FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 forecast features plenty of Primary guesswork

FiveThirtyEight recently updated its forecast for the 2022 elections and it looks like a red wave is coming.

Most of us knew that already — the political climate has been trending toward the GOP for months — but FiveThirtyEight’s model underscores just how big a beating Democrats are expected to take in November.

The broad strokes outlook is backed up by solid statistical modeling and passes the smell test. It’s clear that, as of today, Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio are cruising toward re-election. It’s also clear Florida’s U.S. House delegation will get redder.

But what’s not clear is who, specifically, will be in the delegation that heads to Washington in January. FiveThirtyEight must know something the rest of us don’t, because their forecast presumes to know the winners of Florida’s Primary Elections two months before polls close.

In some races, they made safe assumptions. They took some big leaps in others.

The most glaring is the race for Florida’s 15th Congressional District, where they anointed Rep. Jackie Toledo as the presumptive Republican nominee.

Toledo has all the ingredients needed to win the GOP nomination: she is running a competent campaign, she’s raising a decent amount of cash, she has solid name ID, and she has a political record that will play well among GOP voters. It wouldn’t be a shocker if she ends up becoming a Congresswoman.

But one could say the same about former Secretary of State Laurel Lee or Sen. Kelli Stargel.

Lee launched her campaign less than two months ago, but she has hit the ground running. She has already earned endorsements from Attorney General Ashley Moody and Jay Collins, a DeSantis-backed state Senate candidate, and a recent fundraiser invitation shows several other Republican leaders are backing her bid.

And though Demetries Grimes and Kevin McGovern are longshots, their presence on the Primary ballot means the eventual GOP nominee could win with less than a third of the vote.

FiveThirtyEight gets a lot of things right, but this is the type of assumption their detractors point to when they miss the mark.