St. Pete Polls finds Florida Senate race within a point as our model moves to 37 in 100

A St. Pete Polls survey of 913 likely voters in Florida, sponsored by Florida Politics and fielded September 15-17, put Republican incumbent Ashley Moody at 45.2 percent and the Democrat at 44.8 percent. That is a four-tenths-of-a-point gap. The race is close in this poll; neither candidate is ahead of the other in any meaningful sense.

Our model now gives the Democrat a 37 in 100 chance of winning the seat, with the Republican at 63 percent. Before this run, at 8:32 AM ET today, those numbers were 29 percent and 71 percent. The mean margin moved from R+3.3 to R+1.9, and the 5th-to-95th percentile range narrowed slightly, from R+13.1 to D+6.4 to a span of R+11.7 to D+7.8. So this is a change rather than a confirmation: one survey closer than what our average had been carrying moved the estimate several points, and the race remains one our model leans Republican.

The wide range is the more important number. Our simulations still produce outcomes from a double-digit Republican win to a mid-single-digit Democratic one, 46 days from the November 3 election.

Nationally, our average of 28 generic-ballot polls over the past 45 days stands at D+7.4. In the Senate, our model gives Democrats a 52 percent chance of winning control and Republicans 47 percent, with a mean of 50.5 Democratic seats; Democrats need 51 seats and Republicans 50, because the vice president is a Republican and a 50-50 tie goes to the Republicans. Florida is one of the seats that sits inside that margin. In the House, our model gives Democrats a 97 percent chance of a majority, with a mean of 243.1 seats against the 218 needed. That House figure is marginally firmer than we would like: our simulation correlates error nationally, by census division, by state and by district, but we have no cluster data to correlate demographically similar districts across state lines, so some shared error is unmodeled.