Speaker 1: Later on today, we're going to be speaking with political scientist Rachel
Bitter Copper.
And one of the questions that I will have for Rachel is, are the numbers that increasingly
suggest this might not be a disastrous midterm for Democrats?
Are they numbers that can be trusted because we're getting more and more of these numbers?
Now, you might remember that last week or the week before, maybe it was.
I told you that for the first time in this primary season in the FiveThirtyEight forecast
for the U.S. Senate, Democrats became favored to retain control.
Now, it was a very small margin.
It was 52 to 48, meaning if you run 100 simulations with the current inputs in 52 of them, Democrats
end up controlling the Senate, and in 48 of them, Republicans end up controlling the Senate.
This is sort of like if you had a coin that instead of being a 5050 coin was a 5248 coin,
meaning the more times you flip it, the closer you'll get to 52% heads and 48% tails.
Now, if you only flip it once, it's either going to be heads or tails.
And 52 to 48 is a very, very small margin in favor of heads.
But the more times you run the simulation, the closer to 52% you will get.
That's the idea here.
Those numbers have now grown to 57% in the exact same FiveThirtyEight forecast.
And in fact, Nate Silver put together an article on FiveThirtyEight, which you can check out,
which has a bunch of different data.
The article from a few days ago called The Political Environment Might Be Improving for
Democrats.
And indeed, when you look at how the Senate forecast has changed.
If you looked at the beginning of June, Democrats only had about a 40 to 45% shot at holding
the Senate.
Remember, Democrats currently have the Senate 5050, with the vice president, Kamala Harris,
as the tie breaking vote in the event of a 5050 tie.
Those numbers have increased, increased, increased to where now it is a 57% chance that Democrats
control the Senate after the midterm elections and only a 43% chance that Republicans control
it.
Now, as we know, even things that are statistically unlikely sometimes happen going into the 2016
presidential election.
The odds were that Hillary Clinton had an 85% chance of winning and Donald Trump had
a 15% chance of winning.
Now, 85% is not 100%.
You run 100 simulations in 15 of them.
Trump would come out the winner, and indeed he did.
This is a very, very small margin, but we have to it's not even really come to terms
with it, understand that there's a unique or at least an unlikely and uncommon opportunity
this November.
Normally, and I know you guys are some of you are sick of hearing this.
Normally, when one party takes the White House in the first midterm election, they lose the
House and or Senate.
Or if they already don't have control of the House, they fall even further behind.
Or if they have control of the House and retain it, it's by a smaller margin.
You get the point.
We might not see that this November.
And if the question is why?
Which is to me, the most interesting question right now, everything we know, everything
we can say is that it's because primarily of two issues.
Number one, abortion.
And number two, gun safety.
Although I have to say, compared to six, eight weeks ago, the gun safety issue is not nearly
in the forefront as much as it was.
But we have two issues that normally are not good issues for Democrats to run on that are
helping Democrats right now.
The country mostly wants abortion to be legal in most cases.
We saw that on Tuesday night in Kansas, where Kansas voters voted to defeat an amendment
which would have allowed completely banning abortion.
They voted to defeat that amendment by a 20 point margin.
That is not a small margin, and that's a very red state, one of the reddest states in the
country.
And when Roe v Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, even many centrists and center
right people said that this is wrong, this is wrong.
Abortion should be legal in most cases, and that may not help Republicans in November.
In fact, it could be their undoing.
And in addition to that, although I think it's diminishing compared to a couple of months
ago, continued mass shootings and just absurd reactions from Republicans.
Oh, it's the issue is doors.
Armed teachers put more guns in the schools, ballistic backpacks and bobbed grenade resistant
blankets or whatever it was that was being proposed.
Outrageous.
And although there are still many millions of true believers who think the solution here
is more guns, certainly not to restrict access to guns.
More and more of the country supports all sorts of common sense gun safety regulations.
We've looked at the numbers, overwhelming support for background checks in all cases,
even personal transfers and sales gun show every every situation.
There should be a background check.
And I've given you the list.
But our elected officials, by and large, don't support these things, at least not the Republican
Party.
This really seems to be hurting Republicans, and this is why now in what should be a really
big defeat, I mean, by all historical assessments, Democrats should get crushed in November.
It's increasingly looking if we had to just say what's the most mathematically likely
scenario?
The most likely scenario is Democrats lose the House, but not by much, and Democrats
maintain control of the Senate.
Now, it might not go that way.
We all must vote.
We must get involved.
We must phone, bank, all of the things.
Right?
We're going to be talking about them because it could come down to one race in the Senate.
It really could come down to one race.
We are going to continue talking about it.
But the inevitable massive red wave that many had been touting for a long time since Joe
Biden was sworn in that massive red wave seems increasingly unlikely