New Election Forecast Predicts Democratic Sweep of House and Senate
by John Gage
(Picture credit Nate Silver)
A new election forecast model released by Nate Silver, a nationally recognized political forecaster, predicts that Democrats will take both the House and the Senate this November. Silver released his model’s results on Tuesday and gave Democrats a 57% chance of winning the Senate and an 87% chance of winning the House.
Perhaps the most surprising prediction from the model, called FLIPR (Forecast with Leading Indicators, Polls and [Expert] Ratings), was giving Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico a 63% chance of beating Republican candidate Ken Paxton in Texas. The model also gives Democrat challenger Troy Jackson a 70% chance of knocking off Republican U.S. Senator Susan Collins in Maine. Collins has served 5 terms in the Senate and successfully pulled off wins in close races in the past.
Silver says the Texas and Maine as well as the Ohio Senate seat will be the major races that determine which party controls the Senate next year.
In Nebraska, FLIPR predicts incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts will defeat Independent challenger Dan Osborn, giving Ricketts a 83% chance of winning.
Silver lists none of the congressional races in Nebraska as particularly competitive, giving Democrat Denise Powell a 97% chance of defeating Republican Brinker Harding in CD-2, Republican Congressman Mike Flood a 91% chance of winning against Democrat Chris Backemeyer in CD-1, and a 100% chance of Republican Congressman Adrian Smith in CD-3 of getting re-elected.
Silver characterized the 2026 midterms as “a pretty normal midterm,” which he said means “bad news for the incumbent president’s party.” Currently, Democrats have about a 7-8% lead in the polling on the generic congressional ballot.
In 2018 during a wave year for Democrats, the party beat Republicans on the generic ballot by just over 8% and picked up 40 seats in the House. Democrats only need to pick up four seats this year to win the majority in the House as well as four seats in the Senate to win a majority there.
Silver came to prominence as a political forecaster in 2016 after he was one of the only mainstream creators of a political model that predicted that there was a high probability that Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential race.
— John Gage is the executive editor of The Plains Sentinel.
I hope you are wrong and one pundit from 10 years ago with one correct guess does not make a solid arguement for the headline of this article. It may be statistical and probable, but this new generation of Democratics candidates is not American. Lets talk about how we need to get out and vote, not how we're not going to win.