Bringing the House down: our American midterms model

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The economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Describing Steve Reich as a contemporary classical composer just leaves too much unsaid. He's been pioneering a singular kind of classical music since the 1960s, and as his 90th birthday approaches, our correspondent sits down with him and middle children, youngest children, cover your ears. We dig into the data that suggests why it is that statistically, eldest siblings do better in life. First up though, Here are some things you've been able to count on in American midterm elections since long before Donald Trump started to sow doubt in the whole process.

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1.

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Attempts will be made to fiddle the maps, laying out which district a particular place falls into by convention. This is redistricting when it isn't obviously unfair, and gerrymandering when it is. 2 There aren't actually that many competitive districts, so the overall control of the two houses of Congress hangs on a small number of races. 3. Anyone trying to start up a third party will get thumped. 4. The President's party loses the lower chamber, the House of Representatives. Really. It's odd how consistent that trend has been. And for all the norm breaking of Trump, two, it's pretty certain to happen again.

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The Economist's new model forecasting America's congressional elections gives the Democrats a whopping 98% chance of taking back the House of Representatives.

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Dan Rosenheck is our data editor and

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an impressively high 48% chance of winning the Senate as well.

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Let's start with how the model works.

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What goes in the model eats every possible type of information that I can feed to it. So that's historical election results, how every district or state voted in the past. It's all types of polling, national polling, presidential approval polling of specific races. It looks at results of special elections to fill vacant legislative seats. It looks at fundraising. Any possible new type of information that comes up along the way, obviously, we've had some recent redistrictings in states. We may have more those enter the model immediately. You name it, we got it. We process it.

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At the mention of redistricting and sometimes in the context of gerrymandering and so on, that often really sways the American elections because they tend to be so tight. What does that look like for the upcoming midterms?

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The gerrymandering wars have been interesting this cycle and unusual, I think, in one striking way, which is that the conventional assumptions, I think, about gerrymandering in America are not just that both parties do it and it's bad and we wish they didn't, but also that one side or the other, and certainly from about 2012 to 2016 or so, that was the Republicans, does so more effectively than the other and therefore extracts some sort of advantage. And instead, what we've had here, above all thanks to the democratic success on April 21st of getting voters in a referendum in Virginia to approve an absolutely brutal gerrymander that takes a state that had six Democrats and five Republicans delegation, which roughly mashed its vote split, and is going to move that all the way out to 10 to 1 Democratic. Largely as a result of that, the Democrats have not only fought the redistricting war that Republicans started by gerrymandering Texas last year to a draw, but they've actually kind of won it so far. The overall nationwide House map is actually pretty much perfectly fair, although in individual states it's wildly lopsided one way or the other, with Virginia now being sort of the canonical example. Nationwide, If Democrats get 50% of the national popular vote, our best guess is that they'll get 50% of the seats. So it's completely neutral, which is actually pretty unusual by recent historical standards.

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And for, you know, fans of representative democracy, kind of good news, right? One of the other things that has been the sort of thing that keeps you awake at night is about polling and polling errors. What kind of things are you looking at this time around?

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So my role in this ecosystem is basically to calibrate that uncertainty in the polls and then combine it with other types of information and see how much we can reduce the uncertainty using that. There will be some polling error, the polls won't be perfect. Something is going to be off by some amount somewhere. Probably everything is going to be off by some amount everywhere to some degree. What our model is supposed to do is calibrate all of that uncertainty and say, okay, based on everything that we have seen in the history of elections, and polling for Congress in the United States, what are the chances that we get polling errors of X size in Y direction in this place plus in the Z size in the similar direction in another place? And how does that all add up?

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Strong vibes of looking at the forecast and understanding what exactly it's telling me about whether it will rain or not. So I won't be betting the farm on the basis of the model's output at this point, but let's go through what it says for now, starting with the House. Talk me through it.

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Our model is very, very confident that the Democrats are going to flip the House following the Virginia redistricting. And I should clarify here, one central and probably incorrect assumption that the model makes is that current maps final. In fact, the Virginia State Supreme Court could throw out the Democratic gerrymander. It's widely expected that Florida will attempt a final retaliatory gerrymander of its own. So this is all conditional on the current maps. But even a handful of further districting seat changes as a result of districting wouldn't vastly change this number or anything. The fundamentals are just overwhelmingly in Democrats favor. First of all, it's a midterm. Whichever party does not hold a presidency tends to do extremely well in midterms. The polls are consistent with this. Democrats lead by about six points on generic ballot polling, which asks people which party they plan to vote for in Congress. The president's approval rating is 20 points underwater. The maps are reasonably fair. Republicans can't count on gerrymandering to hold back the popular will. I mean, look, pigs can fly. One in 50 events happen one in 50 times. But I definitely think the Democrats are gonna take the House. I couldn't quite tell you how big their majority is gonna be, but, like, I feel pretty confident in that.

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Okay, all right, small side bet then. For me, part of the farm on the House. It's the Senate that's more of a nail biter. Talk me through what the model says there.

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The Senate is really a nail biter. It wasn't quote unquote supposed to be. Because the map is super favorable to Republicans, Democrats need to flip 4 SE. Republicans hold the vice presidency, which break ties. And there's one of those that is not necessarily in the bag, but quite likely, which is that Roy Cooper, the former governor of North Carolina, will probably win a Senate race there. But the Democrats have a vulnerable open seat in Michigan that they need to hold. And there's quite a divisive primary happening there right now. They need to knock off Susan Collins in Maine, which is a blue state, but she's the most moderate Republican in the Senate. And then after that, Democrats still need to flip two more states, all of which Trump won by at least double digits in the most recent presidential election. The reason why we still think that's basically a coin flip that the Democrats could do it is a combination of two main factors. One, the national political environment is very favorable to not being the incumbent party. And then in a few of these seats, Democrats got really strong recruits. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown, who is a longtime senator from that state. In Alaska, Mary Peltola, who has already won a statewide race there. So in theory, that would get the Democrats to 51. Now, both those are tough races, but, you know, if those fall through, they might have some backup plans elsewhere.

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Apart from the gerrymandering redistricting that you mentioned, what other curveballs might really change what the model is going to predict or indeed going to change the outcome?

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Well, the big known unknown is just who's going to run Most primaries haven't happened. And our model, it assumes that incumbents who are seeking renomination will get it. It doesn't incorporate any information, including polls about specific races, until both nominees have been chosen. So that and further redistricting are the two big known unknowns. And then the unknown unknowns are just a change in the national political environment. Something big happens in the world or the country that is, you know, good for Trump and Republicans and bad for the Democrats. And, you know, the Democratic lead on the generic ballot falls from, you know, six to or two or a zero, and then we'd be in a very different universe.

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Got it. Well, I suspect we'll be checking back in with you as we get closer to the midterms, but for now, thanks a bunch.

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Thanks for having me.

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It really is worth your time to have a play with our interactive midterms prediction model. You can find it in the United States section of the Economists app or@exterator.com and for more oral stimulation on this, check out tomorrow's episode of Checks and Balance, our subscriber only sister show on American politics. They're considering whether Donald Trump will try to meddle in the midterms and how that very idea undermines Americans faith in democracy.

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So I just want to get some levels first. Tell me your name, where we are, and what you do for a living.

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10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Pickled peppers. Pop. Hi, this is Steve Reich. I'm a composer and we're in Pound Ridge, New York.

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Steve Reich is one of America's greatest living composers and one of his most famous works. Music for 18 musicians turns 50 this week.

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John Fasman is a senior culture correspondent for the Economist.

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It's impossible for any artist to explain exactly how they transform their life experience into art. But that doesn't stop people from wanting to know.

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As a kid, I had piano lessons in New York, and John Thompson type, you know, teaching Littlefingers to play. I just had no interest in it. One friend who said to me one day, looked down a block a little bit, you gotta come over and hear this, okay? And he played me the writer's brain. My jaw fell. I'm like, what is this? This is like. The whole world seemed to change if somebody opened the door and said, you haven't seen this room yet.

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The early 1960s were a heady time musically for avant garde composers, but really tough economically. At one point, Steve Reich and Philip Glass ran a furniture removal business together. Reich's experiments with tape loops changed musical history through a technique called phasing, playing two identical recordings in different tempos.

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People were really fooling around with tape in the 1960s. Tape loop was a very interesting thing because you began to hear details that you would never hear, whether it was a musical phrase or whether it was speech. Pick the right sample, you would hear something highly melodic, and the ambiguity between it being a piece of music and being a meaningful phrase began to blur. And it's just that blur, which is so meaningful because it's like, you know what it's saying, but it's saying something different because of the way of it's being taken apart. A friend of mine had said, you've got to record this Black Preacher In San Francisco, calls himself Brother Walter. He said, union Square, just check it out.

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They didn't believe that it was gonna

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rain, but glory to God, Hallelujah, that's God's wonderful name. This evening, I say this evening after a while. And I went down to Union Square with a microphone and a recorder. And sure there was Brother Walter. And he was talking about the flood, the end of the world. And in the 1960s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, that kind of mood of catastrophic ending was in the air. Those kind of things don't just blow away.

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Reich was deeply affected by his times.

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I had to like open the bruise

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up and let some of the bruised

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blood come out to show them.

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Come out to show them.

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Come out. In 1966, he composed Come out based on voices recorded at a benefit for the Harlem Six, who were six young black men accused of killing a woman who owned a used clothing store in Harlem. Five of them had their convictions overturned.

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I dare say of all the electronic music that was done in that period of time, these two pieces seem to be amongst the sole survivors. Because they are here and because they are about something. The important part of the discovery was not the facing process itself, but how to make close canons in a way that was an old, old technique, but not applied on that scale.

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On that brevity, Reich returned to using human voices in different trains. A piece for string quartet and tape loops. The voices on the loops are people in Europe and America talking about train journeys during the build up to and aftermath of the Second World War. In the second movement, three Holocaust survivors discuss the trains that took them to the camps. And in the third, they discuss the post war years. Can I ask a slightly more personal question?

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I don't promise to answer, but you can ask.

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I'm Jewish.

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Right.

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The bookshelf that I'm looking at over your shoulder, both incredibly enticing and in large part very familiar.

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Right.

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Can you tell me about the role that Judaism plays in your music, in your composition, your thought process?

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Sure. Now that's a perfectly legitimate question. I was raised a Reform Jew, which means to say I knew nothing about anything. I could say the Shema in Hebrew, but that was the beginning and the end of it.

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But that was not the end of it. Reich threw himself into study, reading the Torah and learning Hebrew. He became especially taken with the Tehillim, known in English as the Psalms.

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There's no complete Psalm said it. There's parts of four different Psalms and the first is Psalm 19. And all of a sudden myself unconsciously said. And she said to me, you're singing. What's going on? At the same time I got. I had been involved in doing yoga, breathing exercises for many years. Your breath will control your emotions in many ways. Anyway, because of that, I had this idea to bring that kind of thinking to the piece. One of the things that really keeps Music for at musicians constantly alive is the fact that the rhythm is really strict and is laid down by the percussion. Just like drummers on marimbas, on xylophones, on pianos, and at the same time, the clarinets. And sometimes imitating the pianos and the two clarinets, obviously, and the singers. And there are four singers. Take a deep breath and go start singing pulses as long. And it says in the score, as long as the breath can comfortably support you. That's the measure.

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Music for 18 musicians began as music for 21. But that's a lot of people. The number 18 has a special and specific meaning in Judaism.

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I kept thinking, we're going on tour, 21 musicians. That's a lot of airplane tickets. There's a lot of hotel rooms. J U double here. If you do that, you can get 18. And then later I thought to myself, there must be some significance to that. 18 in Hebrew is from Yud and Chet Yin, Chet Anchai, and that means life. So there was certainly a significance to it.

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One of the striking things about Music for 18 is that it has no conductor. The musicians have to work together, or in one man's case, accept the Herculean task of doing it alone.

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I'm Eric Hall. I'm a multi instrumentalist and composer in Michigan. In 2020, I released a solo interpretation of music for 18 musicians coming from the pop or indie rock world. At the time, I was very much in the culture of, like, well, sometimes you do a cover, and when you do a cover, you do it your own way and you use your own palette. You see how it turns out. And if it stands up, you know, My only goal was to play it faithfully, get the score, play it note for note, one part at a time, but to apply the score to the instruments that I have and can play and that are here in my studio. I realized over time that I really love music that takes a long time to unfold, of course, rhythmically. This is a piece that's very exciting to me and that really hits home harmonically. It's very rich and it's eventful. There's this programmatic arc and kind of this trip that you go on. But I think ultimately the thing that sets this particular piece apart is simply how it makes you feel, how it makes me feel. It has this emotional pull and emotional arc that you experience while listening, that like any great work, it just makes you feel so many things. And that's what drew me to it again and again when I first discovered it.

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Rice turns 90 this year, an occasion that will be celebrated around the world with a series of concerts and performances by some of his closest collaborators and biggest fans. As for the man himself, he's still working, still pushing the boundaries of what music can do.

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And as for what I will do in the future, I'm mulling over what I'm going to do. I hope to live to my 90th birthday and we'll take it from there.

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On standard measures of success, things like time spent in education or earnings as an adult, the eldest children tend to do better than their younger siblings.

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Ainsley Johnson is a data journalist for the Economist.

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So there's this effect where the eldest child often does the best, then the second born and the third born and so on like that. There's this stereotype that maybe this is because the eldest child is particularly responsible or conscientious, while the younger children are maybe more rebellious or free spirited. But actually, there's very little evidence that there are consistent personality differences depending on birth order. But a new study has pointed to the idea that maybe childhood illness might play a role in these effects.

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How? How does that figure in?

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So the study was conducted by researchers based across America, China and Denmark. So, as any parents of young children will know, these children, particularly when they're in nursery or preschool, will tend to pick up a lot of germs, a lot of illnesses. So the researchers had this idea that while those illnesses might be beneficial for those children, you know, it's good for their developing immune system. But the authors wondered whether these older children could be bringing these illnesses home and infecting their infant siblings while they were at a more sensitive period. So infecting them with germs that those children themselves were protected from at the same age. They used Danish administrative data and they found that this did seem to be the case. Younger siblings are hospitalised for respiratory illnesses at around two to three times higher rates than firstborn children are in their first year of life.

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And sorry, I'm still failing to see the connection. So what?

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So during your early life, this is a really sensitive period of development, particularly for the brain. So getting an illness in this time that can have both direct effects on the brain, so inflammation of the brain can be really detrimental to its development. Illnesses can also affect the brain indirectly. So if your body is fighting off some pathogen, it means it has to divert resources and energy away from brain development. So those are the two ways that they thought this might be working. And in fact, they did find that there was causal evidence for a link between early exposure to respiratory infections and earnings in adult life. They found that this exposure to illness could actually account for roughly half of this difference in earnings between older and younger children. And that was around a difference of around 2%.

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So you said that the illness data explained about half of the wage gap. What's the other half?

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So younger children always like to complain that the oldest kids get the most attention and they are actually right on that. So studies using time use data, there is one from America, for example, find that in general, older children get around 20 to 30 minutes more time with their parents per day across their childhood than younger children do. And the way that that works is a mixture of the fact that for a period of time the eldest child is the only child and gets 100% of their parents attention, but also that parents will often do this thing in an attempt at fairness where they'll divide their time equally between older and younger children. But what happens is as their children age, they need less attention. So it means that effectively, if you have a baby sibling, you're getting as much attention as that baby is when you're maybe three years old, when maybe you didn't need as much attention. And when that carries over throughout the whole lifespan, it means that the eldest child just gets a lot more attention overall. And spending time with adults is really important for boosting your brain power. Has shown that this kind of stimulation, adult conversation is just really, really important for brain development.

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Well, as an only child, I can definitely advocate a maximum of attention all the time. You got siblings?

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Yeah, I have two sisters and I am the eldest and I definitely got more attention.

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Are you outperforming them on life measures?

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I don't know about that.

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Ainsley, thanks very much for joining us.

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Thank you, Jason.

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That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

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