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SurveyUSA has a new national poll that shows Joe Biden leading with 32 percent of the vote, followed by Bernie Sanders at 21 percent, Elizabeth Warren at 14 percent and both Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg at 9 percent. As compared with SurveyUSA’s previous national poll in November, Biden is up 2 percentage points, Sanders is up 4, Warren is down 1, Buttigieg is down 2, and Bloomberg is up 6. While SurveyUSA has seemingly good news for Biden, an Ipsos national poll for Reuters does not. Instead, it has Sanders ahead nationally at 20 percent, followed by Biden at...

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro on Tuesday tweeted a meme invoking a character from the popular streaming series “The Mandalorian” to show his support for moving early primaries to states with more diverse populations that better reflect the Democratic base. The presidential candidate was responding to a tweet by Nate Silver of the polling website FiveThirtyEight, who tweeted, “If the Democratic Party wants a field that's representative of its members and its voters, it probably shouldn't have two states as white as Iowa and New Hampshire vote first every year.” In response, Castro tweeted an image of...

Sometimes, when a news story is still unfolding in real time, we can’t do much better than to hazard a guess about how it will affect the polls. Of course, we can also not hazard a guess — that is, we can not say anything about it at all. But given that I wrote yesterday about public opinion surrounding the impeachment of President Trump, this is one time when I think it’s worth weighing in on the latest development; namely, the White House’s decision to release, on Wednesday, Trump’s reconstructed conversation (note: not a verbatim transcript) with Ukrainian president Volodymyr...

In March 2010, Professor Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University released a study about President Obama’s stimulus package. It contained many informational gems: *Public entities received 42 percent of awards under the stimulus package, but received over half of dollars awarded (meaning they got larger chunks of change than private contractors); *Even according to the administration, $285,814.61 was spent to create each job under the stimulus; *On average, Democratic districts received 1.53 times the amount of awards that Republicans were granted, with Democratic districts receiving 2.65 times the amount of stimulus dollars Republican districts received. Democratic districts received 73...

President Trump has declared a national emergency in order to pay for physical barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, but will Congress block it? That’s a long shot — but we can’t rule it out either. Here’s the basic process, as the New York Times explained in an article after Trump’s declaration. Congress can take up a resolution to end a presidential national emergency declaration. If such a resolution passes in one chamber, the other must bring it up for a vote within 18 days. If the resolution passes both chambers and the president vetoes it, a two-thirds majority in Congress...

FiveThirtyEight founder and election forecaster Nate Silver on Monday offered his final projections for the midterm elections, arguing that a number of factors are conspiring to make Republican chances of keeping the majority in the House "fairly slim." Silver gave Democrats a roughly 86 percent chance of winning the majority in the House. The party must pick up at least 23 seats on Tuesday to retake the majority. "Democrats need a couple of things to go wrong to lose tomorrow because not very much is going right for Republicans," Silver wrote. Silver said Republicans still stand a slim chance of...

Red Wave: All last month political guru Nate Silver predicted that Democrats had an 80-85 percent chance of retaking the House at least, but now that the midterm elections are just a day away, he seems to be hedging his bet. “This last set of Upshot/Siena polls has been pretty good for D’s. They’re polling in 11 districts now, and on average, the polls are coming in about 2-3 points better for Dems than the 538 Classic forecast from before the poll was entered,” the editor of FiveThirtyEight.com tweeted on Saturday.

The reason it’s counterintuitive is because you can’t really identify 23 districts that are safe bets to flip to Democrats, which is the number they need to take the House. In the Deluxe version of our model (the one I’ll be focusing on here) only 193 seats are considered by our model to be “solid Democratic” (at least a 95 percent chance of a Democratic victory). If Democrats won only those seats and no others, they’d actually lose two seats from the 195 they control now. Another 15 seats are “likely Democratic,” where Democrats have at least a 75 chance...

FiveThirtyEight's election forecaster Nate Silver said Sunday that the House could end up in Democrat or Republican hands in Tuesday's election, though polling predicts that Democrats will flip the chamber. "So in the House we have Democrats with about a 4 in 5 chance of winning," Silver told ABC's "This Week." However, he noted that "polls aren't always right." "The range of outcomes in the House is really wide," he explained. "Our range which covers 80 percent of outcomes goes from, on the low end, about 15 Democratic pickups, all the way to low to mid 50s, 52 or 53."...

I'm not at all convinced there's movement nationally toward Democrats—the generic ballot has been very flat. But, they may be closing well in swing districts because of their big spending advantage, which ought to be a bit scary for R's... But to bring this back: When people look at 538 and ask "what if the polls are wrong?", that's *the question our model is trying to answer*. The polls say Ds will win the House. Our model says, based on how accurate polls have been in the past, there's a 15-20% chance they won't...

11/5/14 "For much of this election cycle, Democrats complained the polls were biased against them. They said the polls were failing to represent enough minority voters and applying overly restrictive likely-voter screens. They claimed early-voting data was proving the polls wrong. They cited the fact that polls were biased against Democrats in 2012. The Democrats’ complaints may have been more sophisticated-seeming than the ”skewed polls” arguments made by Republicans in 2012. But in the end, they were just as wrong. The polls did have a strong bias this year — but it was toward Democrats and not against them."

in 7 Chance Democrats win control (86.4%) 1 in 7 Chance Republicans keep

Nate Silver explains the methodology behind our 2018 midterms forecast. Read more …

538 founder Nate Silver said the major "X-factor" in predicting the 2018 midterm elections is turnout and that is determined by the "Trumpian news cycle." He also said we might see "an October surprise or two" before November 6, in an interview on ABC's 'This Week.' (snip) GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: "...So there it comes down to 85 percent chance that Democrats win control (note: Nate Silver's prediction now). That sounds a lot bigger than it is, right?" NATE SILVER, 538: "...Not a lot of guarantees, but that’s why we show like a very wide range, anywhere from a 20 seat gain,...

RUSH: Nate Silver. Since I mentioned it, let’s go listen to it. We have three bites here. This is last night, FiveThirtyEight website, politics podcast, Galen Druke asking the editor-in-chief, Nate Silver, about his forecast for the 2018 midterms. The question: “What odds does your forecast show for control of the House in this election?” SILVER: It gives Democrats a three-in-four chance of winning the House. It’s in the Hillary Clinton zone. It’s very similar actually. Part of the reason why we’re saying like three-in-four and one-in-four for Republicans. If you play out this universe four times they win once...

When "presidential politics experts" ranked all presidents, past and current, the headlines typically focused on Trump’s position at the bottom of the list. After one year—a year with a booming economy, increased business and consumer confidence, and significant gains on the foreign policy front—they have concluded that Trump is the worst president of all time. There’s no chance of any partisan bias there, right?Trump's record is certainly up for debate, but even famed liberal pollster Nate Silver wrote off the rankings as partisan garbage in a tweet. "It speaks poorly to the field of presidential scholarship that political scientists have Trump...

Sometimes your best friends can inadvertently become your worst enemies. Such was the case of Hillary Clinton and the mainstream media according to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight. Most observant people knew that the MSM was all in for Hillary this past election to the extent of acting like cheerleaders for her. So instead of cautioning Hillary when Donald Trump made exactly the right moves to win the necessary electoral votes for victory, they instead mocked him for his ignorance of political campaigning. As a result this gave the Hillary campaign a false sense of security when they should have campaigned...

Statistics expert Nate Silver claims defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would "almost certainly" have made it to the Oval Office if the election had been held before FBI Director James Comey announced the reopening of the agency's investigation into her private email practices. "Comey had a large, measurable impact on the race," wrote Silver, who ran FiveThirtyEight's election forecast, in a series of tweets Sunday morning.

Here’s the Electoral College map we’re going to end up with, assuming that every uncalled state goes to the candidate leading in the vote count there as of 4 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. There’s a sea of red for President-elect Donald Trump. He earned 306 electoral votes and became the first Republican since 1988 to win Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.

Hillary was at 76% odds of winning according to this buffoon today... Effing idiot. http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/