Welcome!
The 2020 presidential election begins in less than 24 hours!
Just kidding (sort of).
First things first: Welcome to our live blog for the 2018 midterm elections. This is the first post. By the time the last post publishes, we’ll know whether Republicans or Democrats will control the House and Senate in 2019. (Most likely, anyway.) Americans in 36 states will have voted on their next governor, and Americans will have rendered a verdict on the first two years of the Trump era.
According to our pre-election forecasts, Trump isn’t likely to enjoy that verdict. Here’s where things stand (we’re freezing the forecasts for good soon):
- Right now, Democrats are 6 in 7 favorites to win the House, according to the “Deluxe” version of our model. They gain 36 seats, on average, but you really shouldn’t be surprised by anything from a 20-seat Democratic gain (which would mean the GOP holds on to the majority) to a 54-seat blue tsunami.
- At the same time, Republicans have a 5 in 6 chance of maintaining control of the U.S. Senate. On average, the GOP is forecasted to pick up 0.6 seats. Again, though, the 80 percent confidence interval of our forecast ranges from a Democratic gain of two seats to a GOP gain of four.
- Our “Deluxe” governors forecast shows Democrats gaining several governorships overall, and governing close to 200 million Americans next year, compared to 132 million for Republicans. Right now, the U.S. has 33 GOP governors, 16 Democratic governors and one independent. Our forecast shows Democrats controlling roughly 24 governorships, on average, when all is said and done.
- But soon we’ll know for sure. We’re forecasting more than 500 races this year — counting contests for House, Senate and governor together. If our model is well-calibrated (and we think it is), then a bunch of modest underdogs should prevail, and even a few really long-shots should win. We’ll be here following it all.
So stick around. During the day, we’ll be keeping tabs on any and all electorally relevant developments. We’ll also unload a veritable treasure trove of useful data on this live blog — races to watch, benchmarks to pay attention to, analyses of the campaign up to this point — pretty much anything you could ask for.
Once polls start closing, we’ll switch into vote-watching mode. We built a real-time forecast that will live just to the right of this post. It’ll use the incoming vote and projections from ABC News to provide up-to-the-moment odds for every race and control of each chamber. We’ll also have the entire FiveThirtyEight crew — and some special guests — helping make sense of the returns. There won’t be a smarter or funner corner of the internet to watch everything unfold (in my heavily biased opinion, at least).