2018 Elections

The votes counted after Election Day have been rough for the GOP.

Trump is stronger; but red states are now in play.

Republican Will Hurd will serve a third term.

Trump can maybe eke out victory in 2020 by trading suburban votes for greater rural turnout, but that doesn’t solve his House problem.

What data from 2016 and 2018 tell us about 2020.

As expected, they took the House and some governorships. But the winners were largely anonymous.

Her complaints about "crazy Democrats" and alignment with the president on the migrant caravan came off as cynical.

The data did a pretty good job in 2018.

Hurd has represented the swing district since he was elected in 2014.

And what's next.

There are questions as to whether she will serve the entire six years.

Rick Scott, Ron DeSantis defy predictions to win Senate, gubernatorial races.

King's son to Des Moines Register: “We are not granting credentials to the Des Moines Register or any other leftist propaganda media outlet with no concern for reporting the truth.”

The district has been trending toward Democrats in recent years.

Stewart’s alignment with far-right figures likely depressed his chances of statewide appeal.

A look at a red-state senator’s difficult dance to the center.

A Democratic strategist weighs in.

Democratic wave or Republican surprise? Americans are going to pass judgment on President Trump.

As a confirmed "Never Trumper," I would be thrilled, if there were no other considerations, to see Donald Trump’s Republican Party get blitzed in these elections and Trump therefore be humiliated.

Democrats look to Dan McCready to help them flip the House.

But one of the biggest state-level elections may be headed to a runoff after next Tuesday.

PHOENIX — Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is moving past the threats that came after she announced she would vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

The movement has already either dwindled or evolved, but the Pennsylvania Republican is a legacy of what substance it had.

A statistic that’ll be relevant for about five more days.

The Senate races that could shock you on election night.

New report looks at 22 races, including 13 in the House and three in the Senate

The former president raises questions about whether the secretary of state is too compromised to oversee an election in which he’s campaigning.

The Democratic incumbent is looking vulnerable in Missouri

What we do and don’t know .

At the very least, it could eliminate most federal prohibitions in states that have legalized marijuana.

How Trump's Presidency Might Lead to the End of Walker's Governorship

A fun look back at a district-picking game

Republican Josh Hawley led incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill by 7 points in the closely watched Missouri Senate race, according to a fresh poll conducted for the challenger’s campaign.

Gov. Rick Scott issues executive order to give eight affected counties more flexibility regarding election procedures.

Big reveal: She is a garden-variety Democrat doing her best to win re-election in a red state.

A Different Way To Look At the House Elections

Solving a paradox in the forecast.

The Senate majority leader talked to THE WEEKLY STANDARD about judicial confirmations, the midterm elections and Democrats wanting to change the rules.

The casual political observer in Indiana would be confused.

The Republican win probability has doubled in Arizona.

Politicians talk about "witch hunts" so often that the occult has almost become cliche in American politics. But in Arizona, there's at least one candidate on the ballot who takes sorcery very seriously.

Not much.

Some data and context.

Our model shows Republicans winning about 70 percent of model simulations.

We have data.

Who are people searching for, and what issues do they care about?

Tons of Data is Rolling in from The Upshot’s Polling Project

A swing through the best/worst realistic scenarios for both parties.

Two very different Republicans try to win in the same state in a rough year.

It's a real possibility, and it's worth gaming out

He’s still the favorite, but it’s not risk-free.

Here's how the model reacted to the latest wave of new polls.

Probably not.

Yes—but not for the reasons you might think.

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

His district is just that red.

Three examples of what not to do.

How not to get tricked by noise.

How the Trump era has inspired women—mostly Democrats—to run for office.

Minnesota, Wisconsin, Connecticut and Vermont vote.

Both parties have had some good polls. Here's how you should digest the results.

Second verse, same as the first.

What should voters take away from a last-minute attack ad?

Seth Grossman made multiple racist social media posts and called diversity 'a bunch of crap.'

On June 26, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pulled off an upset victory against Incumbent Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley, a senior Democrat who had been floated as a replacement for Nancy Pelosi. Ocasio-Cortez is a Democratic Socialist who ran on a platform that involved abolishing ICE, Medicare for all,…

This is one the best GOP results of the Trump era.

The model might be too high on Sinema. But it also might have a point.

SwingSeat update: We have updated forecasts in Texas, Arizona, and Florida.

Maybe the bump in the generic ballot was just noise.

E.W. Jackson got crushed in the Republican primary, but Sebastian Gorka got paid. The Christian activist running for a chance to challenge Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., cut a check to the former presidential adviser to headline a May fundraiser.

The GOP frontrunner in Virginia is known for extreme rhetoric and ties to vicious people.

Democrats won’t find pickups as easy as they hoped.

MILWAUKEE, Wis. — Bryan Steil isn't intimidated by talk of a blue wave. To the contrary, he finds the challenge "invigorating."

The Republican businessman prevails in a divided primary field to face Senator Joe Donnelly in November.

Get ready for West Virginia's Republican primary

It turns out projecting 435 House Races using one polling number is tough

A Democratic super PAC is boosting its spending against Rep. Evan Jenkins, R-W.V., in an effort to prop up Don Blankenship's campaign for the GOP nomination to take on Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V.

I’m in the middle of a long-term project—I’m building a Senate election model and writing about the process as I go (see previous posts here). At this point I’ve written a lot of the code and I was tempted to devote this update to how I’m aggregating polls, forecasting final vote shares, or…

Mike Braun, Luke Messer, Todd Rokita are all running for a chance at a rare GOP pickup in the upper chamber.

Debbie Lesko underperformed Trump by about 16 Points—that's not a great result.

The Most Special Election Yet

This isn't a story about Donald Trump's takeover of the GOP.

WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah — Mitt Romney on Saturday suffered a disappointing but ultimately meaningless snub from grassroots Republicans when delegates to the state party convention declined to endorse his bid for U.S. Senate.

Welcome to 2018, people: Nixon’s the one.

What another set of special elections tells us about the Trump Era.

The state shifted right during the Trump Era, and the gubernatorial race is a toss-up

The outgoing speaker's district will be in play this November.

The Wisconsin Republican took over as leader in 2015, replacing John Boehner.

In less than three weeks, the 2018 election will head to Arizona. Republican Rep. Trent Franks resigned late last year amid a scandal involving money, staffers and surrogacy (it's a bizarre story), triggering a special election in Arizona's 8th District. In a normal year, this district would be…

On Tuesday, Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate Mike Espy's campaign released an internal poll showing him in the lead in Mississippi's upcoming Senate election. The headline might sound like good news for Democrats—every candidate obviously prefers to be ahead, and Mississippi is extremely…

For the past week, Trump's approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average has hovered close to 42 percent. That's an improvement from early March, when the average briefly dipped below 40 percent. FiveThirtyEight didn't shift as much in that interval, but its aggregate shows that Trump gained…

Everyone knows that President Trump is historically unpopular and his low approval rating is putting Republicans in real danger of losing at least the House in 2018. At this point, that's old news.

What if there were no polls?

"I have come to Albany mad as hell about Republicans, and I have come to Albany mad as hell about Democrats," said Cynthia Nixon in a speech in Albany Monday. Knowingly or not, she was quoting the movie Network, a dark 1976 satire of TV's corrupt command of America.

The much-hyped 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels aired Sunday, and did not reveal much more than we already know about the alleged brief sexual relationship between the porn actress and Donald Trump a decade before he became president. Daniels, who signed a non-disclosure agreement about the…

This weekend, hundreds of thousands of young people participated in the “March for Our Lives” in Washington, D.C., the culmination of efforts by student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who had survived the recent shooting that claimed 17 lives.

For decades, Ohio has been a political bellwether—a quadrennial swing state that often voted for the winning presidential candidate. But in 2016, something odd happened—Ohio jerked sharply to the right, giving now President Trump an eigh-point win despite his two-point national popular vote loss.…

On Tuesday, Illinois’ incumbent Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, barely won renomination for his 2018 re-election bid. He defeated Jeanne Ives, a state legislator who was challenging him from the right, by only three points in the state’s primary. That’s not a great showing for Rauner – incumbent…

Top lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russian election interference on Tuesday marked the end of a critical portion of their probe focused on election security, and offered up a preview of the panel’s recommendations to counter foreign meddling in the midst of the 2018…

Last week, Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran announced that he was resigning due to health issues, triggering a November special election for the open Senate seat. Mississippi isn’t usually a problematic state for Republicans. It’s a strongly red, highly inelastic state—meaning that it usually votes…

In a normal year, a special congressional election in Pennsylvania’s 18th District (a highly red area that includes the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh and surrounding rural areas) wouldn’t be a huge deal. Trump carried the district by about 20 points in 2016, so Republicans should have been able to…

We are coming down to the wire in Pennsylvania’s 18th District, where Republican Rick Saccone will face Democrat Conor Lamb in a special election, for a term of just seven months. Here are four questions (and answers) to clarify what’s at stake, how close the contest is, and what it means for 2018…

State legislative elections are easily overlooked, but they can carry enormous consequences for policy and politics, even on the national level. Democrats were reminded of this truth the hard way in 2010, when Republicans took control of state governments across the country amid the Tea Party wave.…

Donald Trump is historically unpopular, and Republicans are underperforming his margins in special elections across the country. Some might be tempted to look at these numbers and conclude that Trumps’ re-election effort (which is already underway) is doomed.

Mississippi senator Thad Cochran announced Monday that he would be retiring as of April 1 due to health issues. Cochran’s retirement will trigger a special election for November 2018—a nonpartisan primary that, if no candidate gets above 50 percent, will go to a runoff.

Donald Trump is beating Congressional Republicans in the polls. And that’s not necessarily great news for either of them.

If a congressional campaign won’t tell you the candidate’s schedule two weeks out from a tight special election, it’s a safe bet to go to an American Legion post (it doesn’t matter which one, any post will do) and simply wait. This is how I found myself at a Friday night fish fry at American Legion…

Gubernatorial elections are high maintenance.

CALLERY, Pa.

She doesn’t say so, but 2018 has been a tricky year so far for Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward. After months of polling strongly as an uncompromising, Trump-loving alternative to unpopular incumbent Jeff Flake, the conservative firebrand now finds herself squeezed between two new challengers:…

Which party is going to win control of the Senate in the midterm elections? It’s a simple question. But also a difficult one. And right now, I’m in the middle of the process of building a model that will try to shed some light on it by calculating win probabilities for every Senate contest.

In a crowded nine-way Republican congressional primary in Texas, former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw has decided that the best way to break out of the pack in his run for Congress is to run for Congress—literally. February 20 marked the first day of Crenshaw’s 5-day, 100-mile run through a congressional…

Top Democratic leaders are calling to provide the FBI and Department of Homeland Security with hefty funding boosts to expose and counter Russian election interference ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

In the wake of the Florida school massacre that left 17 innocents dead, there’s been a push to renew the Assault Weapons Ban. “Courage and conviction led to an assault weapons ban once before. Let’s do it again,” tweeted Bill Clinton, who signed the Assault Weapons Ban into law in 1994. The federal…

Three answers to one question Tuesday night summed up the Republican primary in the Indiana Senate race. During the campaign’s opening debate, the moderator asked the trio of candidates running to replace incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly to name two spending cuts they would vote to make right away.…

On Tuesday, Politico and Morning Consult published a poll showing Republicans ahead of Democrats by one point in the generic ballot. This is an improvement for the GOP—Morning Consult put Democrats ahead by four in its last two polls and had them up by 10 in December. The poll also shows Trump with…

Senator Bob Corker made headlines last October when he became the first GOP senator to announce he would not seek reelection in 2018—then quickly ignited a public spat with President Donald Trump, with the two trading barbs on Twitter. Over a period of weeks, Corker called the Trump White House “an…

Danny Tarkanian made a new friend last year. The insurgent candidate, who is running in the Nevada Republican primary to unseat incumbent Sen. Dean Heller, obtained the endorsement of former deputy assistant to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka. He couldn’t be happier.

Arthur Jones, an outspoken white supremacist and Holocaust denier, has unsuccessfully run for public office in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas since the 1970s. But he is now set to win the the Republican primary on March 20 in the race for Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District, his eighth attempt…

According to the RealClearPolitics average, 42.2 percent of poll respondents approve of Trump’s job performance. FiveThirtyEight has Trump’s approval rating at 42.5 percent among voters and HuffPost Pollster has him at 41.6 percent. And in all three of these aggregators, the basic story is the…

For much of December and early January, Democrats held a double digit lead in the RealClearPolitics average for the generic ballot–a poll that basically asks a national sample of voters which party they intend to vote for in the upcoming congressional elections. Today, that advantage is down to…

Texas is the Democratic white whale. Every election cycle, some enterprising statewide (or national) Democratic candidate tries to flip the state by winning the governorship, a senate seat, or the state’s electoral college votes. And recently, they haven’t had much success. Texas has elected…

House Oversight Committee chairman Trey Gowdy announced Wednesday that he will not be seeking re-election and will instead be returning to work in the justice system.

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Hundreds of wealthy donors and several Republican officials involved with the powerful Koch network gathered at the Renaissance Indian Wells Resort just outside of Palm Springs, California, on Saturday for an annual fundraising conference.

The basic math of the 2018 Senate elections shows a challenge for Democrats. In order to win control of the upper chamber, the party need to successfully defend all 26 of its seats up for election (some of which are in highly red states like Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota, West Virginia, and…

Donald Trump is historically unpopular. At the end of 2017, the three major polling aggregators—the HuffPost Pollster, Real Clear Politics, and FiveThirtyEight—put his approval rating at 40.4, 40, and 37.9 percent, respectively. According to FiveThirtyEight’s historical averages, this is the worst…

On Tuesday night, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker seemed rattled. In a special election in the state’s 10th Senate district, Democrat Patty Schachtner beat Republican Adam Jarchow, taking over district that voted for Trump by 17 points in 2016. Walker responded by firing off a series of tweets that…

The forecast for November 6, 2018 is a Democratic tsunami.

Your must-read of the day comes from the New York Times, and it’s full of interesting details about special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Michael Schmidt reports that Mueller has learned a lot of new information about the nature of Donald Trump’s decision-making in his first few months as…

We’re more than 11 months out from Election Day, and there are too many moving parts (changes in national environment, primary elections, possible retirements, fundraising, strategic decisions, and more) to know anything for certain.

As far as elections go, 2017 wasn’t a good year for Republicans. Democrats won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, frequently outperformed their baselines in special elections across the country and won a senate seat in Alabama—arguably the most GOP-friendly state in the country.

Chris McDaniel, a state legislator, is leaning toward challenging Sen. Roger Wicker next year in Mississippi in the Republican primary, saying the GOP’s stunning loss of a Senate seat this week in a special election in neighboring Alabama hasn’t discouraged him from running.

Winning isn’t everything, nor is it the only thing for Democrats in special elections this year. Political observers had built up Tuesday’s Alabama Senate vote as yet another put-up-or-shut-up moment for Washington’s minority party, suggesting that a loss by Doug Jones there would be another…

For the last five weeks, most of the political world has been (rightly) focused on the wild race for the Alabama Senate seat that l Jeff Sessions vacated earlier this year to become attorney general. But other key races didn’t stop while Democratic senator-elect Doug Jones was beating…

Roy Moore’s defeat in Alabama has taught the Republican party a number of things about the current political environment: (1) That no state is impregnable, no matter how red. (2) That there is, at least for now, a limit to what Republican voters are willing to forgive in a bad candidate. (3) That…

It's long been publicly understood that the International Olympic Committee is a den of jobbery and payoffs. Which only raises the question, just how corrupt does an Olympic team have to be to get the IOC to sit in judgment of them?

There are plenty of understandable objections to the tax bill sailing through Congress. Some people think it will increase the deficit. Others cry foul that it is being rushed through without sufficient deliberation. And there are those who like big government and frankly oppose the idea of letting…

Minnesota Sen. Al Franken announced Thursday morning that he would resign from the Senate amid allegations that he forcibly kissed or groped several different women. Franken’s resignation would trigger a special election for the seat in the 2018 midterms and allow Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton to…

On Aug. 19, 2012, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill received one of the biggest gifts of her political career. While discussing abortion in the case of rape, her Republican opponent Todd Akin said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.” Almost…

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said Monday that he would vote for Democrat Doug Jones over Judge Roy Moore in the Alabama special election for Senate and would support expelling Moore if he wins.

Are Republicans going to lose the House in 2018? And if they do, will it be President Trump’s fault?

Election wonks don’t play favorites with polls. We love them all equally. (Translation: We do our best to judge them impartially based on their past accuracy, methodology, question wording, context and other relevant factors.) But it’s hard not to have a soft spot for surveys that offer something…

There's a new episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol up and it is, typically, intensely interesting.

Tennessee congresswoman Marsha Blackburn announced Thursday that she would run for the Senate seat that retiring senator Bob Corker is vacating in 2018.

The victory of Roy Moore, a populist and religious fundamentalist, in the Alabama Senate primary last week can be seen in two different ways: continuity with the recent past of GOP politics and a radical break from it.

The victory of Roy Moore, a populist and religious fundamentalist, in the Alabama Senate primary last week can be seen in two different ways: continuity with the recent past of GOP politics and a radical break from it.

Tennessee senator Bob Corker announced Tuesday that he won't run for reelection next year, putting to rest weeks of speculation about the influential Republican's potential retirement from the Senate.

Fiery social conservative Roy Moore is on the verge of upsetting Sen. Luther Strange, President Trump's preferred candidate, in a closely watched special election in Alabama.

If more congressmen like Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., start heading for the exits, it will become harder for Republicans to defend their House majority next year in what figures to be a challenging election cycle.

Blindsided congressional Republicans worried Thursday about whether President Trump's surprise fiscal deal with the Democrats would mean more shocks are ahead on issues such as tax reform.

A group backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., launched a new ad campaign Tuesday against Kelli Ward — the primary opponent of Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. — attacking her over "crazy ideas" and "embarrassing behavior" during her time as a state senator and her primary campaign…

For the first time, Donald Trump has inserted himself into a 2018 Republican primary against an incumbent. The president tweeted Thursday morning that it was “great” to see Trump nemesis Jeff Flake of Arizona get a Republican challenger. “Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake…

Republican tax negotiators believe they are closing in on an agreement to overhaul the U.S. tax code but remain at odds over whether reform would be enshrined permanently or automatically sunset after a period of years.

Rep. Mike Kelly is frustrated by his Republican colleagues' resistance to President Trump.

Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Steve Hayes talks about Republican politicians struggling to craft a "Trump Strategy" for the 2018 cycle. Are the tight special-election races a bellwether for the mid-terms? And how should traditional conservatives campaign for an electorate that seems more loyal to…

The Republican Party avoided a demoralizing upset Tuesday when it forced Democrat Jon Ossoff into a special election runoff to fill a vacant conservative Georgia House district.

Utah's senior senator, Republican Orrin Hatch, remains popular in the Beehive State. But a poll conducted on behalf of a political action committee that seeks more conservative Senate candidates has also found voters in Utah believe the seven-term Republican should retire rather than run again in…

Writing at National Journal, Josh Kraushaar suggests Democrats' far-left policies on energy and the environment have been a problem for the party at the ballot box. There are even some Democratic politicos, Kraushaar reports, who are discussing pulling back from the party's hard line on energy…

A leading House Democrat called on his party to reconsider its political strategy ahead of the 2018 elections and praised incoming president Donald Trump for making a "smart" political decision by convincing an American manufacturer to keep some jobs in the United States. Adam Schiff, an eight-term…

Alabama attorney general Luther Strange has decided to run for the Senate to succeed Jeff Sessions. President-elect Donald Trump has picked Sessions to be the U.S. Attorney General.

Republican Abraham Lincoln waged his Civil War with malice towards none. Republican Donald Trump is waging his intra-party civil war with malice towards just about everyone. Bodies will be strewn across the political landscape, and the projected body-count is rising.