In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate and Galen discuss a recently published assessment of how our 2022 midterm forecast performed. How did the polling averages and seat-gain projections compare with the actual results? If we said there was a 70 percent chance a candidate would win a race, did that actually happen 70 percent of the time?

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

2022 Election

How Our 2022 Midterm Forecasts Performed

Our model was always skeptical of the “red wave.”

By Nate Silver

Graphics by Ryan Best

Feb. 2, 2023, at 11:30 AM

Let’s get this out of the way up front: There was a wide gap between the perception of how well polls and data-driven forecasts did in 2022 and the reality of how they did … and the reality is that they did pretty well.

While some polling firms badly missed the mark, in the aggregate the polls had one of their most accurate cycles in recent history. As a result, FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts had a pretty good year, too. Media proclamations of a “red wave” occurred largely despite polls that showed a close race for the U.S. Senate and a close generic congressional ballot. It was the pundits who made the red wave narrative, not the data.

With that said, the polls weren’t perfect.

• Polling averages and forecasts did slightly underestimate Democrats, though the differences were modest — certainly less than the extent to which they underestimated Republicans in 2016 and 2020.
• Some pollsters — such as Trafalgar Group and Rasmussen Reports, which have a history of Republican-leaning polling — had a conspicuously poor year. 
• There are different methods of polling aggregation and forecasting. The margins in the polling averages from RealClearPolitics were on average 1.3 percentage points more favorable to Republicans in the most competitive Senate races¹ than those published by FiveThirtyEight. Similarly, RCP’s generic ballot polling average was 1.3 points more favorable to the GOP than FiveThirtyEight’s. In this article, I’ll only be evaluating FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts, but methodological choices made a difference.
• Finally, Democrats’ relatively strong year — although there were some precedents for it — defied a lot of midterm history. It’s not just that the polls did better than the conventional wisdom; they also did well relative to political science or “fundamentals”-based forecasting methods.

So let’s dig into the FiveThirtyEight forecast. As you may know if you follow our work closely, we publish three different versions of our congressional and gubernatorial forecasts. Version one is a Lite forecast that sticks as much as possible to the polls themselves. (In races that have little polling, Lite makes inferences from the generic ballot and from polls of other races.) Our Classic forecast blends the polls with other data — for instance, information on candidate fundraising, incumbency and the voting history of the state or district. Finally, our Deluxe forecast adds in another layer, namely race ratings from outside groups such as The Cook Political Report. Deluxe is the default when you pull up our forecast interactive and the version that we use most often when describing our forecasts.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/red-wave-happen-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-92956144

But there was, in some ways, a fourth version of our model this year. Because of a data processing error, our Deluxe version was using outdated race ratings for House ratings from one of the expert groups, Inside Elections. Essentially, those ratings were frozen in time as of late September. The impact on the forecast was minor, but not to the point of being trivial. In this article, I’ll evaluate our Deluxe forecasts both as published (that is, with outdated Inside Elections ratings) and as revised with the correct ratings. (Ironically, the as-published forecasts were actually slightly more accurate than revised ones — more about that below.) 

But first, here were the topline numbers for the various versions of our forecast:

Both the Democrats’ one-seat gain in the Senate and Republicans’ nine-seat gain in the House were well within the 80 percent confidence intervals established by our various models.² True, the actual results were not in the dead center of the range: Democrats did somewhat better than the average forecasted result in both chambers. But it’s hard to hit an exact bullseye (although we get lucky and come close now and then) — that’s the whole reason to express uncertainty in a forecast.

In percentage terms, the forecasts gave Democrats somewhere between a 41 and 50 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate. Even using the 41 percent number, you would have had a decent-sized (and ultimately winning) bet on Democrats relative to prediction market odds, which put their chances at 32 percent. That is to say, the FiveThirtyEight forecasts were more bullish on Democrats than the conventional wisdom. And the Lite and Classic forecasts — which rely entirely on objective indicators and not expert ratings — saw the Senate as a true dead heat.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/2020-election-deniers-2022-elections-fivethirtyeight-93072681

Meanwhile, Republicans won the aggregate popular vote for the House by 2.8 percentage points. That is pretty close to the target established by our forecasts, which projected Republicans to win it by margins ranging from 2.4 to 4.0 points.

In other words, Republicans won about as many national votes as expected. There was not any sort of disproportionate youth turnout wave or other Democratic turnout surge. Instead, according to exit polls, more Republican-identified than Democratic-identified voters turned out in November. 

However, Democrats did an especially good job of translating votes into seats. How? Republicans ran up the score in uncompetitive races while Democrats eked out tight ones. A big part of the story is candidate quality. In many swing states and districts, Republicans offered voters far-right, inexperienced and/or scandal-plagued candidates, turning off independent voters. It may also have been that Democrats did a better job of directing financial and other resources to the highest-stakes races. Differences on the margin mattered: Democrats won four of the six Senate races and four of the five gubernatorial races decided by 5 percentage points or fewer.

Next, let’s check the calibration of the FiveThirtyEight forecasts, which is a way to see if the leading candidate won about as often as advertised. (For instance, did candidates who had a 70 percent chance win around 70 percent of the time?) We break our forecasts down into four categories: toss-up (where the leader had between a 50 and 60 percent chance of winning); lean (a 60 to 75 percent chance); likely (a 75 to 95 percent chance) and solid (a 95 percent or greater chance). Here were the numbers for the various versions of the forecasts — first splitting the results by whether Democrats or Republicans were favored, then showing all races combined.

Overall, calibration of the Lite forecast was pretty good, but with some asymmetries between the parties. Based on our forecast, Republicans were supposed to win 252 races (combining House, Senate and gubernatorial contests) and they in fact won exactly 252. Democrats were supposed to win 220 races and instead won 230. In the aggregate, the Lite forecasts were slightly underconfident — meaning there were somewhat fewer upsets than expected — although that’s what you might expect in a cycle where the polls had a strong year.

The calibration story is basically the same story for our Classic forecasts. Note that there were very few long-shot upsets. In races labeled as “likely,” the favorite won 55 out of 56 races. And they won 389 out of the 390 “solid” races.

And last but not least, Deluxe followed more or less the same script. I’ll present both the published and revised versions of Deluxe together since they make for a fun comparison:

Note that the as-published version of the Deluxe model actually made more correct “calls” (488) than the revised version did (481), even though the published version was using out-of-date Inside Elections ratings! Some of this probably just reflects luck in the closest contests. Deluxe (as published) identified the winners correctly in 32 of 43 “toss-up” and “lean” races (74 percent), while Deluxe (revised) went 30-of-53 (57 percent) in these categories.

However, the published version of the Deluxe ratings was also somewhat more optimistic for Democrats than the revised version. Since Democrats had a pretty good night overall, this helped it get a few more calls right. Mostly this reflects that the conventional wisdom grew more bearish on Democrats between late September and Election Day — and the conventional wisdom in September was closer to what actually transpired. So in some ways it was a blessing in disguise to use the late September version of the Inside Elections ratings.

Next up, a chart you’ll love if you want to give us a hard time: the biggest upsets of the year.

The major upset here is in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez defeated Republican Joe Kent despite having only a 2 percent chance in Deluxe (as published) and a 4 percent chance in Classic and Deluxe (revised). That’s a big upset, but it’s also about what you’d expect. As you can see from the calibration charts, an upset or two like this is par for the course given that we made forecasts for more than 500 races. So this is a sign of solid calibration.

What we might change — and what we don’t think we’ll change — for 2024 and 2026

I typically close these forecast reviews by considering what modifications I might make to our models in the future. In certain ways, though, this election lowered my stress level a bit. The polls had a relatively good year, even if that by no means rules out problems going forward. 

Moreover, one of the core hypotheses of our forecast is that polling bias is unpredictable: Polls will be biased against Republicans in some years and biased against Democrats in other years, but it’s hard to predict the direction of the bias in advance. That was the case in 2022, where Democrats were modestly underrated by the polls in 2022 — albeit with some misses in both directions — after Republicans considerably overperformed their polls in 2016 and 2020.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/learned-2022-midterms-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-95568339

However, there are a few things that I’m thinking about:

1. Given that the Deluxe forecasts haven’t really outperformed Lite or Classic since we introduced the current version of the model in 2018, there’s a question of what utility they serve. In principle, the expert ratings used in Deluxe can add a lot of value by considering measures of candidate quality that may be hard to spot in objective indicators, or because the groups that publish these ratings have access to inside information such as internal polling. But they can also introduce a subjective or “vibes”-based element, which certainly didn’t help in 2022.

There’s also a potential issue of recursiveness. If the expert groups partly look to the FiveThirtyEight forecast for guidance in how they rate races, but the FiveThirtyEight model in turn uses the expert ratings, the two methods become less independent from one another.

I’m not sure what we’ll do about Deluxe quite yet, but it’s a fairly close call between keeping things as is, scrapping the Deluxe forecast, and keeping Deluxe but making it a secondary version and Classic the default version.

2. Our model has a pretty sophisticated method for considering how the results in different states and districts are correlated — for instance, it understands that demographically similar states and districts tend to move in the same direction. But it likely understates intrastate correlations.

That was an issue this cycle as Republicans experienced a localized “red wave” in Florida and New York despite having a disappointing election nationally. These effects were partly the result of turnout differentials caused by upballot candidates, such as the tailwinds for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or the lack of enthusiasm for Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in New York.

The problems come because our model underestimates the degree to which a district in upstate New York and one in downstate New York are potentially correlated with one another, even if the districts are fairly different from one another demographically. Conversely, it slightly overestimates the degree to which a district in New York and one in Pennsylvania are correlated. We will do some due diligence on how common these patterns have been in past elections — and how much practical effect they have on the model.³

3. Finally, this is more in the category of “note to ourselves,” but we need to review our internal processes for double-checking that data inputs are working properly, given the error involving the Inside Elections ratings. Our models combine and aggregate a lot of different data sources, and that’s part of what makes them robust — but complex models can also introduce more opportunities for error.

There’s also one department where I’m not considering major changes, which is our process for determining which polls we include in our averages and forecasts.

Despite complaints both before and after the election about Republican-leaning polling firms “flooding the zone,” our overall forecasts and polling averages were both fairly accurate and relatively unbiased in 2022. It doesn’t seem prudent to me to have continued to “trust the process” after 2016 and 2020, when polling averages had a strong pro-Democratic bias, but then to panic and radically revise our method after polling averages had a slight pro-Republican bias in 2022.

That doesn’t mean we won’t consider changes around the margin. But I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and our polling averages and our model already have a lot of defense mechanisms against zone-flooding. The most important is our house-effects adjustment: if a polling firm consistently shows Democratic or Republican-leaning results, the model detects that and adjusts the results accordingly. Expressly partisan polls (such as an internal poll for a campaign or the RNC) also receive special handling: basically the model assumes they are biased until proven otherwise. And our pollster ratings are designed to be self-correcting. When we update our ratings later this year with results from 2022, pollsters such as Trafaglar and Rasmussen will take a hit, which will give them less influence in the polling averages in 2024.

Finally, we don’t want to have to make a lot of ad-hoc decisions about which polls to include or not, both because that would be extremely time-consuming and because it would introduce avenues for bias when everyone is stressed out in the middle of an election campaign.

Keep in mind that this is a long-term process: It takes many election cycles to determine which polling firms are most reliable. For instance, some of the polling firms that were least accurate in 2022 were actually the most accurate in 2020. I think it’s an enormous mistake in forecasting to constantly “fight the last war” when you have many years or a larger batch of data to evaluate. It’s exactly the sort of mistake that vibes-driven pundits make: They assume that whatever happened in the previous election or two will happen again. Our approach is to create a good process and to play the long game — and it works out pretty well more often than not.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/big-elections-happening-2023-96780613

Last week showed the diversity of challenges House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will be faced with as the leader of a five-seat Republican majority — from what to do with a swing district fabulist to the prospect of the United States defaulting on its debt. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how debates on both the debt ceiling and the future of Rep. George Santos’s career might unfold. In light of new data showing union membership at its lowest point since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began counting, they also look at how that decline has shaped U.S. politics.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Over the weekend, the White House announced that five more classified documents from the Obama administration were found at President Biden’s Delaware home. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew asks whether comparisons to former President Donald Trump’s own classified document scandal are apt. They discuss why gas stoves became such a hot topic of debate on the internet and what the 2024 primary for U.S. Senate in California will look like.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Last week, internal Republican Party divisions spilled onto the floor of the House of Representatives in a way rarely publicly seen in Washington. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew looks at why it took 15 votes to get Rep. Kevin McCarthy elected House Speaker and what that process says about the two years ahead and the GOP more broadly. They also consider how Rep. George Santos’s scandals will affect his tenure in Congress and whether he would have been elected at all if his fabricated biography had received more scrutiny during the campaign.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

With midterm elections in the rearview mirror, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast opens up the mail bag to answer lingering questions about the results. They also consider Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s motivations for registering as an independent and look at the latest polling on a potential presidential primary matchup between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Are The Democrats Screwed In The Senate After 2024?

No, but the party faces an uphill battle.

By Nate Silver

Dec. 8, 2022, at 11:05 AM

I’m not that impressed by long-term projections of Democratic doom in the Senate. Mostly that’s because I’m not that impressed by long-term political projections in general. Political coalitions change; not many people would have had it on their bingo card that Democrats would obtain a Senate majority in 2020 by winning two runoffs in Georgia, and then would actually expand on that majority in 2022 following another runoff in Georgia despite their party controlling the White House.

With that said, while I don’t think we can say very much about what politics will look like 10 or 20 years from now, a medium-term look-ahead is possible. Do Democrats have a reasonable hope of regaining a trifecta — control of the House, Senate and presidency — at any point in the near future (2024, 2026 or 2028)? And how long will they hold onto control of the Senate and the presidency, allowing them to appoint Supreme Court justices without Republican help?

My colleague Geoffrey Skelley already took an initial look at the 2024 Senate map, which is bad for Democrats, but I wanted to dig slightly deeper and also consider 2026 and 2028. Like Geoffrey, I’ll be focused on the Senate, because that’s the weakest link in Democrats’ effort to win back the trifecta. Despite some disadvantages in the Electoral College, Democrats obviously have no trouble winning the presidency. And they nearly held onto the House this year despite losing the popular vote for the House. The current House map doesn’t have much — if any — of a Republican skew, and Democrats should be able to win back the House if the national political environment is reasonably good for them.

So let’s look at the 2024, 2026 and 2028 Senate maps (yes, 2028 features the same map as the midterm we just finished; I just can’t let go, I guess). We’ll classify races into bronze, silver, gold and platinum “tiers” in terms of how feasible they are as pickup opportunities. I’m deliberately using this goofy metallurgical theme as opposed to the categories FiveThirtyEight typically uses (e.g., “toss-up,” “lean Republican”) so you’ll recognize these as being back-of-the-envelope suppositions rather than any sort of official race ratings.

In general, these ratings lean heavily on looking at how close a race was the last time it was contested, with some subjective adjustments for candidate quality. I’m also considering how the electoral environment has shifted within the state — Florida has gotten redder since Rick Scott was elected in 2018, for instance — although it is definitely not always safe to assume a state will continue trending in the same direction.

2024

Republican pickup opportunities

Platinum tier: West Virginia (Manchin), Montana (Tester), Ohio (Brown),

Gold tier: Arizona (Sinema), Nevada (Rosen)

Silver tier: Wisconsin (Baldwin), Michigan (Stabenow), Pennsylvania (Casey)

Bronze tier: New Jersey (Menendez), Virginia (Kaine)

As Geoffrey noted, the platinum-tier states listed here are the Democrats’ main problem. They have three senators up for reelection in states that Donald Trump carried by 8 (Ohio), 16 (Montana) and 39 (West Virginia!) percentage points in 2020. Each of those Democratic senators won reelection in 2018, of course, but that was a strong Democratic year, and there’s been further movement of white voters without college degrees — a key part of the electorate in these states — toward Republicans since then. 

I don’t want to focus too much on any one individual race, but it’s probably safe to assume that Joe Manchin has the toughest reelection campaign of all. Meanwhile, maybe Sherrod Brown can feel a bit more comfortable following Tim Ryan’s relatively good performance in Ohio this year, but Ryan did lose, and Brown may face a tougher opponent than Ryan did in J.D. Vance. Democrats also run the risk of retirements here; neither Manchin nor Jon Tester has officially yet announced they will seek reelection.

Beyond the platinum tier, Democrats face some other risks. Kyrsten Sinema is likely to face a serious primary challenge. Democrats keep winning close races for Congress in Nevada but it’s a very purple state. Tammy Baldwin, Debbie Stabenow and Bob Casey won by fairly comfortable margins in 2018 and will likely be fine in the event of a decent-to-good Democratic year, but if 2024 turns into a good Republican year, they could be in trouble.

Democratic pickup opportunities

Platinum tier: None

Gold tier: None

Silver tier: Texas (Cruz), Florida (Scott)

Bronze tier: None

Conversely, it’s very slim pickings for Democrats. On paper, you’d think that Texas might be close — Ted Cruz won by less than 3 percentage points there in 2018 and Texas is more competitive than it once was — but the erosion of the Democratic vote in South Texas has prevented Texas from turning truly purple. And although Scott won by only 0.12 percentage points in 2018, Republicans did so well in Florida in 2020 and 2022 that I was tempted to demote his race all the way to the bronze tier. Plus, there’s a good chance that the GOP’s 2024 nominee will be either Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or Florida resident Donald Trump, which could help drive Republican turnout.

Beyond that, any other races look like an extreme stretch for Democrats. Maybe Josh Hawley in Missouri could be vulnerable in a 2018-type environment, but that’s less likely in a presidential year and Hawley’s approval rating isn’t that bad. Put him in the “honorable mention” tier, I guess.

Given all this, I’d imagine the modal outcome from 2024 is something like Republicans picking up about three Senate seats. There’s uncertainty around that; it’s surely within the realm of possibility that Democrats hold the Senate, but it’s also possible that Republicans could wind up with 54 or 55 seats. And of course, all of these races are correlated. If the GOP is doing well enough to win the presidency in 2024, they should have no trouble also winning the Senate.⁴

2026

Republican pickup opportunities 

Platinum tier: None

Gold tier: Georgia (Ossoff), Michigan (Peters)

Silver tier: New Hampshire (Shaheen)

Bronze tier: Minnesota (Smith), Virginia (Warner)

The 2026 map is more balanced. Democrats undoubtedly feel pretty good about how they’ve performed in Georgia and Michigan in the past two cycles, but Jon Ossoff and Gary Peters won by extremely narrow margins in 2020 and it would be a mistake to assume they’re safe. It’s not a particularly deep set of pickup opportunities for Republicans, though if Democrats retain the presidency in 2024, you’d expect Republicans to have good midterms in 2026, and New Hampshire and perhaps even Minnesota and Virginia could potentially be in play. 

Democratic pickup opportunities 

Platinum tier: None

Gold tier: Maine (Collins), North Carolina (Tillis)

Silver tier: Alaska (Sullivan)

Bronze tier: Texas (Cornyn), Iowa (Ernst)

Meanwhile, Democrats will try again in the two states that were most disappointing to them in 2020: Maine and North Carolina. Given all the focus on Georgia, I wonder if North Carolina hasn’t become underrated as a place where Democrats could gain ground in the future; the states are fairly similar demographically and it wouldn’t take that much of a shift for Democrats to go from narrowly losing races in North Carolina to narrowly winning them. Susan Collins will be 74 years old in 2026, meanwhile, an age at which there’s typically some chance of retirement.

Democrats also have a below-the-radar pickup opportunity in Alaska, where Mary Peltola was elected to a full term in the U.S. House⁵ last month by a 10-point margin after ranked-choice votes were tabulated. GOP incumbent Dan Sullivan has a mediocre approval rating and a Peltola-Sullivan race would potentially be competitive.

Suppose, though, that Democrats win the presidency but lose the Senate in 2024. It’s really not as crazy as it sounds. If every state votes identically to how it did in the 2020 presidential election — and every Senate race follows the presidential vote — then Democrats would come out of 2024 with the presidency but only 48 Senate seats after losing West Virginia, Montana and Ohio. Could Democrats pick up two Senate seats from the GOP in the 2026 midterm while controlling the presidency? Unlikely — but then again, Democrats gaining Senate seats this year seemed unlikely and they did it.

2028

Republican pickup opportunities

Platinum tier: None

Gold tier: Nevada (Cortez Masto), Pennsylvania (Fetterman), Arizona (Kelly), Georgia (Warnock)

Silver tier: New Hampshire (Hassan)

Bronze tier: Oregon (Wyden)

All right, now we’re literally coming full circle to consider the races that were just contested in last month’s midterm. So we’ll keep it pretty brief. Yes, Democrats have to feel pretty good about their wins in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia — especially given that the overall political environment wasn’t that great for Democrats this year. But they were narrow wins, and (with the possible exception of Nevada) they came against a mediocre set of GOP opponents. Maybe some of these races are toward the silver end of the gold tier, but more likely than not they’ll be competitive again.

And since we’re projecting a full six years out, I’m going to be a little bit more creative about considering long-shot opportunities in the bronze tier. Although the Senate races in Washington and Colorado received attention this year (Republicans spent a lot of money on both, only to lose by double digits), they wound up coming just as close in Oregon with a QAnon candidate as part of a comparatively strong year for the GOP in the Beaver State. Could a more mainstream GOP nominee have made it a race? Oregon is quite white, it has fewer people with college degrees than the “Portlandia” stereotype might make you assume, and Democratic incumbent Ron Wyden will be 79 years old in 2028 …

Democratic pickup opportunities

Platinum tier: None

Gold tier: Wisconsin (Johnson), North Carolina (Budd)

Silver tier: Vance (Ohio)

Bronze tier: Alaska (Murkowski), Florida (Rubio), Utah (Lee), Iowa (Grassley)

Again, we’re mostly just rehashing this year’s map. Ron Johnson, who originally hadn’t planned on running in 2020, is another retirement threat in 2026 — and he barely won reelection anyway. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown could seek to return to the Senate if he loses in 2024 by challenging J.D. Vance. And 2028 is far enough from now that I wouldn’t want to rule out Democrats being competitive in states as far-flung as Utah, where independent Evan McMullin ran a fairly competitive race against Mike Lee this year.

Even with an additional senator going into 2023, the 2024 map is still so bad for Democrats that keeping the Senate for years to come will be a fairly tough order. The party’s prospects might rest more upon limiting the damage in 2024 so that it has a chance to regain the Senate in 2026 or 2028. But a bad 2024 could make it very difficult for Democrats to regain the Senate before 2030 or 2032.

That bleak picture may shape the next few years of political maneuvering. When Vox’s Dylan Matthews suggested on Twitter that liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor (age 68) and Elena Kagan (age 62) should retire while Democrats have their Senate majority and be replaced by younger justices, it didn’t go over well. But it’s a perfectly rational suggestion if Democrats don’t feel like gambling with their judicial future. (Consider how consequential Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire has been for liberals.) Democrats have a narrow path to Senate control after 2024, but it’s narrow indeed, and one that might require the GOP continuing to nominate bad candidates — and a fair share of luck.

In this emergency installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how Trump’s campaign will impact the upcoming Republican primary for president, and if this early announcement strategy will pay off during his 2024 campaign.