Nate Silver
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The Ezra Klein Show · Nate Silver Predicts a ‘Momentous’ Midterm
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What Has Pulled Down Donald Trump's Approval?
Nate Silver says Donald Trump's approval in the second term tracks gas prices. It moves with prices and with economic anxiety, it dropped sharply around Liberation Day in April 2025 when tariffs scared people, and the rest of the fall has been fairly steady. Trump is 80, and he has been the central figure in American politics since the middle of 2015, so fatigue is part of the decline too.
That decline is why the Senate is in play. Ezra Klein said Democrats would not be favored to win the Senate if Trump had not gone to war with Iran and pushed gasoline into the mid-$4 range, higher in California. In the first term, a good economy worked as a halo. Paychecks, jobs, a rising stock market, an
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Why Do Republicans Lose When Donald Trump Is Not on the Ballot?
Nate Silver says Republicans lose the elections where Donald Trump is the dominant figure but is not himself on the ballot. Trump can get disengaged voters to crawl over glass for him, and those same voters will not do that for Roger Marshall or Ken Paxton. The pattern runs through 2018, the Georgia runoffs, special elections, and 2022, when something kept Joe Biden from the wipeout a weak approval rating would usually bring.
Trump has not cleared that problem away. Ezra Klein noted that Trump could have ended the Texas primary and left John Cornyn the nominee, which would have put Republicans in a stronger position and made a Senate loss less likely. Trump's account of a midterm defeat is
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Have Midterm Polls Underestimated Donald Trump?
Nate Silver says midterm polls have not consistently underestimated Donald Trump. The misses people remember are the presidential years, 2016, 2020, and 2024, when the polls were low on Trump and Democrats were left thinking of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. The two Trump-era midterms went the other way. 2018 was one of the most accurate polling years on record, and 2022 was accurate too.
A shared error can still decide the Senate. Ask what happens if the Senate polls are off by three or four points in the same direction in every race. Democrats hold a lot of leads of about three points, including in Ohio and Texas, and a miss of that size could leave the majority waiting on ranked-choice v
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Why Can Democrats Win Senate Races in States Donald Trump Won?
Nate Silver says the Senate map opened because the story after 2024 was wrong, not because midterms stopped punishing the president's party. The steadiest pattern in American elections is a backlash against that party, a little larger in a lame-duck term. An average midterm moves the country about seven and a half points against the president's party from the previous presidential year. This year looks closer to an 11-point shift. Donald Trump won Ohio by about 11 points, and he won a run of these states by 10 to 13, so a shift of that size makes Ohio a toss-up.
Candidate quality moves less than the national swing, about five points at most. Roy Cooper is a strong Democratic recruit in Nort
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Why Does Nate Silver Call the 2026 Midterm Momentous?
Nate Silver says this midterm feels momentous because a result in line with the polls would mark the end of the Trump era. Donald Trump would still have two years left as president, but the 2028 campaign would start the night the votes were counted, and a bad night would make him a super lame duck, the way Bush was after 2006.
What makes that hard to accept is the map. Kansas and Texas look competitive, which would be Democratic gains deep in Republican territory and would feel like a different regime. Generational turnover, Trump being three quarters of the way through the two terms the Constitution allows, and AI all sit in the same shift. AI may already matter more in this election than
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What Is Nate Silver's Gut on the 2026 Midterms?
Nate Silver's gut on the midterms is contradictory. Fundamental conditions feel terrible for Republicans, and if the year is worse for them than 2018, Democrats win the House popular vote by 10 or 11 points. He worries more that state polls are wrong than that the national race is miscalibrated.
Before the 2024 election his model had Kamala Harris winning and his gut had Donald Trump winning. In 2024 he listed 21 reasons the political environment favored Donald Trump and only four or five reasons it favored Harris. The midterm year reverses the balance. Republicans have a second-term 80-year-old president who had a bad midterm in 2018, when he was younger, more popular, and the economy was
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How Did Florida Become So Red?
Nate Silver puts Florida’s turn toward the Republicans at 75 percent migration and 25 percent a death spiral for the Democratic Party, a spiral he says might reinforce itself.
Florida is unusual in offering blue-state amenities without as many liberals, and the mix has always attracted older people. A lot of the shift is political self-selection.
In most states, voter registration has begun to favor Democrats over Republicans again after four or five years in a row when it did not. Comebacks for Democrats are showing up in the Midwest in particular, and in Pennsylvania, but not in Florida. Florida keeps getting redder at the registration level.
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How Many House Seats Would Democrats Gain?
Nate Silver says a model with a 90% plus chance of Democrats winning the House still translates into only about 22 seats on average.
Redistricting and voter self-sorting left far fewer swing districts than before. Democrats also had a relatively good 2024 in the House, and on election night there was still doubt about Democrats winning the chamber despite Harris having lost. Wave elections have reached 40 or 50 seats, including 63 in 2010 and about 41 in 2018. Republicans gained a few seats from redistricting, mostly by cutting out a majority-minority district. Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee amount to a clean three seats wiped out for Democrats, though the Alabama district is kind of clo
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Why Do Some Midterm Polls Look Better for Democrats?
Nate Silver says asking people whether they will vote, and how enthusiastic they are about voting, produces a very Democratic sample. Other pollsters try to predict whether people will vote from other kinds of data, and the techniques tend to produce more modest results for Democrats.
Early voting is one place to look, though he generally advises people not to rely on it. Voters who have voted in no more than one of the past three elections, counting midterms, appear quite Democratic so far. Republicans will probably still cast votes on Election Day and catch up to some extent. If Democrats' low-propensity voters turn out and Republicans do not, a polling error might underestimate Democrats