Given the unprecedented decision by President Biden to withdraw from the presidential race at this late date, Decision Desk HQ is temporarily freezing our Presidential, Senate, and House forecast models.
The reason for freezing our Presidential model is clear: Democrats have no candidate with the bound delegates needed to win the nomination. If a presumptive nominee emerges before the convention, we will begin to reboot the model; otherwise, we will reboot the model upon a nomination. You’ll likely see a lag between the identification of a nominee (presumptive or official) and the relaunch of our model while we take the needed time to collect and input the new data, primarily polling data, that will enable us to restart the model.
The decision to pause our Senate and House models, the only such models across the major forecasters, is due to the significant correlation between the performance of a Presidential nominee in a state and the performance of their party’s candidates for Congress in that state. Without the ability to reliably forecast the top of the ticket, we cannot accurately model the downballot effects in a given state. (We had planned to publish updated Senate and House models with Q2 FEC data this weekend, along with an updated Presidential model, but given this historic development, we are freezing these models instead.)
Until we relaunch the forecast models, we will continue to collect polls and provide our potential Presidential match-up averages. Our current Trump-Harris polling average and Harris’ current favorability rating remain available.
We look forward to being able to reactivate our forecast models to help you make sense of this historic and unique election.