2018 Congressional Generic Ballot and House Polls Megathread - the original

[Gustaf]

Clearly Democrats are doomed. LimoLiberal's hot take is all we need to pay attention to.

Have you guys considered banning the moron that's cheerfully sh**tting everywhere?

I can't ban him, and I'm probably in a minority if not alone among the mods who think career trolls like him should be banned.

But if he keeps posting commentary meant to incite arguments then I'll consider moving his posts and threads to a single megathread.

For the record, you are not alone.

[Gustaf]

Republicans lead by only 6% in ALL of the districts they hold.

But they lead.. Of course, as distribution is very nonuniform (Republican margin in TX-13 will be far more then in NY-24),  that means that Democrats will win districts, but may be - less, then they expect. And they don't need 64-26 margin in their districts - yeah, that means, that there is minimal danger to lose substantial number of them, but it adds nothing to their numbers.

Lol, what, how dumb are you? If Republicans lead by only 6 on average in all the districts they hold, they would lose plenty. As was already pointed out, what this suggests is that about 80% of the national swing is happening in Republican districts with only about 20% happening in Democratic districts.

What was your PhD in again?

[Gustaf]

Another fun graph:

....oh my god

sidenote: what happened in 1998??

Bill Clinton, Impeachment of

Ah, of course.

Im also noticing that, outlier nonwithstanding, this shows that special elections undershoot Dem performances (1988, 1996, 2002, 2006, 2008, 2012) more than it overshoots Dems (2000, 2014). It's even undershot Dems by huge amounts before. If the difference observed in 2006 is observed again in 2018, that's a D+17 election.

I'd guess that is due to lower Democratic turnout and given the enthusiasm gap that seems less likely to hold true this year.

[Gustaf]

Little tidbit, not the most solid data but I haven't seen anyone do this (if someone did I'd be interested in seeing it) but there is a pretty solid positive correlation for last year's special elections (0.46) between Clinton doing worse than Obama and there being a swing to Democrats compared to the Clinton numbers. Which of course isn't necessarily surprising, but it suggests that places where we already saw Clinton doing well (think GA-06) are going to swing less to Democrats than places where Clinton lost a lot of support compared to Obama.

[Gustaf]

Harvard Institute of Politics Spring 2018 youth poll, March 8-25, 2631 adults age 18-29 only

D 69 (+4 from Fall 2017 poll)
R 28 (-5)
 
Other items:

Trump approval: 25/72 (no change from Fall).

37% say they will definitely be voting, compared to 23% in 2014 and 31% in 2010.  This includes 51% of young Democrats and 36% of young Republicans.  In 2014, it was 28% of Ds and 31% of Rs; in 2010, it was 35% of Ds and 41% of Rs.

Additional details at http://iop.harvard.edu/spring-2018-poll.

That's pretty brutal. If youth turnout goes up by 50% while Democrats substantially increase their vote share I imagine it would have pretty big impact.

[Gustaf]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qB-Me45ZfqcTuASx49bL4c2vVmTecwo4q-sCt_ASiqs/edit#gid=0 is a spreadsheet of data collected by Joel Wertheimer showing state-level GCB polls, with comparisons to Cook PVI and 2012/2016 presidential margins.

Beating PVI by 9 according to that.

[Gustaf]

Yup, he stands for family values, i.e. the right of powerful men to rape local kids without an oppressive government stepping in. It's fascinating how all these people pretend to be Christian since it must be very difficult (if they actually believed I think they'd be trying to avoid hell so we must assume they think God is a lie)

[Gustaf]

You can't count that as a GCB poll, because these options are mutually exclusive. Any actual congressional race can pit EITHER a Republican independent from or one loyal to Trump versus EITHER a liberal or a moderate Democrat.

Without knowing the distribution of races or the breakdown of these groups if their preferred option isn't on the ballot you don't know much.

[Gustaf]

Estimating these sort of probabilities is not a particularly exact science.

I don't think sort of modelling approach is very precise, given that you'd expect demographics to vote very differently between different districts (ok not VERY VERY differently, but enough around the margins that it becomes a very noisy predictor).

I'd probably rate Democrats' chances at taking the House as a little better than coin flip but not that much higher. Maybe 60% or so.