Welcome to the Brown Political Review’s 2022 senate midterm forecast model!
NOTICE: Our map and histogram have finished updating for the 2022 Senate Races. However, our needles at the bottom of this page will continue updating as new data comes in. Come by Sayles Hall at 8pm to watch the election with live commentary!
Right now, our Senate model shows a Republican-leaning race. We predict that Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania will end in the hands of the Republicans, while Nevada will remain in the hands of the Democrats. We predict the Republicans will take over the Senate 72.8 percent of the time, with an average seat count of 51.7. The closest races in our model at this point are Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. You can hover/press on individual states to get the expected result and each party’s chance of winning for that state.
Our model combines prior election results, state and federal-level polls, incumbency factors, and expert opinions to predict the result of every state. We coded our model in R, by aggregating data and creating a normal distribution with a mean result and standard deviation, through which we calculated each candidate’s chance of winning. We then ran a demographic-based monte-carlo simulation 10,000 times to predict the percentage chance of each party winning the Senate. The code for our model can be found here, and is available for reproduction or modification.
We would like to credit those who worked to aggregate data we used in our model:
FiveThirtyEight: polling aggregation and pollster ratings
Ballotpedia: previous election results
Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, CBS news, Politico, RCP, Fox, DDHQ, FiveThirtyEight, and the Economist: expert opinions
ORACLE of Blair: simulation methodology
We will learn from our successes and failures in this model to create an even better model for the House, Gubernatorial, and Presidential elections in 2024.
In the meantime, join us, Brown Votes, and lots of other organizations at Sayles Hall on election day starting at 8 pm to get live commentary! We’ll be updating our E-Day model throughout the night.
If you have any questions about our model or suggestions for the future, please feel free to email the BPR or comment below. We would love to hear from you!
Forecast Creators:
Model Creator – Asher Labovich
Assistant Programmer – Ryan Doherty
Data Compilation – Carson Bauer
Interactive Implementation – Logan Rabe
