What Went Down In The 2018 Midterms

Republicans carried the national House popular vote by 1 percentage point in 2016, and based on The Upshot model, they look likely to lose by about 7 percentage points in 2018. That 8-point shift would be nearly as large as the 9-point shift toward Republicans that happened in 2010 and the largest shift toward the Democrats since 1948.

I’d be careful on Montana there. Our model is just looking at the overall vote count and not where the outstanding votes are from. The Upshot’s model thinks there’s a lot left from Missoula that will likely put Tester ahead.

In the Maine 2nd District, Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin leads Democrat Jared Golden 46.3 percent to 45.5 percent. In other words, it looks like no candidate will win a majority, which means it’s ranked-choice voting time! With two left-leaning independents in the race, it’s very possible that their voters will break toward Golden and Poliquin’s initial lead will disappear after a few rounds of ranked-choice runoffs. If that happens, Poliquin has left the door open to challenging the result in court, which … could get messy.