2 November 2018 — 1427 mdt

FiveThirtyEight forecasts 2018 Montana turnout
will be slightly lower than turnout in 2006

FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts for the Montana elections for the U.S. Senate and House project a voting eligible population turnout that’s slightly less than in 2006, when a blue wave barely carried Sen. Jon Tester to victory but wasn’t enough to push Monica Lindeen past Denny Rehberg for the U.S. House.

A reminder: the voting eligible population is the voting age population minus foreign nationals, and legally disqualified classes such as felons still in the slammer. VEP data for Montana are contained in Flathead Memo’s Montana Turnout Spreadsheet (Excel).

FiveThirtyEight’s forecast assumes a ten percent falloff in votes cast from the U.S. Senate to the U.S. House elections. The election returns for 2006 and 2012 do not support that assumption.

This afternoon, the MT SecST’s website reported there are 705,079 registered voters. I suspect another 3,000 or so will register by the end of the election.