UNH poll puts Goodlander up 21 in NH-2, nudging our margin higher

A University of New Hampshire survey of 694 likely voters, fielded September 17-21, has Democratic Rep. Maggie Goodlander at 56 percent and Republican Lily Tang Williams at 35 percent in New Hampshire's 2nd District, with an independent candidate at 3 percent.

That is a wider margin than our model carried into the day, and it moved the numbers slightly. Our forecast now gives Goodlander a 98 in 100 chance of winning the seat, with a mean margin of 18.0 points and a 5th-to-95th percentile range running from Goodlander by 3.5 to Goodlander by 32.8. The run before this poll had her at a 97 percent chance and a mean margin of 16.8 points, with a range of 2.1 to 31.5.

So the direction is the same as it was in our two earlier write-ups of district polling here, and the size of the change is small: one percentage point of win probability and a little over a point of expected margin. The new data mainly firms up what was already in the average rather than rearranging it.

Nationally, our average on the generic ballot stands at D+8.3 across 30 polls from the last 45 days. Our model puts the Democratic chance of winning House control at 98 percent, with a mean of 245.7 Democratic seats against the 218 needed for a majority, and the Republican chance at 2 percent. One caveat on that figure is ours: our simulation correlates error nationally, by census division, by state and within each district, but we have no data to correlate demographically similar districts across state lines. Without that term, the House control number is marginally firmer than a fuller model would make it. In the Senate, our model gives Democrats a 52 percent chance of control and Republicans 47 percent, with a mean of 50.5 Democratic seats; Democrats need 51 seats, Republicans 50, because the vice president is a Republican and a 50-50 tie goes to the Republicans.