It looks as if the two chambers of Congress will be at political war.
According to 538’s statistical analysis, there is an 82% chance that the Republicans will keep control of the Senate, and an 85% chance that Democrats will take over the House.
To be technical, there is only a 67% chance that the Republicans will take 51 Senate seats or more, but there is also a 15% chance of a 50-50 split, and the GOP will retain control in that case because the VP casts the tie-breaker.
UPDATED with comments:
This is from the same outfit that said trump had a 3% chance of winning the 2016 election?
Not at all. Nate Silver actually said just before the election that Trump had a good chance to win, maybe 30% – and he got royally shit upon by the liberal press!
He was only a hair off on his predictions. He thought Hillary would win 48.5% of the popular vote, and the actual was 48.2%. Where he went wrong was exactly where everyone went wrong. He thought that Gary Johnson would get 5.0% of the vote. In fact, he got only 3.2%. That is a massive difference. It may not sound massive, but 1.8% of the vote is enormous – that’s two million voters in the USA! The one thing pollsters have not yet been able to predict is how many supporters of third party candidates will get cold feet on election day and decide not to cast a meaningless ballot. But that’s only half of the problem. Even if you can figure out how many of them will switch to a major candidate, there is still the question of WHICH major candidate. In this case, it was a lot of voters, and Trump appears to have picked up just about all of them, which was enough to swing some toss-up states into the red column.
How big is 1.8% in reality? That percentage of the voters represents enough to swing Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania, and those 75 electoral votes, if reversed, would have given Clinton 302. Even without Florida, which was not as close as the others, the other three states would have brought Clinton to 273, giving her a narrow victory.
I’m not saying that it is impossible to forecast the abandonment of third party candidates, but simply that the math has not yet been worked out.
This is from the same outfit that said trump had a 3% chance of winning the 2016 election?
Not at all. Nate Silver actually said just before the election that Trump had a good chance to win, maybe 30% – and he got royally shit upon by the liberal press!
Where he went wrong was exactly where everyone went wrong. He thought that Gary Johnson would get 5.0% of the vote. In fact, he got only 3.2%. That is a massive difference. It may not sound massive, but 1.8% of the vote is enormous – that’s a two million voters in the USA! The one thing pollsters have not yet been able to predict is how many supporters of third party candidates will get cold feet on election day and decide not to cast a meaningless ballot. But that’s only half of the problem. Even if you can figure out how many of them will switch to a major candidate, there is still the question of WHICH major candidate. In this case, it was a lot of voters, and Trump appears to have picked up just about all of them, which was enough to swing some toss-up states into the red column.
How big is 1.8% in reality? That percentage of the voters represents enough to swing Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania, and those 75 electoral votes, if reversed, would have given Clinton 302. Even without Florida, the other three states would have brought Clinton to 273, giving her a narrow victory.
I’m not saying that it is impossible to forecast the abandonment of third party candidates, but simply that the math has not yet been worked out.