America’s next top model: predicting the midterm results

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In New York, I'm John Fassman, and.

In London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The nuclear arsenals of China, India, and Pakistan are growing. Combined, they've got more nukes than Britain and France have stockpiled in Europe. But there's still no arms race happening in Asia yet.

And the Rosetta stone that allowed the translation of hieroglyphics first ended up in French hands, then in British. Now Egypt wants it back, even though it's technically Greek. The restitution of artifacts is often messy because that's how history is.

But first, Political junkies have been chewing over the upcoming midterm elections for months. But for many Americans, Labor Day, which was celebrated this past Monday, marks the beginning of campaign season. A lot of those junkies had been predicting a red wave in this year's midterms.

History and precedent suggests that the party of the incumbent president is looking to get clobbered, basically in the midterm elections.

Given all of the polling the way it is now, it'll be one of the largest red waves in the history of the United States. But in recent weeks, many have begun to wonder whether that wave crested too early. Two months ago, it looked like the Republicans were going to just sweep the midterms. Now it's not entirely sure.

It's not a slam dunk that Republicans will take both the House and the Senate in November.

Democrats seem to have been bolstered by a range of factors, including legislative victories, the right to overreach on abortion, and the falling price of gas. Still, it's hard to know how any of these factors will look when people start voting. And polls have suffered a reputational drubbing recently. They've become harder to carry out. And with so many of them, it can be tough to know which ones to trust. But there's still an important way of finding out what voters care about in a diverse country of 330 million people. This week the Economist is launching its own model designed to predict the outcome of November's midterms. And today, in the latest episode of our midterm series that looks at the broader forces influencing power and politics in America, we're getting crunchy. We're speaking to the person who put it together about what it's telling us two months out. And there are some surprises in there. And we'll also find out how to tell good pulls from bad with the guy who literally wrote the book on the subject.

Well, we're still putting the finishing touches on the model and fine tuning a couple of adjustments.

Daniel Rosenheck is data editor at the Economist, and he's the architect of our midterm model.

But from what we've got right now, the Democrats have a 24% chance to hold control of the House of representatives and a 76% chance to retain control of the Senate.

By what margins and how confident are you in those numbers?

So in either case, we expect the size of the majority for whichever party wins to be fairly narrow. In the model's average Senate simulation, The Republicans win 224 House seats, which is six more than is needed for a majority, and the Democrats to win about 51 Senate seats, which is two more than needed for a majority, given that they control the vice presidency and therefore the tie breaking vote. That said, there is still substantial uncertainty around those central estimates. There's plenty of time left until the election. Obviously, predictions even made the day of the election can have large errors, as we have seen in recent years. So the confidence intervals which is basically the model thinks that there's a 95% chance that a given party will wind up with between X and Y. Seats are still somewhat wide at this point. For the House, we have around that 224 estimate. For the Republicans, a range as low as 208 or as high as 243. And then for the Senate, looking at the Democratic number of seats, the model wouldn't be surprised with anything as low as 47 for the Democrats or as high as 54. So it really wouldn't be surprising at all to see pretty big losses for the Democrats in the House consistent with what we've seen in recent midterms. And it also wouldn't be completely out of the question for the Democrats to even gain seats in that chamber. And The Senate is currently 50 50. So a 53, 47 majority for either side could totally happen.

So, Dan, it sounds like we're pretty confident that Democrats will retain control of the Senate. That may come as a surprise to a lot of listeners. Let me ask you something else. Our listeners don't know, but we on this side of the microphone do just how hard you've been working over the past few weeks to perfect this model. Why is this a useful exercise?

I think it's useful for two reasons. The first question is, is it useful to have a better sense than you might otherwise have of the range of outcomes in a political contest and what's likely to happen? And I would argue, yes, I would say that the single most important factor in determining the course of public policy in the United States is which of the two major parties controls each of the three elected arms of the government, the presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. So then you get to the second question, which is, okay, if we think it's useful to have a precise estimate of just how likely each of these outcomes are to happen? Well, what's the best way to do it? And there I think the answer is that, particularly when you're dealing with Congress, there are so many races and there's so much data and so many different types of data. There is absolutely no way that any human or group of humans can, could, without the assistance of a computer, systematically and methodically combine and weight all of this information in a way that would historically have produced the most accurate possible predictions. Only a computer can do that.

So that's the why. Tell us a bit about the how. In simple terms, how did you build this model given all the data you had to put in? What are you looking for?

Sure. So the Step one is just compiling the data. You're looking at generic ballot polling, which is when pollsters just ask people, which party's candidate do you plan to vote for, which party do you want to control Congress? You have the President's approval rating. You have some factors like is it a midterm or is it a presidential election year? What's been going on in, say, special elections? So when somebody leaves their legislative seat and there's an election to fill it, that often gives you another type of insight into which way the political winds are blowing. Then basically you ask the computer to find the equation that combines them that would have yielded the most accurate predictions of what the national popular vote would have been in every previous election year. And then you take that equation and you apply it to 2022.

When you build a model with polls, you have to hope those polls are accurate. The polls have got a bit of a bad rap these past few years. Folks after 2016 just don't trust the polls. They just don't buy it.

The biggest stunner then, the state polls.

That showed Clinton ahead in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

But the Democrats blue wall crumbled. Donald Trump narrowly winning all three, and with them, the White House.

After 2016, everyone wants to know, of course, and they're still kind of having.

Like PTSD for the polling.

Can the polling be trusted this time around?

But it really seemed like the environment about polling information changed after 2016.

Elliot Morris is a data journalist at the Economist who has recently written a book defending polling called Strength in Numbers.

The polling error that year was a little bit larger than average. But I think more importantly, people had a lot of feelings about that election. And the natural person or people to blame was the pollsters for misguided expectations. But I think that the reaction has been a bit too severe.

And so, Elliot, what went wrong in 2016? What caused that larger than average polling error?

Well, it's a bit of a tricky question, actually. The polls were right in the sense that they are relatively uncertain tools. And so when you have a close election, it can go either way. And the polls aren't necessarily broken when that happens. But they did do something wrong in that they didn't talk to the right percentage of non college educated white voters who tend to vote for Republicans. And so the polls end up underestimating Republicans, you know, but that's a pretty like technical methodological failure. And that doesn't mean that the whole tool is broken or worthless.

And so how has the practice of polling changed since 2016?

Well, after the 2016 election, most of the pollsters fixed that problem, but they had a new problem, which was that the non college educated white voters and all the other voters that they were getting also happened to be too Democratic because Republicans have gotten less likely to answer surveys. So in some ways the old problems have been fixed, but there are a lot of new problems. We saw that in 2020, and there's no guarantee, right, that whatever pollsters have been trying to do to fix that error in 2020 will fix any future problems. So it's this constant game of whack a mole where pollster sticks one issue and another one pops up.

So how useful are polls now, broadly?

Well, there's an election answer and then there's sort of the issue polling or political policy answer. And on the latter, polls are a pretty shining example of quantifying democracy in Washington. You get politicians, but also interest groups and advocacy organizations and activists constantly citing polls to sort of push their side of the agenda, but more importantly, to push for what the people, at least in aggregate. And if you have fair polling, want. And polls do a pretty good job at that, there are studies that say they're even better at predicting how people feel on the issues than they are predicting how they're going to vote and elections.

And when it comes to elections, the polls have improved since 2016. They've probably improved since 2020, but there still might be more problems. How should we feel about them?

Fundamentally, polls do a pretty good job at predicting elections. We really sweat these small differences between 1 or 2 percentage points Error here and there. But in the grand scheme of things, if, you know, you take a poll and it says it's 49, 51 for one candidate, and it ends up 51, 49 flipped the other direction, you're off two points. That should really tell you that the election is pretty close and could go either way. And that's the environment we're living in right now of close elections and relatively average poll errors making much bigger differences than they used to in the past.

All right, Elliot, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

In the next installment of our midterm series, we'll be visiting the biggest convention congressional district east of the Mississippi river to see how Democrats are trying to win back rural voters. For now, you can find all of the economist's midterm coverage@economists.com Midterms2022.

Foreign. Hi, this is Christy from Back to the Bar. You've probably heard about GLP1, weight loss, medications and the side effects that can come with jumping in too fast. That's why I love Noom Makes getting started easy. Their microdose GLP1 program begins with a smaller dose and gradually scales up based on how your body reacts. The Noom GLP1 microdose program starts at $99 and is delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP1 journey today at Noom.com that's N-O-O-M.com Noom micro changes big results average weight loss 8 pounds in first month meds and personalization based on clinical need and not available to all individuals. Medications are not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy or quality. Pricing based on first month only.

For decades, a nuclear weapons arms race played out between America and the Soviet Union. And as China, India and Pakistan gained the ability to build atomic bombs, many feared a similar grim contest would play out in Asia. That didn't happen, although the stockpiles of weapons the three countries do have still pose risks. Earlier this year, India said one of its missiles launched accidentally during routine maintenance. Pakistan's then foreign minister, Shah Mahmoud Qureshi laid out questions to reporters.

India needs to clearly explain the type and specifications of the missile that fell in Pakistani territory.

That is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

So far, all three countries have shown some restraint in their nuclear ambitions, but that long standing position may be changing.

For most of the time, since India and Pakistan became independent states back in 1947, nuclear weapons have cast a kind of shadow over South Asia.

Shashank Joshi is our defence editor.

China got the bomb in 1964, India conducted what it euphemistically called a peaceful nuclear explosion. Ten years later in 1974, and by the 1980s, it was pretty obvious that Pakistan could build one very, very easily if it wanted to do so. And then in 1998, both India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests. At 1545 hours.

India conducted three underground nuclear tests in the Pokhran range.

I warmly congratulate the scientists and engineers who have carried out these successful tests. So it became open that China, India, Pakistan, these were all declared avowed nuclear powers. But in many ways they are very modest nuclear powers. They have grown their arsenals relatively slowly. They're sort of hesitant nuclear states relative.

To the more overt nuclear states such as America and Russia.

Absolutely. So you look at America in Russia, Jason, they've got several thousand warheads each, depending on how you count the ones that they have in storage. Pakistan, when it turned 60, as a country in 2007, it had about 60 nuclear warheads. So you can think of them as candles on a cake. Now it has around 165. So in recent years, it has grown very quickly. India doesn't have as many, but it still has a lot. It has around 160. And China, despite having been a nuclear power for a lot longer than those countries, it has about 350. But what's been happening more recently is that all three countries have been modernizing their arsenals much more quickly than in the past. So China is adding hundreds of new nuclear missile silos. China, India, and Pakistan are all emulating the American and Russian nuclear triad, which means they're making their nuclear weapons deliverable not just from land, not just by planes, but also from submarines. So they're maturing as nuclear powers. They're growing relatively fast.

So you've once again come on the show and given us a new reason for worry.

So obviously, it isn't great that there's lots more nuclear warheads around than there were 20 years ago. But it isn't clear that this means there's some kind of arms race going on. There's a recent report published by Ashley Tellis. He's a former State Department official. He's now at the Carnegie Endowment, that's the think tank in Washington. And his argument is essentially that there's still something really distinctive about the way in which these three countries understand the role of nuclear weapons relative to America and Russia.

What do you mean by the role? They're bombs.

I think to answer that, Jason, I need to say a word about the way that America and Russia think about their nukes. Both of those countries have a strategy of what we call counterforce, which means you don't just target the other side's cities, you actually target the other countries nuclear weapons to limit the damage they might do. That means that you have to have a very big arsenal, and it has to be kept on high alert at all times because, you know, you never know when the other side will come at you. By contrast, China, India, and Pakistan view their nuclear weapons as political instruments. Ashley Tallis says so. For example, China and India both have pledges called no first use, which means they promised they would not use their nuclear weapons unless another country had fired at them first. That results in arsenals that are in some ways much more restrained numerically and technically than they would otherwise be.

But the one thing that doesn't sort of keep with that explanation is the expansion of China's silos in particular.

Yeah, China really is the catch in all of this. The Pentagon says that China's nuclear arsenal might expand to about a thousand warheads by 2030. And that would be because China is very keen to overwhelm American missile defenses. That would be an arsenal that is still smaller than America or Russia, but it would be one that is much bigger than India's. And India might think, well, you know, hang on a minute. We've only got 160 or so warheads. What if China's now in a position to overwhelm us? That would be one problem. The other problem is also if the Chinese arsenal becomes much more technically sophisticated, the as well as being very big.

What do you mean by that?

Well, India gets by with a very small arsenal for the same reason that China, for most of its history, was able to get by with a very small arsenal vis a vis America. And that was because both countries were very secretive about the location of their nuclear weapons. The worry is that advances in surveillance technology, things like spy satellites, advances in artificial intelligence that can sift through huge amounts of data in the imagery that's produced, and things like cyber espionage, all of those things could pierce the veil of opacity, as Ashley Telles calls it. And the fear is that if you have enough warheads and you have very accurate missiles and you have all of those surveillance and reconnaissance technologies, that one day China could basically find every single one of India's nuclear storage sites, and it could, if it wanted to, take them out. So that is the really big worry that could destabilize the nuclear balance in Asia.

And so to your mind, what does this change in character mean for the cooperation and competition between these countries in a more general sense?

Well, Jason, nuclear weapons are sort of a paradox, right? The countries that have them, they're sort of safe. Pakistan fought a war with India in 1971 in which it lost half of its country. Bangladesh. That couldn't happen now that it has nuclear weapons. So in that sense, they bring a kind of stability to South Asia, and on India's side, they give it a certain degree of protection against China. But they're also, in another way, potentially destabilizing. We have seen how Russia, for instance, this year has used nuclear threats as a sort of shield behind which to wage its war in Ukraine. And I think the worry is, could that happen in Asia? Could China use its increasing threat, nuclear force, as a similar kind of shield to wage war against Taiwan? Nuclear weapons are stabilizing and destabilizing at the same time. That is what makes them so complicated. That's what makes them so Geopolitically significant.

Shashank, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

So the Rosetta Stone is the British Museum's most visited object. If you go to the British Museum, you will find it spotlit in room four, behind thick glass and surrounded by crowds four deep.

Catherine Nixie is a Britain correspondent for the Economist.

It ended up in the British Museum through a slightly circuitous route. It arrived at the start of the 19th century after it was discovered in Egypt. This cupboard's probably a bit of a euphemism, was taken by the French. And it looks really pretty boring for the most famous object in the museum. It's a very dull looking one. It's the size of a small child in height, it's black, it's a big piece of broken rock and it's got inscriptions. This is the thing that matters and this is the thing that everyone knows about it. It's got an extremely boring decree in three different scripts. It talks about wine taxes, it talks about canal renovations. But boring though it was, the fact that it had the same decree in three different scripts was what enabled scholars to use it as the key to deciphering hieroglyphics and therefore unlocking Egyptian history. But now the Egyptians want it back.

What do you mean that Egypt wants it back?

Well, so it's a very particular Egyptian who is spearheading this campaign. He's called Zahi Hawass and he's an Egyptian archaeologist. He has a hat, famously like Indiana Jones. He calls himself the man with the hat and he's a former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities and he that the stone is an icon of Egyptian identity and the British Museum has no right to show this artifact to the public.

This is not an unfamiliar concept. We've talked about art restitution on the show quite a bit. This is just a really big example of that same thing.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it is one of the most famous archaeological objects in the world. And restitution is absolutely in the air. In 2017, President Macron of France famously called for the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa. Last month, the Horniman Museum in London said it would return 72 objects, including 12 Benin Bronzes, to Nigeria. It's part of a much larger trend about the restitution of artefacts and it feels particularly pertinent in the British Museum.

Why is that?

Well, if you turn your back on the Rosetta Stone, if you walk forward about 50 paces and back 250 years, you find yourself right in front of the Parthenon marbles and they are one of the most famous in the British Museum. They are the marbles that Lord Elgin chiseled from the front of the Parthenon in actually the same year that the Rosetta Stone arrived. So in 1801, and they were brought back to London and they instantly became the subject of very bitter debate. So Lord Byron was furious. He said, dull is the eye that will not weep to see what Lord Elgin has done. But the poet Keats like them a lot more, so he went to see them in London and he wrote a poem to say that he felt like a sick eagle looking at the sky, which appears to have been a Keatsian compliment in the past years. However, Byron's sentiments, they're the ones that seem to have caught on. So a poll last November found that most Britons thought that the sculptures actually belonged in Athens and not here. And even the British Museum seems to be bending, which was unthinkable a few years ago. So, earlier this year, George Osborne, who's head of the BM Trustees, said that there is a deal to be done with Athens.

So is this, then, as straightforward as just simply taking the Rosetta Stone out of its glass case and shipping it back?

Well, one of the nice things about the Rosetta Stone is it just shows how complicated all these debates can be. And the problem isn't just that the museums are dragging their feet, it's that history is really complicated and the story of many objects is anything but straightforward. So in the case of the Rosetta Stone, there are those like Dr. Hawas, who say that it is an Egyptian object, pure and simple. But that really is just oversimplifying, because the stone was made for a Greek Macedonian king, Ptolemy V. And the Ptolemies had turned up in Egypt 100 years before with a Macedonian Greek king, Alexander the Great, and then conquered it. So they were rulers from outside of Egypt and they kind of assimilated. They were not quite Greek by the time the stone was made, but they were not quite Egyptians. And so I spoke to a professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, and he said there's basically no way of unproblematically mapping modern Egyptian identity onto the Ptolemies.

Right. So, as you say, it's complicated. Who's right in this?

Well, we can't stop there, because it gets even more complicated, because the stone was initially discovered by the French, and then when the English defeated Napoleon in Egypt, it was awarded in a treaty to the British as spoils. It was brought back to London, where it became an instant sensation. Because people could see just by looking at it, this is going to be the way that you can get into hieroglyphics. It's got the same decree. Three scripts, two languages. This is the answer. And it became the subject of European wide scholarly attention. People went into the British Museum, they copied it, they were allowed to make copies. And its decipherment started really quickly. The first big leap forward was made by an English scholar, Thomas Young, and then it was completed by a French scholar, Jean Francois Champollion. So Egyptian history could now, by kind of 20 years after it arrived in London, could be read. And you unlocked the whole of this world through this stone. That's why it's so famous. But it's worth pointing out that it wasn't brought to the museum because it was so famous. It was so famous because it was brought to the museum and became the key to this hitherto uncracked language.

These are all reasonable arguments on both sides. How do you think this is going to end up?

Like most of these debates, I have absolutely no idea. But you can see the case that the British Museum makes, that this is an international object that was contributed to by lots of different nations. It's right that it should stay in Britain and lots of people can see it here. And you can see the Egyptian case, that it was made in Egypt and therefore it should be back there. But I mean, you know, it's a mark of how complicated all of these debates are that you could sort of theoretically make a third debate that actually it's a Greek object and it should probably go back there. I mean, they could throw it in as a job lot with the Elgin Marbles.

Catherine, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you very much for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomist.com and you.

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