The Transphobic Tranny

My methodology for making election predictions is to look at an aggregate of past polling. I then look for the error in a chosen poll of polls. I chose Real Clear Polling this time. Individual polls have a lot of noise but the aggregate seems to be a better bellwether. I used this method with success in 2024 with Trump. I don't have a lot of faith in models or early vote tea leaf reading, frankly. I am happy to change my mind if I see evidence that modeling shows promise. Right now, my view is that if you want to know what voters think you should just ask them and then see what patterns emerge. I believe, based off of the data, that Republicans will barely hold onto the Senate with JD Vance's tie-breaking vote at 50-50. I also believe Republicans will lose the House. I haven't tracked any individual races closely but I think Democrats will have a comfortable 20+ seat lead based off of national sentiment polling. My Senate picks were made by looking at Real Clear Polling's average from the last two Senate elections. South Carolina: Graham -Past polling underestimated Lindsey's support. His sister will win. New Hampshire: Pappas -Leading in the polls and no reason to think they will be incorrect. Nebraska: Ricketts -R state and he's leading. Georgia: Ossoff -Polls have been consistently right in the state. Ossoff's margins are massive. Game over. North Carolina: Cooper. -Easy flip for Dems. Cooper is popular, has won statewide office, and has disciplined messaging. His margins are overstated and this will be a closer race than expected but he will win. Iowa: Hinson -Polls show a tight race but in 2020 the RCP average had Ernst up only by 1.4 but she won by 6.6. Big GOP undercount that year. Polls in 2022 were also all over the place even though it was obvious Grassley would win. I don't have a ton of consistent data from the same pollsters but hard to see a Dem win here considering the 2020 undercount. Rural whites are hard to get on the phone. Not sure what else to say. Kansas: Marshall (by a hair) -Polls have Hamilton up but in 2020 the pollsters missed Marshall's support by A LOT. NYT had him up only by +4 in October. He won by 11.4. That's a 7.4 undercount miss. Apply that same error margin to this year's NYT poll and you get a 2 point win for Marshall. Maine: Collins -2020 polling was a disaster. Democrat support was overestimated by 14 points. Most Mainers think she'll win this year. I think she does it again. Michigan: El-Sayed -RCP has him up by 5.3. Polls in the past have overestimated Democrat support. They will do so again but it won't be enough for Rogers to win. In 2020, RCP had Peters up by 5.4 but he only won by 1.7. In 2024 RCP had Slotkin up by 2.3 and she won by 0.3. The pro-Dem bias amounted to 3.7 and 2.0, respectively, but that's still shy of El-Sayed's lead. I think the race is nearly as close as 2024 but El-Sayed hangs on. Texas: Paxton (narrow win) -I think Paxton barely pulls this one out. RCP polling aggregate for the last three races have predicted the winner. However, in 2024 the RCP aggregate underestimated Cruz by 4.1. In 2020 it underestimated Cornyn by 3.3. 2018, by contrast, was an overestimate of Cruz by 4.2. This makes it harder to make a prediction but I am going to side with the most recent data showing pollsters undercounting GOP voters. Plus, Republicans are on a winning streak. I think it will be close but Paxton will squeak it out. Ohio: Brown. -Another Dem flip. Polling in 2022 RCP overestimated Vance's support by 1.5. In 2024 it underestimated Moreno's support by 1.9. There is no consistent bias here. RCP has Brown up by more than that 1.5-2.0 margin of error. That tells me he wins in a very tight race. Alaska: Peltola -This one will be razor thin and the ranked choice voting makes it very hard for me to suss out what might happen. I simply think that any election with a lot of complexity involved favors the more left-wing candidate. There is margin for error here but I think, if I am wrong, it will be by being too favorable to Republicans. Since I am a straight ticket Republican voter, my cognitive bias is in favor of the GOP. I got 2022 very wrong for this reason. I successfully corrected for that error 2023 and had a decisive edge in the Presidential election in 2024 through my read of the polling data. We will see if my methodology is successful this time. As a political scientist, I think it is necessary for me to state my predictions clearly so that I can hold myself accountable in the future when I analyze my own thinking. No matter what happens, after the election, I will provide my analysis of the trends that I think are at play. If GOP loses seats (as I expect) I will point directly to Iran and high gas prices as the cause. If GOP over-performs it will be because of lingering opposition to Dem radicalism, Trump's success on immigration, and a strong AI capex build out. In any case, Republicans would do a lot better if foreign policy and trade wars were not big issues. Voters want stability and consistency. GOP hasn't delivered that normalcy, unfortunately, and I think they get punished for it. There is a big legitimacy problem on the right, too. The Epstein hysteria combined with Trump going to war alongside Israel was a bad combination. In 2024, Biden had clearly lost "Instagram Reels Americans" but in 2026 the GOP is decisively losing that faction. I use that as my "normie" barometer. Right now, I think negative perception of the GOP outweighs the positive perception and marginal R voters stay home while Dems get a turnout boost from their hyper-political base.