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Oct. 18, 2018, at 5:58 AM
Election Update: How The Latest Fundraising Numbers Shifted Our House Forecasts
And why things barely budged in the Senate.
Welcome to our Election Update for Thursday, Oct. 18!
You may have noticed a little bump for Democrats in the “Classic” version of our House forecast early this week. On Wednesday night,1 the party had a 5 in 6 chance (83.9 percent) of taking control; on Tuesday night, it had risen to 84.8 percent, the best Democrats have fared in our model since its August launch. The average number of seats Democrats are expected to pick up was 39; on Tuesday, that number reached 40 for the first time.
One reason for the uptick? Fundraising reports from the third quarter of 2018 (spanning July 1 to Sept. 30) were due to the Federal Election Commission on Monday, and they bore fantastic news for Democrats. According to a preliminary count by the National Journal, Democratic challengers in House races outraised at least 92 Republican incumbents, and more than 60 Democratic candidates in the House hauled in more than $1 million for the quarter. Candidate fundraising is one of the bigger factors in the “fundamentals” part of our model — we specifically look at individual contributions (as opposed to money from PACs or given to the campaign by the candidates themselves) because, aside from polls, it’s one of the few tangible measures we have of pre-election support from real voters. Democrats’ strong fundraising numbers also help explain why the party has improved in the Classic version of our model but has stayed about the same in the poll-driven “Lite” version, at least in the House. In fact, the Lite and Classic versions of our House model are now farther apart than they have been in some time, reflecting a renewed divergence in what various model inputs (that is, polls vs. fundraising) are telling us about Democrats’ chances (pretty good according to polls vs. really good according to fundraising).
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-how-the-latest-fundraising-numbers-shifted-our-house-forecasts/
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