I am a great believer in hope, and in the value of holding on to it even as the creeping sensation of doom approaches. Maybe I learned that as a Mets fan. So I am not here to crush your hopes for how tomorrow will go in the fight to control the Senate and stave off political process Armageddon in 2029–30. But the tidings are not good. You can catch up in my prior posts on my metric for organizing and analyzing the RealClearPolitics poll averages. The short summary:

Each election cycle since the 2014 midterms, I’ve used a metric for tracking statewide races for the Senate and the governorships that I’ve come to call the Breakers. This isn’t a predictive model, just some simple algebra applied to the RealClearPolitics poll averages over time to track where these races are headed and what the Republicans need to win each one. . . . For the polling averages, I look at the RealClearPolitics average for each race with particular attention to how far each candidate is from the magic 50 percent mark and what share of the remaining undecided vote would need to break in the Republican candidate’s direction to get to 50. (Or to 50 percent of the two-party vote, if there are third-party candidates being polled.) I typically flag how robust the data are for each race — how many polls make up each state’s average, and how many of those are relatively recent. I’m not making mathematical predictions or odds. I’m just collecting the data we have in one place, asking how much........

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