Nate Silver Just Gave Trump Devastating News About Republicans’ Hopes For Keeping Congress
Few prognosticators accurately predicted the results of last year’s Presidential Election and Republican Primary, and FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver was among the many who wrote off Donald Trump early and gave the edge to Hillary Clinton late. But he also used data analysis to correctly predict the vast majority of primary contests and cautioned those who dismissed Trump’s chances entirely.
Last year’s political upheaval came after eight years in which Silver’s election predictions were as close to flawless as any in history, and he remains the closest thing to a crystal ball as exists in the political universe.
That is why his analysis of 35 special elections in 2017, including two last night, is so damning for Republicans.
In a morning Twitter thread, Silver starts with a cursory glance at last night’s results in Oklahoma and New Hampshire and then drills down into what it means in context of the other 33 elections that have happened this year:
So based on evidence from PEOPLE ACTUALLY VOTING, Trump hasn't been "Teflon" and GOP problems might be bit *worse* than polls let on.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 13, 2017
When Silver says that GOP problems are worse than there polling indicates, he’s comparing the reality to polls showing Trump to be far and away the least popular first year president in modern U.S. history and Congressional Republicans down nine points to the Democratic counterparts.
In his analysis of the 35 specials since Election Day, Silver finds that about 80% have made Democratic gains from 2016, six seats flipped from Republican to Democrat with none going the other way, and the average over all margin shows Democrats performing 13% better than in 2016 and 9% better than 2012:
There's data on special election results here. In general they've been producing fairly big swings to Democrats –> https://t.co/4bzxjRFN2E
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 13, 2017
The situation gets even worse for Republicans as a wave of Congressional retirements have turned several red districts purple — the reverse of the trend that led to the tea party wave of 2010:
The recent rush of GOP retirements is good for Democrats. https://t.co/lX0lS0Eqah pic.twitter.com/qfJZFJNkie
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) September 12, 2017
In bad news for Republicans there is great promise for the American people. Increasingly voters are deciding that if Republicans in Congress are too cowardly to hold our dangerous president accountable, they will replace them with men and women who have the courage and conviction to do the jobs they were elected to do.
