Micah Drew

FYI, we're making a patch to FLIPR in MT-Sen to reflect the weird nature of the race in Montana that we don't think FLIPR was handling quite right. I guess I'll just put this in one long tweet. Montana features a Republican (Kurt Alme), a Democrat (Alani Bankhead) and a Democratic-leaning independent (Seth Bodnar) who would presumably caucus with the Democrats. De facto, it should be handled more like Alaska, where there can be more than one candidate from the same party on the ballot and FLIPR adjusts for this in various ways. This has two major implications: 1. Bodnar and Bankhead's vote should tend to be inversely correlated. In other words, as he rises she'll fall, and vice versa. 2. The various adjustments FLIPR Classic and Deluxe make, i.e. for fundamentals and expert ratings, need to be shared between Bankhead and Bodnar as "co-Democrats" whereas before they were only being applied to Bankhead (and Alme). While #1 has somewhat ambiguous effects, change #2 will hurt Bodnar. FLIPR was confused why Bankhead was *so* far behind Alme, and therefore FLIPR Classic was adjusting her vote upward and Alme's downward as it applied the fundamentals while leaving Bodnar's vote unchanged. But the reason is that the D- and D-leaning vote is basically split between Bankhead and Bodnar, deflating her vote. With the patch, Bodnar's projected vote won't change much, but because Alme was too low (and Bankhead too high), he now has a higher target to aim at. We expect the race to shift from "Lean R" to "Likely R" as a result of the patch. It's definitely an interesting race and Bodnar has some chances and has been gaining in the polls, bringing him within striking distance, but the tightening polls mean Montana needed more scrutiny than back when Bodnar was way behind. We think this handling is more internally consistent with the precedent we'd already built for those multi-way Alaska races. We'll do a new run of FLIPR later tonight that reflects the update.