When media outlets, authors, professors, scholars, and even bookies (but don’t tell anyone) are looking for odds on an election, they essentially only have one source: Five Thirty-Eight.
Nate Silver, the founder of the site, chose the name for obvious reasons — there are 538 electors in the United States electoral college, of whom 270 are required to grant one candidate the presidency.
Of course, fivethirtyeight.com predicts more than just presidential elections. That would be a pretty narrow focus, and a great waste of what’s turned out to be the most accurate prediction model that American politics has ever known. In fact, Nate’s rise from blogger to political powerhouse has been meteoric, and mostly unprecedented since the advent of the service ten years ago. That method includes the weight of other pollster’s track records, then assigns a value he calls “pollster-induced error.” Nate then adds his own electoral predictions based on the usual metrics of local favorability and the like, and comes up with his final tallies.
Some would like to dismiss the major polling outlets after essentially everyone called the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton. But the major factor in them “getting it wrong” was one that could never have been accounted for through any traditional methods — and one that’s been proven to have played a huge role in Donald Trump’s electoral college victory: Russian interference.
What Five Thirty-Eight is saying today about the midterm elections should truly strike fear in the hearts of not just Republicans hoping to hang on to their House seats, but the President himself. As most people are aware now — and we can thank this historically unpopular leader for it — the House is the chamber in which articles of impeachment are introduced. And Nate Silver’s prediction this year for the House of Representatives has Democrats with a 75 percent chance of taking control from the Republicans.
It’s important to remember that many factors will play a role, and we can’t discount gerrymandering. But Silver’s predictive model does account for that. It’s ironic that just a few short years ago, many of us in the world of political wonkery considered the House lost to the GOP for a generation because of gerrymandering.
Now, after watching history being made in district after historically-red district, many are strongly convinced there will be a Blue Wave election this year, and Nate’s model seems to back up that claim. In fact, out of more than 30 seats expected to “flip” parties from the incumbent’s party, just one — Minnesota’s 8th — is expected to go from Democratic to Republican.
It’s going to be an exciting election, so hang on to your hats, folks!
Just not those red ballcaps.
Featured image via screen capture
