Though election season, Republican and Democratic strategists in national organizations like the NRCC, DCCC, Campaign Leadership Fund, and House Majority PAC spend considerable time planning out which races to allocate money into to maximize their side’s chances of victory in as many races as possible. We took a look at our Congressional Election Model and wanted to create a framework in which anyone can explore how these decisions altered the landscape and second-guess them if they’d like. Today, we’re excited to announce the (beta) release of our 2018 Election Forecasting Simulator!
How exactly does it work? It allows you to modify every dollar of outside spending (independent expenditures) spent across all House 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.
With it, you can answer questions like “What if Republicans had spent as much money as Democrats?”, “What if the NRCC hadn’t put money into VA-10?”, and “How many seats could Democrats had won if they optimized every dollar they spent?” We’ve already pre-loaded some of the most obvious scenarios and optimized both expected seats (based on aggregate probability) and favored seats (whichever candidate has a greater than 50% chance of victory) for both Republicans and Democrats
The House version launches today. The Senate version of the simulator is coming soon, so keep an eye out for it! In the meantime, feel free to share your most interesting House scenarios with us on Twitter- @0ptimusPredicts.