Decision Desk HQ

Paul, I want to get into independents.

If we go to the telestrator, we pop up some numbers in our recent poll that came out from NewsNation DDHQ, the generic ballot test.

Independents are leaning towards the Dems by 10 points.

All right.

And so President Trump can crisscross this country every day until Election Day, but without a compelling economic message that goes beyond ideology, without proof, that everyday people's lives are getting better.

Two years after he became president again, Republicans become the sacrificial lamb for the presidency that's really paid off the most for the top 1%.

I guess the one question for Republicans that they might hang their hat on, Jeanette, is, and we can go back to the Telestrator to look at the midterm forecast that DDHQ currently has put together, gives Democrats a 54% chance of controlling both chambers of the Congress, 21% that Republicans would keep control and about a one in four chance that the control would be split, is that these independent voters, and we saw this in our poll, they're far more likely, and this is not a surprise, than like a partisan Democrat or a partisan Republican to change their mind, right, at the end.

So there might be still a number of them up for grabs.

I mean, we were...

Uh, for many of us it's actually our first year in Re- RealClearPolitics, and that's why you've seen others like DDHQ.

Uh, we've been in there for a long time.

But it was always, it was, it looked better for Trump in '24, Steve, in DDHQ than everywhere else, and that's because they had MAGA pollsters in there, people who understood how to reach these people and how to, how to properly represent them.

So these races will be very, very close.

The one thing that does concern me, and that's why, you know, you'd always... it's irresistible to look at early vote.

[upbeat music] Welcome to the Decision Desk HQ podcast.

I'm your host, Jeffrey Skelly, the chief elections analyst here at DDHQ.

Uh, today we're going to bring in a, a couple more experts, couple reporters on the ground who are following important races in two of the pivotal states in the 2026 midterms, Alaska and Iowa.

So in the first part of this episode, I'm going to speak with James Brooks, uh, who is a veteran political journalist in Alaska.

Uh, Geoffrey Skelley, chief elections analyst at Decision Desk HQ.

Madison Morel, data scientist, which is a title I now realize at 50 I will never hold, uh, at Decision Desk HQ.

Um, we are here to talk about the DDHQ, uh, 2026 forecast election model.

Uh, we've done a bunch of these, but look, we're down to it now, folks.

20 days left, so we're going to do one each week here, if I can get these very busy people to join me.

You can also find on that page much more detail should you be interested in what Madison is talking about and sort of how this all works.

I, I would say models are, I think, the best, um, compromise between solely looking at polling and solely looking at historical data.

They, they, they do, they do to try to bring both of those in, and obviously as Madison mentioned, uh, the DDHQ model also uses, um, uh, some of the trade, uh, prediction markets, which gets you, I think, kind of like really, really up to the second pulse on these rates.

Let's start with the poll.

'Cause these numbers have just in, and they're exclusive to NewsNation and DDHQ today.

And first, really important, the analysts always talk about it.

It's what's they, they call the generic ballot.

Um, and it's one that I think could genuinely be a sort of unknown going into election day.

Um, it's one of the races where the different forecasts, um, you know, across places like VoteHub or DDHQ or Nate Silver actually disagree with one another.

Um, and that's another reason why I think it's critical to watch early voting data.

Georgia doesn't report it by party, they report it by race.