As I’d been suggesting, the early response that Trump did well in the debate should show up in the first few days’ polling done afterwards, but if that glow really did fade quickly, by the time we got to polls that were taken entirely after Sunday night, we’d probably see the full effect of the debate move, if any, Friday or Saturday, and then head back to a more steady-state after that. The PEC meta-margin, which opened up to 5% based on the final pre-debate numbers, has since closed back up again to 4.7% yesterday and 4.4% today, even though the Clinton win percentage has not moved and their Senate takeover probability has expanded to 67%.

Now, I think any of us who have studied statistics (and that Silver fellow) know that 67% is relatively meaningless, but there’s a directional trend there that is potentially big news for Democrats.

The generic R-D polls that are a proxy for House control appear to have flattened at just over D+5; with the current state of Congressional districting, Sam Wang does not believe that’s nearly enough to wrest control of that body–his calculations, at least until the next redistricting before the 2022 elections, suggest that a D+8 overall tally would be needed to flip the house. So, unless Speaker Ryan is defenestrated by a crowd of pitchfork-wielding Trump supporters, it’s probably reasonable to expect him to hang on both to his own seat, and the big chair on the platform. And that he’ll throw his presidential hat in the ring in 2020, before redistricting runs a goodish shot of making him House Minority Leader, depending on how the first term of a Clinton administration progresses, and assuming there will be a second.

Let’s revisit this every day for the next few.

Source: Princeton Election Consortium — A first draft of electoral history. Since 2004