Key state by key state looking in detail at how tomorrow’s battle for the Senate might go
It’s not just the Democrats who have turnout issues
One of the things about political betting is that for the most of the time there are not things that you can have a gamble on which you’re going to see results within a few days or weeks.
Well tomorrow we have the US midterm elections which by all accounts are taking the form of the referendum on the President. This is the biggest political betting event of the year and I’ve been very active.
Already we know that turnout is going to be much higher than the mid-30s of normal midterms. Indeed in Texas the number of early votes has exceeded the entire number of votes the last time there was a midterm election if 2014.
That suggests that we’re going to see big turnouts in other states particularly those where keenly fought battles are taking place.
A big issue for the Dems is that polling has found that about a fifth of those who say they’ll vote Democrat have not participated in midterm elections before.
The current core Republican base is on the face of it less likely to turnout given there are now far fewer college educated women within its base and a greater proportion of white working class men.
One of my big spread bets is that turnout will be higher than 43.7%.
As we’ve been reporting on PB in most states there are going to be elections for governors and a whole host of different local county and state offices.
I like the video analysis above going through this state by state getting a sense of how the battle for the Senate is going to work out.
If turnout is considerably higher than that which was seen at previous midterms then could we have an effect like at the UK General Election in June 2017 when this wrong footed many pollsters.