A polling expert has pointed out a grim omen for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.
Election analyst Nate Silver said Republicans’ failure to flip the polls around after Labor Day appears to be a nail in their coffin.
Silver explained that the roughly 8.5-point lead the Democrats hold over the GOP signals that a Republican rebound is increasingly unlikely this close to November.
The analyst said he was unsurprised by the data because his forecast model “had detected that likely voter polls were likely to be better for Democrats.”
“To see Democrats up by eight and a half points—it can be eight or nine depending on how you round it—is consistent with what we thought,” he said on the Still Counting podcast.
Democrats maintain an 8.6-point lead over Republicans in mid-September, according to RealClearPolling’s average for the generic congressional ballot.
“Any notion of like, ‘Oh, people will come back, kids come back to school and then we’ll see Republicans rebound because their voters will get fired up by Democrats being too left-wing or be loyal to President Trump,’ I mean, there’s not very many signs of that,” Silver added.
The data specialist, who once forecast Barack Obama’s election wins with startling precision, stressed that the latest New York Times poll showed Democrats and those who supported Kamala Harris in 2024 were more likely to cast ballots in the midterms, and that independents were leaning more Democratic than Republican.
The poll found that 60 percent of Harris supporters were “almost certain” to vote in the midterms, compared with 58 percent of Trump supporters. Likewise, 61 percent of Democratic supporters said they’d show up compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.
Co-host Clare Malone said turnout projections may explain why MAGA figures are appearing more desperate ahead of the November elections, pointing specifically to Vice President JD Vance’s plea to Republican voters on Tuesday.
“Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years,” Vance, 42, said on the All-In Podcast.
Trump, 80, has also suggested the extraordinary measure of paying Americans $5000 “Trump dividends,” but only if the GOP maintains its House and Senate majorities post-midterms.
“Here is my promise: if the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them,” the president said at the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention last week, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”
Silver came to prominence for his astonishing accuracy in predicting the outcomes of the 2008, 2012, and 2020 presidential elections. However, he was humiliated by his failed predictions of Trump in 2016 and 2024.
