JUST IN: Nate Silver Now Gives Democrats 68% Chance to Hold Senate
UPDATE: Since this post was published, Nate Silver updated his projection to give Democrats an even greater chance of holding the Senate: 68%.
FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver shifted his prediction regarding the fate of the U.S. Senate to favor the Democrats after Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) retained her seat and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman flipped a Senate seat in Pennsylvania.
Silver’s prediction came after several key early Senate races had been called, with Republicans winning several predictable victories, such as incumbents Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), but not scoring any upsets so far.
Notably, Pennsylvania GOP Senate nominee Mehmet Oz is trailing behind former President Donald Trump’s 2020 vote percentages, a promising sign for Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) — as is the victory in the governor’s race for the Democrat, Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
But it was Hassan’s victory that swayed Silver’s analysis.
ABC News anchor David Muir announced the call for Hassan, adding “suddenly we’re in an even ball game between Democrats and Republicans.”
Silver said on ABC he gives Democrats a 51% chance of holding the Senate.
“This is really incredible,” said Muir.
Bolduc garnered a lot of negative press over the course of the campaign for outlandish comments and promotion of Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election. The Republican actually backtracked from his election denialism after he won New Hampshire’s GOP primary, but then backtracked on his backtracking to get in line with Trump again. Bolduc’s embrace/re-embrace of the Big Lie did score him a late-October endorsement from Trump, but the ex-president also took a swipe at him for his previous waffling.
According to WMUR, with 52% of votes counted, Hassan had a comfortable lead over Bolduc, 55.5% to 42.5%. Bolduc reportedly conceded in a speech to his supporters around 11:15 pm ET, but had not yet called Hassan.
Watch the video above, via ABC.
