What this is

A work in progress from the team at Policy y Peaches. Its foundation is a set of weighted polling averages — polls are weighted by a hybrid pollster-quality score and recency, as of the date stamped on each page. On top of that foundation, the Senate Forecast page runs a probabilistic simulation of chamber control and compares the result against prediction-market prices. The shaded bands on the charts are confidence intervals around the polling average.

The three trackers

• Presidential approval — weighted average of job-approval polls, with a daily trend and CI band.
• Generic ballot — weighted average of the national D-vs-R congressional preference, reported as a margin. The “estimated seats” figure is a directional translation from a historical slope.
• Senate — per-race weighted polling averages. Click any race card to chart how our win probability for that race has moved over time. Chamber-wide win probabilities live on the Senate Forecast page.

Comparison & nowcast layers

• Model comparison (homepage) — our approval average shown alongside Silver Bulletin’s published model, an unweighted VoteHub poll average, and 50+1 when available. Each line is that source’s own output; we don’t blend them.
• NYT vibes adjustment (Senate) — an experimental, bounded (±3 pt) overlay on the base race average derived from sentiment-scored New York Times coverage. Full explainer on the Senate page. Off by default.
• Senate control simulation — 50,000 Monte Carlo simulations of the key races with correlated national polling error, optionally blending Polymarket/Kalshi implied odds at a tunable weight. It shows where the chamber stands today given current polling and market prices.

Data & refresh

Polling data is refreshed by a scheduled job that runs the model pipeline twice a day and publishes static JSON — including the hierarchical state-space estimates (house-effect-corrected approval and generic ballot). If a primary feed stops delivering new polls for more than 72 hours, the pipeline tops it up from Wikipedia’s national polling tables and flags the feed below.

Pipeline last run Aug 4, 2026, 11:07 PM. “Most recent poll” is the newest survey in each feed — if those dates start drifting behind today, the upstream polling sources need a refresh. Reminder to the team: keep the source CSVs current.