A single Nevada poll shows NV-2 close; our forecast still does not

The only poll in NV-2 in our file is a Strategies 360 survey of 400 likely voters, fielded August 22-26, that put Republican Dave Flippo at 45 percent and Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson at 42 percent, with 7 percent for other candidates. A three-point gap on a sample that size is well inside the range of ordinary sampling error, so the poll is best read as showing a close race rather than a Flippo lead.

Our forecast reads the district very differently. As of September 8 at 8:03 AM ET, our model gives Flippo a greater than 99 in 100 chance and Benitez-Thompson under 1, with a mean margin of R+25.8 and a 5th-to-95th percentile range from R+41.5 to R+10.1. The Strategies 360 result sits outside that range. It did not move the numbers: our previous run, at 6:32 AM ET the same day, had the same win probabilities and the same mean margin, with the range shifting only from R+41.6 at the low end.

That gap is worth stating plainly. One 400-person poll carries limited weight against the other information in the model, and our published interval still treats a single-digit Republican margin as the optimistic tail for Democrats rather than the central case. If more NV-2 polling lands in the same place, the average would have more to work with. For now, the new number is one data point against a forecast that has not budged.

Nationally, our model gives Democrats a 93 percent chance of reaching the 218 seats needed for House control, with a mean of 239 Democratic seats, against 6 percent for Republicans. Our simulation correlates error nationally, by census division, by state and by district, but we have no data to correlate demographically similar districts across state lines. Without that term, our House control probability is marginally firmer than it should be.