It’s (finally) Election season again which means my Friday politics blog posts are going to start back up again from now at least the end of August. I am starting a Statistics Ph.D. program at Texas A&M in the fall so I might not have time to blog regularly for the end of election season, but I will try. I am so excited to follow the 2018 midterm elections!
This summer I plan to immerse myself back into the midterm elections as I did for the 2016 Presidential race. The goal right now is to use the model I already built to predict the 33 Senate races and possibly a few House races if I have time. This election gives me the opportunity to try to build a few new, different kinds of priors to use in my Iterative Gaussian model. I will continue to break the races into groups and use a method similar what I have used to predict Presidential elections, but I am planning to bring in poll data from the Generic House Ballot with some adjustments.
The Senate races are going to bring in new challenges because each race has a different set of candidates that will complicate how I choose races to serve as the prior. What will probably happen is that I will break races down into categories based on the competitiveness of a race and what direction I think it is leaning. Hopefully, we will see polling for every Senate race start to pop up after the primaries. If some of the races don’t have any polls, I might have to get creative.
Right now, I think Republicans will keep the Senate Majority. There are only 8 Republican Senate seats up for reelection. Of those, only Nevada was not won by Trump in the last election. Additionally, there are vulnerable Democratic senators in West Virginia, Missouri, Montana, and Indiana which are all states Trump won by a large margin. Given the polarization of the electorate, I don’t think enough Trump voters (at least those happy with his performance) can be convinced to vote for a Democrat. I also believe Ted Cruz will be reelected to his seat in Texas. O’Rouke might have more money and is gaining popularity, but it will be an uphill battle for him to convince enough moderate Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to vote for him even though he will probably vote the party line if elected.
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