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FiveThirtyEight: Donald Trump is unpopular enough that Republicans could lose the House. . .
". . .but there’s a lot of uncertainty."
. . .
Generally speaking, a president’s party does better in down-ballot races when he’s popular and worse when he’s less popular. But it’s not a 1-to-1 relationship. You can see this by plotting the presidents’ final Gallup job approval ratings before every midterm election1 since World War II against how many House seats his party lost.
Let’s use Trump’s current approval ratings, 40 percent, to show how inexact this relationship is. If we were able to predict the House results perfectly based on Trump’s 40 percent approval rating, Republicans would be forecast to lose roughly 40 seats. Democrats need to pick up 24 seats to take back the House. But the margin of error on this estimate is +/- 33 seats! That is, Democrats could gain as few as seven seats or as many as 73. Democrats could end up on the upper end of that scale, if nearly every person who dislikes the president votes for the Democratic candidate in their House election. We have, after all, seen an increasingly strong relationship between how people feel about the president and how they vote for Congress.
But Democrats could also just as easily fall short of a majority. They may not do a good job of recruiting top-notch candidates. In 2016, Democrats didn’t even field a candidate in 29 districts, including in Republican Rep. Pete Sessions’s district in Texas, even as Hillary Clinton beat Trump there. There’s also the issue of district lines. The way district lines are currently drawn benefits Republicans by distributing GOP voters more efficiently than Democratic voters. So, all else being equal, we would probably expect Republicans to win more seats than Trump’s approval rating alone indicates.
One way to get around the effect of how the districts are drawn is to try to predict the national House vote — the change in the share of people2 nationally who vote for Democratic and Republican House candidates — instead of how many House seats change hands. By looking at the national vote, we can get a sense for how many people are voting Democratic or Republican before those votes are skewed by the congressional district lines. But even when looking at the change in the national House vote, there’s a wide margin of error. . . .
. . .
Generally speaking, a president’s party does better in down-ballot races when he’s popular and worse when he’s less popular. But it’s not a 1-to-1 relationship. You can see this by plotting the presidents’ final Gallup job approval ratings before every midterm election1 since World War II against how many House seats his party lost.
Let’s use Trump’s current approval ratings, 40 percent, to show how inexact this relationship is. If we were able to predict the House results perfectly based on Trump’s 40 percent approval rating, Republicans would be forecast to lose roughly 40 seats. Democrats need to pick up 24 seats to take back the House. But the margin of error on this estimate is +/- 33 seats! That is, Democrats could gain as few as seven seats or as many as 73. Democrats could end up on the upper end of that scale, if nearly every person who dislikes the president votes for the Democratic candidate in their House election. We have, after all, seen an increasingly strong relationship between how people feel about the president and how they vote for Congress.
But Democrats could also just as easily fall short of a majority. They may not do a good job of recruiting top-notch candidates. In 2016, Democrats didn’t even field a candidate in 29 districts, including in Republican Rep. Pete Sessions’s district in Texas, even as Hillary Clinton beat Trump there. There’s also the issue of district lines. The way district lines are currently drawn benefits Republicans by distributing GOP voters more efficiently than Democratic voters. So, all else being equal, we would probably expect Republicans to win more seats than Trump’s approval rating alone indicates.
One way to get around the effect of how the districts are drawn is to try to predict the national House vote — the change in the share of people2 nationally who vote for Democratic and Republican House candidates — instead of how many House seats change hands. By looking at the national vote, we can get a sense for how many people are voting Democratic or Republican before those votes are skewed by the congressional district lines. But even when looking at the change in the national House vote, there’s a wide margin of error. . . .
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-very-early-look-at-the-battle-for-the-house-in-2018/
17 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
It basically assumes that Benedict Donald's current (un)popularity will continue exactly as is, which is very doubtful. It's more likely that he will either rebound somewhat (as people get used to the "new normal"
or crater even more (if things keep going the way they are) than that he will simply plateau at this level. And, if either of those happens, all bets are off.
