistics works.
You’re thinking of statistical prediction as divination. That an 80% chance of something happening means it’s going to happen.
Statistical predictions are a combination of two statements.
- There is an X% chance of event A occurring
AND
- There is a Y% chance of event B occurring.
In order to be accurate, event B must occur Y% of the time, event A X%. There may be dozens of ways either even can unfold, but the ultimate outcome should fall in to one of those two possibilities, roughly as often as predicted.
I’m hot being hyperbolic when I say this, saying “60% of the time it works every time” is literally a more accurate way of looking at it than what you’re saying.
Incorrect. You can fucking look this stuff up and learn instead of being aggressively ignorant.
Analogy: Flipping a single coin has a 50% chance of “winning”. Flip one coin, however, and ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of ALL COINS FLIPPED are HEADS (or TAILS), and yet it was a 50% chance of winning.
Please. Please go fucking learn how this works, or just accept that it is the case. Google it. Talk to an LLM if you want - they are great at explaining this sort of thing. Do something. Please don’t continue to make ignorant replies.
Don’t talk to an LLM, it will end up telling you what you want to hear.
Do actual research
Yeah; 75% from him sounds pretty worrying.
Just some reminders on polling and prediction models:
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Individual polls from reputable pollsters can be a barometer for a snapshot in time, but they may also be outliers.
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An aggregation of many reputable polls during the same period of time is a more accurate snapshot in time.
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Long-term trends can be very useful and give more extrapolative trajectories (e.g., the long-term downward decline of Biden’s aggregate national approval ratings and his steady decline in swing-states leading to a change in strategy and his stepping down).
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Still, such polls may not accurately represent fringe groups (though many pollsters compensate in a variety of ways).
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We shouldn’t just blindly follow the polls (blind-leading-the-blind mentality)—e.g., if the case is never made for something, then it never gets popular. Bernie Sanders heavily advocated for Universal Healthcare and we of course have seen an adjustment in polling instead of simply reacting to its initial unpopularity—but we also shouldn’t ignore trends.
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Polls don’t dictate what people do in the moment, or say or do later; instead, they’re an imperfect reflection of where they are at in the moment.
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Models and Projections like Silver’s with good odds doesn’t mean you still can’t lose, and it doesn’t prove his model is a failure. Just because there’s a 95% chance you don’t roll a critical failure doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. That’s only proven if on hindsight of many cycles of elections, where his accuracy holds up fairly well when including all races including congressional.
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Every advocate should have the mindset of trying to change polls to their advantage; this by active campaigning (canvassing, phone-banking, fundraising, etc.), change of messaging, etc. In this respect, again, the trend is more important.
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Context should always be considered when discussing polling. (e.g., in isolation, Biden’s debate could be considered, “just one bad night, and we can swing polls back,” without considering the long-term concern that was already present over his immutable vice — age/cognitive-decline.)
No matter what the polls say, winning, tying, or losing… Always and I mean always Register and VOTE. Not just this, but drag 3-5 other people to register and vote with you.
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Polls are neat, voting is what counts.
I dropped off my ballot yesterday in a drop box, not trusting the post office, vote early if possible, take all their suppression tricks away.
Silver’s model
Is proprietary and has never been disclosed…
It’s essentially “trust me bro” and that includes if what he’s using today is the same as yesterday, let alone back when it worked.
I don’t care what anyone predicts. We’ve got to keep pushing. This has to be a landslide, a sea change, whatever phrase you wish, the result must be an unequivocal rebuke of the current administration.
Yeah I want the safe red seats to go blue. I want us to be staring down the barrel of congress that might push a medical freedom amendment to the constitution, I want us to have a congress where we’ve got democrats to spare when it comes to trying the orange fuck. And I want our safe seats to be historical blowouts.
I’m probably not getting that, but dammit I’m going to demand it, and I’m going to vote for it.
Aye Aye Captain!!
It’s a jead game to make democratic voters complascent. Go vote. Early voting just started in my area, and im going tomorrow.
a jead game to make democratic voters complascent.
‘jead’?
‘complascent’ – complacent ?
I wonder if you’ve got spell-check turned off. I expect it’ll default to American, but it’s close to English.
never trusting his forecasts again
75% chance of thing happening still means a 25% chance of it not happening.
If you roll a d4, there’s a 75% chance you will roll a 2, 3, or 4. But you still may very well roll a 1.
That’s what’s important to keep in mind with statistical models. The event is only going to happen once, and it doesn’t matter if it had a 25% chance or a 75% chance, it will be the outcome.
Everyone who can should go vote.
Silver’s predictions have also not been particularly accurate over the last decade…I forget what the story was, but there was something that made me seriously question his credibility
It’s entirely possible that after his polls became famous that a GOP affiliated pile of money “encouraged” him to develop an intentional bias in his public numbers