Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics tweeted on Wednesday that new polling shows the media’s predicted Republican apocalypse in the 2018 midterm elections in the House might not come to be and that the GOP might actually gain seats in the Senate:
If we get some more polls that look like Fox (don’t want to hear it, they use bipartisan pollsters) and Harvard-Harris, Republican control of the house would be no worse than 50-50 and R Senate gains back on the table.
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
Trende took some heat for his analysis, which he explained further this morning:
People have been getting really confused about my tweet about Harvard-Harris and the Fox News poll for about 10 hours now, so I suspect some further explanation is in order. 1/ https://t.co/VoDy9UIYTV
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
First, to be clear, I was talking about the job approval numbers and not the generic ballot numbers. I think the GB is an interesting heuristic, and is generally consistent with the national environment. I also don't find it to be terribly useful. 2/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
Lots of smart people use it in their modeling, which is fine, as there are lots of good models out there, but I don't, mainly because in my experience aggregated models of congress don't do so well. I use an individual, district-level model. 3/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
For my purposes, I find that a 1 percent increase in presidential job approval increases the odds of a candidate winning that district by about 1.25 percent. It's an important, but not overwhelming factor. 4/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
My working assumption had been that Trump had a *lot* of downside to his job approval, and not much upside. IOW, I would have been much less surprised to have him at 30% on Election Day than, say, 45%. 5/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
So my baseline expectation for Republicans in November of 2018 has been a bloodbath, something in the realm of around 40 seats, give-or-take. That would be the worst midterm election for Rs since 1974. 6/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
But you have to be willing to update working assumptions. So when you see the two best non-Rasmussen job approval numbers since May of '17 back-to-back, you should cock your head to the side and say "huh." 7/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
Does that mean that you toss out your assumption and say "Trump's headed to 50% approval?" Heck no. 8/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
But you also have to build in that, given the recent spate of good economic news, the apparent gelling of the Republican Party from the tax cut bill, and a few other things, that the normal expectation is that job approval would rise. 9/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
That's what we've seen. On average, he's at 40 percent right now, which still isn't good, and would still be catastrophic to Rs. But *if* (to clarify, this is a conjunction that introduces a *conditional*) 10/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
again *if* we start to get more polls showing him in the mid-40s, I'd substantially revise my expectations about his ceiling, as well as how well Republicans were likely to do in the midterms. 11/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
43 percent job approval is roughly the Mendoza line for Rs being in the game to hold the House. We haven't even had polls testing the upper bound above that number in a while. 12/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
So, it's at least noteworthy to get polls up there. If we get a bunch more polls like Q-Pac or WaPo? Then you shrug and say "these were outliers, he probably still has a ceiling around 40 percent" and move on. 13/
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
And if we get polls showing him in the low 30s? Also noteworthy! But to me, not as surprising, since I don't have much of an expectation that he has a floor. 14/14
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 25, 2018
In summary, anything can happen between now and November 2018, but “great economic news matters” and that what’s driving the polls right now:
This thread: Because great economic news matters, and we are getting a lot of great economic news.
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) January 25, 2018
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