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Let's talk midterms. I haven't been keeping up with the races too much, but some quick research shows that Polymarket has odds for Democrats to take the House at ninety four percent and Democrats to take the Senate at seventy two percent (House market, Senate market). Apparently, the odds of a Republican sweep are down to five to seven percent (Balance of Power market).
Obviously, we can't really trust polls entirely. But I do trust the markets to be at least somewhat accurate, and so things are looking pretty horribly bad for Republicans. What are the actual implications if this happens? Because like I don't know, the second Trump term after Doge flopped, or rather, after Trump pulled back on Doge and was afraid to actually back them when it mattered. This whole term feels like kind of a mess.
What actual goals are going to be blocked by the Trump administration if the Democrats win a sweep? And I guess how much can they get done if they don't control the presidency? Or is it mainly, like, if they win the presidency in 2028 that things are gonna be bad? Walk me through the real ramifications of midterms flipping for the Democrats.
Nate Silver is at this point essentially saying that there's no way to soften, or unskew, or fiddle with the mechanisms in the polls and produce a Republican win: either the Democrats win big, or polling as we know it is useless.
This concerns me, in that polling is a significant part of how Americans understand the world. It may be that polls are no better than horoscopes, often with less math!, but it can't be denied that millions of Americans understand the polls as meaningful information about the world. A polling miss this large will break people's brains.
One of the refrains of the 2020 election conspiracists has always been a reasonable motte: It doesn't really matter if the election was stolen, if enough people think it was stolen than it damages the legitimacy of democracy and the government etc must step in and seriously investigate the allegations of wrongdoing to assuage those concerns. If the confidence of the public is shaken, it must be restored, even if the allegations are factually false.
I'm worried that this is gonna be the big one. Democrats lose, when Democrats have abundant "objective" evidence that they're going to win, and as a result a large part of the D electorate decides that elections are fake and fixed. Or Democrats win, and Trump refuses to accept the result for whatever reason, and gets enough traction to make it a real problem for everyone.
Probably, nothing ever happens. But I'm worried. The polls are unequivocal at this point, the result may not line up with it.
People who understand both betting and polling (of whom Nate Silver is the most prominent) are saying that the prediction markets are entirely consistent with the polls - Republicans doing well enough to hold onto 50 senate seats would require correlated polling errors* within the published margin of error, which is entirely consistent with a 28% probability. (As was the case with the 2016 and 2024 Presidential elections). Republicans holding the House would imply a polling miss of world-historical proportions. This should not be a 5% real-world probability, but it is well known that 5% implied probability on a sportsbook does not correspond to 5% probability on the real-world measure because (i) gamblers overback longshots and (ii) backing a sure thing at 19-1 on/1.05/-1900 odds isn't as profitable as it looks because it locks up a lot of money.
Polling isn't (and never was - 1992 in the UK remains infamous in the industry) good enough to call close elections, and the 2026 Senate election is close.
* The difference between Nate Silver's measured bullishness on Clinton immediately before the 2016 election and less numerate poll-driven pundits thinking that she had it in the bag was that a lot of stupid people didn't understand why polling errors are correlated by default.
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