Paul Krugman, Elliott Morris, and David Nir on the blue wave

This is an upload of a guest appearance on Paul Krugman’s Substack, recorded September 30, 2026.Watch this video on gelliottmorris.com.Paul Krugman had David Nir, who co-hosts the SIN podcast with me, and me on his weekly interview show this Thursday, and the video is out this morning. Paul has graciously agreed to let us repost the video interview and transcript here. In this recording, we talk about (obviously) the state of the midterms — particularly the now-quite-rosy odds of the Democrat taking the House and Senate in November. We also talk about (go figure) the economy, and the counterintuitive finding from historical midterms that economic growth and other objective indicators typically don’t predict midterm outcomes well. What matters far more than any indicator is the label of the party in control of the White House. Of course, when everyone is saying they're mad about prices and only ~20% say the incumbent party is handling the issue well, that tends to have an effect electorally too.We also get into the chance of a large polling miss this year, like in some notable recent elections. I give a reminder that tools like election forecasting models, when done well, can represent uncertainty in the election given measurement error in the indicators.Thanks to Paul and David for a great discussion. Here are some links, and I’ve pasted the transcript below for easy reading.ElliottTranscript Paul Krugman: Like almost everybody I know, I spend about 17 hours a day thinking about the midterms, and I’ve got G. Elliott Morris and David Nir from Strength in Numbers and The Downballot here to talk to me about: What do we know? What’s going to happen? What are the indicators? And then maybe some broader issues about what the heck we think is going on in U.S. politics. So, hi, guys. Welcome.Elliott Morris: Hey, thanks, Paul.David Nir: Paul, it’s a pleasure.Krugman: So, yeah, as we record this, I guess it’s one month and two days before the midterms, and if I believe you guys, the polling and other indicators, which David will talk about, seem to be almost kind of shocking right now. Elliott, I just looked at your Fifty Plus One post, and I believe you now have 99% odds of Democrats controlling the House.Morris: Yeah, well, it’s October, Paul. So we’re in what I consider spooky probability territory. 99% is when you start to go, “I hope these models are parameterized correctly.” Look, the way to unpack this: Our model at 50 Plus One shows a 99% chance that the Democrats will win 218 seats or more. 99% seems very large. As the forecaster, I don’t want to be wrong on the 99, but it makes sense when you look at the numbers on paper.So, let’s take 2018 as a comparison case. That’s when Democrats won 235 seats in the House. That year, the generic ballot—which is a question that asks people how they will vote in their local congressional district, for which party they will vote—that has Democrats up somewhere between 8 and 9 points. Democrats won in 2018, leading the polls by about 8 or 9 points. They actually won the House popular vote by seven and a half points or so, if you account for some weirdness with, like, uncontested seats. So we are in a more favorable environment, if the polls are right, than 2018. And we also have a lot of other district-level indicators pointing the same way.Krugman: But, I mean, the gerrymandering was fairly extreme before this, and if we go back to the beginning of this year, it was looking a little iffy, if I recall.Morris: Yeah. So gerrymandering seems to have shifted maybe a handful of seats at most to the Republicans, accounting for some pretty rosy polling, for example, in South Texas and in Florida for the Democrats, where there’s been a larger shift than the national shift, which is about 10 or 11 percentage points. So if we are around eight points, our model says Democrats need to win the House popular vote by about three and a half points. So there’s room for the polls to be wrong by about five.The average expected error for the polls at this point, 30 days before the election, is about three and a half percentage points. So we’re looking at a larger-than-average error in the polls. And then if you account for other indicators, district-level surveys, the race raters like we do, th