Yeah, I … hmmmm.

“In 2016 when we went in that final day, everybody was predicting gloom and doom,” Rubio recalled during a campaign event for Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis. “They didn’t realize how many people out there were waiting for Election Day.”

He said people went to the polls in person because they were so excited to vote that year.

“Forget about a blue wave,” Rubio added. “A red wave of votes started coming in. That’s what’s gonna happen again now.”

“But we have to make sure it happens,” he said. “That’s what we have to do now. Today is about making sure that everyone turns out and votes.”

It’s true that 2018 is like 2016 in the sense that Democrats, not Republicans, are the side that’s likelier to have a big day. But that’s not uniformly true: Republicans are about as heavily favored to hold the Senate as Dems are to take the House. And it’s not true that the odds Trump faced in 2016 are as steep as the GOP is facing right now (in the House). Analysts were all over the board in 2016, with some giving Clinton a 99 percent(!) chance of winning, but FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast placed Trump’s chances of victory on the eve of the election at better than one in four. Republicans’ odds of holding the House right now are less than half of that. Also:

The big difference between this year and 2016 is that a normal-sized (2-3 point) polling error might NOT be enough for Democrats to win the Senate or Republicans to win the House, respectively. It would make them close, however.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2018

My point is just—nobody is really going out on a limb. Or if we are, it's the same limb. People working independently from one another, looking at the district-by-district map in rigorous ways, are coming up with pretty similar answers to one another, much more so than in 2016.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2018

Why are the House odds so daunting for Republicans this year? For the same reason that Senate odds are so daunting for Democrats: Each is fighting mostly on turf they already hold, so even if they only lose “a few” battles, they’re losing ground. More from Silver:

But why is it so hard for Republicans to win the House without a systematic polling miss? The short answer is because they’re defending too much territory: The House playing field is exceptionally broad this year, because of Republican retirements, an influx of Democratic cash and other factors. The decisive race won’t necessarily be in a toss-up district; it could very easily be in a “likely Republican” district where a GOP incumbent is caught sleeping at the wheel (perhaps a district where there hasn’t been much polling)…

Democrats are underdogs in most of these districts individually, but they’re overwhelming favorites to win some of these districts or others like them on the list — unless the polls were wrong all along and were exaggerating the potential for a “blue wave.”

Realistically, the only way to hold Democrats to “only” 20 or so pick-ups is if all of the polls have been underestimating Republican turnout nationally by a few points, a “systematic polling miss,” as Silver calls it. Missing in a few key Rust Belt states won’t do it. It has to happen across the map — a true red wave, as Rubio says. And it had better start in his own home state, because the polling over the last week has not been encouraging. Ron DeSantis is in real trouble:

And suddenly so is Rick Scott:

Apart from a brief dip at the start of October, during the height of the Kavanaughpocalypse, the Democrats’ generic-ballot lead has been rock solid at around 7.5 points, not a world-beating number but certainly one that argues very strongly against a red wave. Rubio knows, though, that he’ll never be faulted for a bad prediction that’s overly optimistic for his side, only for one that’s overly pessimistic. And he knows what DeSantis’s numbers look like right now. If he’s thinking about an out-of-nowhere red wave, it’s because that’s the only scenario left on the table that’ll deliver a GOP win for governor in Florida. Never mind that the last-minute numbers in national races are tilting the other way:

Democrats gained by more than 3 pts in our final polls over our initial ones, and this individual-level analysis indicates that's not merely because of identifiable changes in the composition of the sample, like more Dems https://t.co/zv2PSu8neT

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 5, 2018

In lieu of an exit question I’ll leave you with this link. Keep hope alive!