The GOP's All In Bet

On Nevada And Pennsylvania

One of the worst feelings as a sports gambler – and a feeling I know all too well – is when a bad Sunday of NFL bets comes through, and then you have a Sunday Night game. You know you should be smart, you know you should not bet it, contain your losses … but there’s also the part of you that wants to chase the losses and get them back. Sometimes, it works, and you’re vindicated. More often, you made a bigger bet than you should have, and you also lost the shirt off your back in the process.

Desperation is never a good strategy in these things – if you’re making bets, bet the games you actually like, not the ones that happen to be on national TV. But we don’t do that, and it tends to lead to bad outcomes. Doesn’t mean it can’t win – trust me, I’ve gotten bailed out of many a bad week with a bad process, but successful Sunday Nighter – but it’s not likely to work consistently over the long term.

It’s easy to say the best way to avoid it is to win your earlier bets, but at some point, you’ve lost those, and so you’re all in, in a sense, on a recovery strategy. And that is exactly where the Senate GOP find themselves, all in on a Nevada-Pennsylvania double that looks more precarious every single day.

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Let’s have a very blunt conversation about the Senate map at this point. Assuming nothing wild happens with New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin, or Ohio, the GOP have 49 seats fairly comfortable, meaning they need two more to win the Senate. That sounds fairly easy, but it’s really not.

In Arizona Mitch McConnell won’t put up any money behind Blake Masters, who is polling like shit, has no money, and is getting blitzed by the most prolific fundraiser in the Senate (and who is so far behind that Peter Thiel’s $5M will pay for one week of matching ads with Kelly’s campaign). In Georgia, I mean, it’s really just a question of whether Herschel forces a pointless runoff or not, because he can’t win outright and runoff dynamics are death for the Georgia GOP at this point (spoiler: Warnock probably wins outright on November 8th).

What’s left is Nevada, which is clearly the GOP’s best chance of the big 4 states and also hard to parse through, and then Pennsylvania, where to make a long story short even fucking Trafalgar can’t find an Oz lead. Plainly, the GOP are in trouble, because their chances of winning the Senate are essentially all in on a bad bet.

In Nevada, you can convince me either way – the polls are mostly bad for Democrats (but Democrats generally beat their polls here!), it’s working class (but also incredibly socially liberal!), and trending right (but national polls of just Hispanics point to a 2020-style Hispanic result!). It’s really easy to make a case for both sides, and basically I’m just going to wait for the turnout data like everyone else.

That said, even giving the GOP Nevada for the sake of this exercise, and they’re clear Senate underdogs. Even if the GOP get a state that is at best a tossup and more likely still Democratic leaning (because of fundamentals and historical polling misses), the GOP still need something else – all because they ran horrible candidates that have taken Georgia and Arizona off the board.

Let’s be clear – the GOP need to win a state that Trafalgar thinks they’re losing in right now. If you think Trafalgar’s fake, I can give you the fact that Fetterman’s up 5.7% in a state where the GOP only beat their polls by 3.5% last time, and that because the 538 average has overweighted things like InsiderAdvantage and Trafalgar to attempt to correct the bias, the chances of a similar sized miss again is not that high. If you do care about Trafalgar, then all I can say is that even the GOP’s propaganda arm can’t find Oz a lead, and they’re running out of time.

Now, does this mean Oz is dead? God no – 2020 should inspire humility from those who got it wildly wrong about overconfident predictions and also remind people that if Partisanship is King – and it is – then candidate concerns can be overdone. It’s also worth remembering that Crystal Ball moved Iowa Senate to Lean D in October – before, to their credit, reversing post-Selzer. Things can change, and while I’m very confident Fetterman would win an election held tomorrow, the good news for Republicans is that the election isn’t tomorrow.

The problem is, that also applies to Democrats in Nevada – they might be down a little now, but time helps them there, because they have time to get the get out the vote machine fine tuned and in working order – in a state with universal vote by mail now.

Republicans have, essentially, whittled down the Senate map to the politics equivalent of a two team parlay, but they’re at best a 55% favourite in one and a 35% underdog in the other. Now yes, in the world Oz wins it’s probably safe to say that Laxalt wins, but that’s not necessarily true, if the reason Oz wins is a 2018-style polling miss in the northeast that stops somewhere between Missouri and Kansas.

If Oz had a poll showing him ahead he’d release it. If the NRSC had one, they’d release it. If there was any good news for Oz, it would be out in the world, but they can’t find any. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist – I wrote many the same sentences about Susan Collins in Maine in 2020, but the difference is that making the case that Collins and Oz are equivalent is destined for failure.

The GOP need to run good to win the Senate, which they very well might, but pretending that they’re particularly likely to do so ignores the scale of their problem. The GOP need both Nevada and Pennsylvania in all likelihood to win the Senate. They made their bet.

In 25 days, we find out if it’s a winner or not.