Last week, we unveiled the beta release of our 2018 Election Forecasting Simulator. We’ve now enabled Senate functionality, giving you the ability to re-allocate money in the most visible races of the year. Can you concoct a scenario where Democrats would have actually been favorites to keep the Senate, or one in which Republicans have their own red wave to counter the House?
It works the same way in the Senate as in the House. The simulator allows you to modify every dollar of outside spending (independent expenditures) spent across all races, to better allocate money in helping your side win as many races as possible (or just create chaos if you’d like). You can run the simulator from the Republican perspective, Democratic perspective, or modify both sides- the latter is the most realistic but also most challenging way of using the simulator, since spending decisions are often contingent upon how much the other side has spent. If you’re interested in the math side of it, we’ve also provided a detailed explanation of our methodology on the site.
One of our pre-loaded Senate scenarios shows what an optimized strategy for creating as many GOP favored seats (where probability of GOP victory is >50%) as possible would look like.
By re-allocating money from many non-competitive seats to ones below 50%, you can get 4 extra seats with GOP favorites (and Minnesota-Special to lean D!)…
But since you’re taking money out of races without regard to what the probabilities mean on the aggregate, you’re not actually adding any seats to the GOP in expectation…
And while you’re now favored to keep NV and AZ, you end up adding money to FL and IN, where Republicans ended up winning despite being underdogs, and you take all outside spending out of Texas, which was perilously close…
We’ll keep adding features to both House and Senate, so stay tuned. In the meantime, feel free to share your most interesting scenarios with us on Twitter- @0ptimusPredicts. And if you spot a bug, let us know here.