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Hey, good morning, Playbookers. I'm Rogum Winovalin. It's Thursday. We got some updates in our election forecast. Let's get to it. It's your Politico Playbook Daily Briefing.

We're a little less than two weeks out from Election Day, and that means crunch time for campaigns.

Steve Shepard, Politico's senior campaigns and elections editor, and among other things,

our chief elections forecaster, tracks pretty much every key race in the playbook newsletter

every day.

And he's here to talk about some recent shifts he's making in his forecast.

Steve, how's it going?

How old enough?

I'm doing okay.

I made the perhaps foolish decision to take a cross-country

trip this week to go see some of the campaign activity out in Arizona, obviously a huge state,

but at the perhaps the expense of my sleep schedule and otherwise bandwidth for doing all of this work in what you called crunch time.

So the first thing I want to ask you about are some of the rating shifts you came out with this

morning. What are some changes you've made in the forecast? Well, the biggest one is from that trip to

Arizona. I had moved back around Labor Day, the Arizona Senate race into our lean Democratic category.

Senator Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent, had a pretty solid lead over Republican

Blake Masters.

Blake Masters struggled coming out of that Republican primary, got Trump's endorsement,

but then had no money once he won the nomination, and Democrats did a great job at defining him as sort of out of the mainstream.

I've seen a lot of attacks on Masters for suggesting that we should privatize Social Security, all these sorts of things that went into that

ad campaign that largely went unanswered for a month, maybe even a month and a half.

...