Ohio Senate estimate moves toward Husted, with Brown at 41 in 100

Our model now gives Sherrod Brown a 41 in 100 chance of winning the Ohio Senate special election, against 59 percent for Republican Jon Husted, the incumbent. That is a shift of 14.5 points of Democratic win probability since our run on August 31, when Brown stood at 56 percent and Husted at 44 percent. The move covers seven days.

The central estimate moved with it. Our model's mean margin was D+1.0 last week; it is R+1.3 now. The uncertainty around that number remains wide in both runs. Our current 5th-to-95th percentile range spans R+11.5 to D+8.9, against R+9.6 to D+11.7 a week ago. On those numbers the race is close, and either candidate winning by several points is well inside what our model treats as ordinary.

We have no new Ohio polling in this run's inputs. No survey is available to us that would account for the change, so we are not going to attribute it to one. The model moved, and the cause is not something this payload establishes.

Ohio sits inside a Senate map our model still rates as more favorable to Republicans than Democrats. We give Democrats a 43 percent chance of winning Senate control and Republicans 56 percent, with a mean of 49.9 Democratic seats. Democrats need 51 seats for control and Republicans need 50, because the vice president is a Republican and a 50-50 tie goes to the Republicans. Our national generic-ballot average, drawn from 24 polls over the past 45 days, is D+6.2. In the House, we give Democrats a 93 percent chance of a majority, with a mean of 239 seats against the 218 needed.