Hare and Rametta publish midterm election forecasting model in PS: Political Science & Politics

Associate Professor Christopher Hare and coauthor Jack T. Rametta (UC Davis PhD '25) have had their article, "How Model Choice Obscures Forecast Uncertainty: The Rashomon Effect and the 2026 Senate," accepted for publication in PS: Political Science & Politics. Their article will appear alongside other papers in a special issue focused on forecasting the 2026 midterm elections. Rametta and Hare examine an often-overlooked source of uncertainty in election forecasts: different models can predict past elections similarly well yet disagree about who will win the next one. Applying this approach to the 2026 U.S. Senate elections, the authors show that plausible models with similar historical performance produce substantially different probabilities of Democratic control. They argue that reporting this range alongside a single model's forecast would give readers a fuller picture of election uncertainty. A preprint of the paper is available at: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/e9kpv More information about their model is available at: https://jackrametta.com/senate-forecast/