Election Update 8/14/26

 It's that time of month again. Well there are multiple times a month I do this and you should just expect it to continue to ramp up as we get closer to election update, but time to look at where the elections are going! Lots to discuss this week. 

Senate

As you can tell I'm on mobile again. It's currently 87 degrees outside and it feels like that inside outside of the few rooms with air conditioning so I'm coming to you from tablet again. 

Anyway, to discuss a few removed races:

South Carolina- no one seriously expects this to be competitive, right?

Montana- Well, neither Bankhead nor Bodnar will drop to give the other a shot at winning, and the deadline to do so has passed and it's like R+16, so I'm gonna declare that safe R. It's not a Dan Osborn situation, unfortunately. 

Speaking of Dan Osborn, you might notice I shifted Nebraska to D+1. This isn't due to new data. I realize that the data I have is so old, that I went out seeking new data because I didnt wanna just throw in placeholder data that is lean R or something, so I found the NY times site, which had three polls on it, averaging D+1. I feel like this is more representative of the race than D+5, that was always kinda sketchy. Heck, the polls added arent much better, they're all sponsored by Osborn or affiliates themselves, but still, the alternative is to not have data and to just add R+3 or something as a placeholder. Given its not currently disrupting my forecast, I'll leave it at D+1 since I prefer to let the data speak for itself than to offer my "expert commentary" that ends up being entirely wrong anyway. 

On other races, democrats are doing quite well, but sometimes not as well as I'd expect. Texas, Alaska, and Ohio are all tilting/leaning D. Maine is up 2.3 for Jackson, but this is a bit underwhelming to me, I feel like he should be winning by more. I get the impression he's not as charismatic as pre scandal Platner was. Iowa's tilting R, that's to be expected. So is Michigan. 

I wanna discuss Michigan in more detail since my favorite candidate of the cycle, Abdul El Sayed is there. He IS on the losing side of this, according to polling. I'm not gonna mince words. But....it's still relatively close, and to be fair, Haley Stevens was only like 2 points more electable in the first place. When El Sayed won the nomination, he was at 47%, a new Fox News poll that was R+4 hurt his average there, but Stevens only polled around 1.7 at the time giving her a 66% shot. So she was better, but not like, amazingly better. 

Either way, I find this frustrating. El Sayed is an excellent candidate and I feel like people are just believing racist and Islamophobic lies about him. I hate to say it, I hate accusing people of that, but it's true here. It's like:

EL Sayed: "I'm a capitalist!"

Republicans: "HE'S A COMMUNIST!"

El Sayed: "I love Jewish people"

Republicans: "HE'S AN ANTISEMITE!"

El Sayed: "I love America"

Republicans: "ABDULRAHMAN MOHAMED EL SAYED HATES AMERICA AND WANTS TO IMPOSE SHARIA LAW ON EVERYONE!"

I mean, it's not even subtle. They're just flat out fricking lying about the guy! And it's clear it's working because he's a brown guy from a middle eastern background. It's crazy. Like really, the republicans have nothing on this guy so they're just making crap up about him. And sadly, he's struggling to get into the positives polling wise as a result. 

Anyway, we'll see where this goes, but yeah. Still, even with him struggling, we got about a 56% chance of taking the senate, and are probably gonna get 52 seats, 51 if we ignore Nebraska. Republicans will likely get 48-49 seats with a 44% chance of controlling the chamber (including ties). 

House

Like always, I expect democrats to win the house in a landslide with give or take 230 seats or so. It should be noted that this is a fundamentals based model, since so little polling data exists, especially at this point in the cycle, but the few polling points I see seem to paint an even rosier picture. For example, I've seen data suggesting OH-07 should flip, because Max Miller is running there and he's been accused of domestic abuse to put it lightly. We'll see come election day, and I suspect I might run 2 separate house models just to see what works better, but yeah, for now, this is what my model spits out at me. 

Governors

I have yet to prune the governors' data like I did with the senate. Namely because there are still races expected to be competitive that have zero data like Kansas. On the flip side, Maine has data and seems just slightly out of the 12 point range, but still close enough to it that I feel I should include him. 

I'd say the biggest story of the week is David Crowley winning the nomination for Wisconsin governor, and now I can confidently shift the race from lean R (Hong data) to lean D (Crowley data). Really, I know I'm a progressive, I know I tend to like DSA candidates, and I know a lot of leftists are acting like Bernie and AOC failed her by not endorsing, but if you notice, I didn't endorse Hong either. Because she couldn't win. For the most part I had her at a 23% shot at winning, and while a last minute poll bumped it up to like R+1.7 with a 34% shot at winning or so, uh...yeah....Crowley polled better. Barnes when he was in polled much better. I wish Barnes was the nominee as he was more progressive (but not crazy about it) and polled even better, but given my focus this cycle is on winning, and given a governorship in a state that isnt mine isn't likely to advance the progressive agenda I want in a meaningful way, well...I can live with Crowley. I mean, I just really wanna beat the republicans this time, ya know? Kinda important for the future of democracy.

Conclusion

With that said what can we conclude? That a lot has changed, but the overall picture hasn't. Democrats are still expected to take the house. The senate is in play when in a normal election year it shouldn't be, and in the senate a lot of races are more or less tossups, meaning that polling error and the size of the predicted blue wave is gonna matter a lot more than candidate quality for the most party. Democrats could win the senate Democrats could win the senate in a 54-46 sweep, while a republican overperformance could knock it down to 49-51 or even less for democrats. It really depends where the pieces end up lying.

But yeah, that's where stuff is right now. I'll do the next one of these toward the end of the month unless there's a massive shakeup I feel should be reported.