Cautious Optimism by Josh Marshall

Cautious Optimism

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall  /  1h  //  keep unread  //  hide

We’re now five days out from the midterm election. I wanted to share some thoughts as some of the outlines of Tuesday night start to come into view.

As I say in the headline, I find myself cautiously optimistic about the midterm results. There are a number of signs that the election is closing with momentum toward the Democrats. Yesterday The Cook Political Report nudged its estimate of Democratic House pick ups from 25-35 to 30-40 seats. The congressional generic ballot polls have been edging in the Democrats’ direction and the President Trump’s popularity seems to be edging back down. Republican campaign operatives definitely seem more pessimistic over recent days than they were as recently as mid-October.

I want to be clear: I don’t put a huge amount of stock in these small movements in the national polls. They’re all more or less consistent with bobbling around in the margin of error. The big story, I’d say, is the consistency and stability of the numbers and outlook for months. Here’s why they matter to me. Democrats have always had the inside track in this cycle. My worry has been late activation or some late shift in the GOP direction. So these small movements don’t give me a strong reason to think Democrats are surging. But it gives me some real confidence that Republicans are not. Since things look pretty good for the Democrats as is, that’s a big plus for the Democrats. There are some reasons to think that President Trump’s aggressive re-entry into the headlines in the last two weeks are reminding people of all their worries about him and building electoral momentum to create a check on his power in Washington.

There are other signs beneath the national soundings which suggest that the map of vulnerable Republicans is expanding rather than contracting, as it seemed to be in early October. It is always important to remember that there are 435 House seats up for election. A lot of those districts haven’t been polled or haven’t been polled much – through public or private polling – with any regularity. So when we hear the map is ‘expanding’ that doesn’t necessarily mean things are changing in a real sense. It may simply mean that latent vulnerabilities which were always there are coming into view. Regardless of which it is, we’ve seen a clear pattern over the last two weeks of Republicans jumping into districts that had looked safe and now look endangered. Information like that is likely what the Cook Report analysts are looking at when they upped their estimate of Democratic pick ups.

Along these lines, there’s a point Nate Silver has made several times. First, some background. The number of seats that are now genuinely toss up races, even if they lean a bit in either direction, is huge. And the overwhelmingly majority of them are currently held by Republicans. This is actually one of the reasons there’s a non-trivial chance of Democrats falling short and also dramatically outperforming expectations. It’s not like there are 25 or 30 specific seats you can point to and confidently say this is a Democratic pick up on election day. There are probably only 15 or so seats like that. But there are upwards of a 100 that could reasonably go either way on election night.

Here we have some key new data today. The Washington Post has the third and I assume final installment of a national poll which samples voters in 69 districts which The Cook Political Report categorized as “competitive” back in August. In that poll, Democrats hold a small but non-trivial four point advantage: 50%-46%. Critically these are almost all Republican districts. 63 of the 69 districts are currently held by Republicans. 48 are held by Republicans and were won by President Trump in 2016.

Democrats probably have to win only a dozen or so of those seats to win the majority. But there’s a big upside. Even a minor polling underestimation of Democratic turnout could move that number dramatically higher.

Here’s where we get back to Silver’s point. Almost inevitably you are going to have a handful of Republicans who found out late that they were in a competitive races. If Tuesday night plays out more or less as expected, you will likely have some Republicans in purple seats who hold on while some in redder seats go down because they hadn’t built a real campaign or raised enough money. A late expanding playing field leads to those kinds of outcomes.

One final point. Democrats’ winning the Senate remains a longshot. Going from 49 to 50 seats is still unlikely but far more plausible. But despite polls consistently showing Beto O’Rourke behind, he can win. I don’t think it’s likely. But I definitely think it’s possible. The key is greatly expanded turnout, as revealed in the early voting. Cam Joseph has a look at the specifics here. Early voting numbers are running high across the country. But they’re running very high in Texas.

Early voting analyses are notoriously treacherous ground to make any predictions about the results of an election. It’s almost crazy to do it. So I don’t make any predictions about what the high turnout in Texas means, who it advantages or whether it advantages anyone. What I do think is that this level of expanded turnout holds the real possibility that the models of the electorate that pollsters are using could be meaningfully off. Put differently, the shape of the electorate could be different from what pollsters are predicting. That doesn’t mean that Beto O’Rourke is more likely to win. It does mean that there’s more uncertainty about what the polls are telling us. Since O’Rourke has consistently been behind at least in the low- mid-single digits, more uncertainty about the poll numbers is a good thing. It makes outperforming that kind of deficit more plausible.

More soon.