Silver Bullet pollster claims midterm election news is even better for Dems than people think

WASHINGTON — A top election forecaster says the House and Senate are about to do something that’s happened only twice in the last 70 years — both flip in a single election.Famed polling expert Nate Silver, who is giving Democrats a whopping 94% chance of reclaiming the House, also predicts there is a 75% chance they will retake the Senate.Silver, who is known for his near-perfect predictions of the 2008 and 2012 presidential cycles as well as his huge miss for President Trump’s win in 2016.claims that his peers are being “boring and risk-averse” by hedging the Dems’ chances of nabbing the Senate.“Democrats’ situation is more robust than if you just treat all of the states in the middle of the table as pure toss-ups,” the data nerd explained in his Silver Bulletin.“[Alaska’s Mary] Peltola, [Texas’ James] Talarico and [Ohio’s] Sherrod Brown, in particular, have led in the vast majority of polls, and those pickups plus North Carolina would suffice to give Democrats a 51-49 winning map.”It should be noted that Silver is one of the most bullish of the polling analysts on Democrats’ chances in November.

To retake the upper chamber, the Dems will need to flip four Senate seats currently controlled by the GOP.Still, many of the top forecasts are expecting Democrats to retake the Senate, which is critical for filling cabinet posts, judiciary vacancies and more.Adding to the stakes of the Senate is speculation that Republican appointed Justices Samuel Alito, 76, and Clarence Thomas, 78, may want to retire over the next two years.Should that happen, Democrats could reshape the ideological balance on the high court.There have only been two instances over the past 70 years when both the House and the Senate flipped simultaneously in the same election cycle: the 1994 and 2006 elections.

Notably, Democrats had a toehold on the House for four decades, from 1955 until early 1995, while the Senate flipped back and forth during that time.One of the r...