Democrats ‘Hidden Good News’ in Election Results, According to Nate Silver

Nate Silver pointed to some “hidden good news” for Democrats in this year’s election results.
Republicans had a solid showing in last Tuesday’s election. Donald Trump secured 312 Electoral College votes in the race against Vice President Kamala Harris, meaning he is now set to return to the White House come January after winning every battleground. They also flipped three Senate seats held by Democrats in Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, though the House remained uncalled by major networks a week later as several races remained close.
Trump improved with nearly every voter group but particularly gained ground with young voters and Hispanic voters, who have traditionally been key to Democratic victories. Exit polls indicated that his victory was fueled by voter dissatisfaction with the economy, and that a majority of Americans were unhappy with the direction of the country.
Democrats are already debating what went wrong in this year’s elections, sparring over the direction the party should take on economic and cultural issues. They’re also hoping to make a comeback in the 2026 midterms, as they did in 2018, two years after Trump was first elected to office.
Beneath the service, there was some good news this year for Democrats, Silver, a polling analyst and forecaster, wrote in a post titled “It’s 2004 all over again” on Tuesday.
He wrote that the “hidden good news” for Democrats is that their “structural disadvantages in the House, Senate and Electoral College are now much less,” Silver wrote.
“If my projection of a Trump +1.4 popular vote is correct, that means the tipping point is only 0.6 percentage points to the right of the popular vote. Michigan and Wisconsin are now left of the tipping point, meanwhile,” he wrote.
Georgia also “moved considerably toward the tipping point,” he wrote. Although Trump carried the state, suburbs of Atlanta shifted toward Harris along with a few other pockets across the country.
He wrote that Democrats “lost the most votes in the places where those votes were most wasted,” such as states like Illinois, New Jersey and New York, three states where Trump made substantial gains but still voted comfortably to the left of the national popular vote.
Newsweek reached out to the Harris and Trump teams for comment via email.
In the Senate, the tipping point is “still a bit Republican-leaning” but “considerably less still a bit Republican-leaning.” Silver has laid out how Democrats can take control of the Senate over the next few election cycles. The close nature of the House of Representatives, even as Trump is winning the popular vote, could also be a good sign for Democrats, he wrote.
“The GOP bias built into the map in place from 2012-2020, buoyed by the GOP dominating the redistricting process after their strong 2010, is no longer,” he wrote.
Control of the House will come down to a handful of seats on the West Coast that haven’t been called, such as Alaska’s at-large district, where Democrat Mary Peltola is defending her seat against Republican Nick Begich, or California’s 22nd district, where Republican Congressman David Valadao is facing a challenge from Democrat Rudy Salas.
As of 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, The New York Times shows that Democrats have won 205 seats, while Republicans won 214 seats.