Final Update: Republicans Have A 3 In 4 Chance Of Winning The Senate & The Most Reliable Guide To Campaign 2014? History 4NOV14

HERE'S fivethityeight.com's Nate Silver's final projection for the US Senate followed by an article from +NPR on the history of mid term elections.....

Final Update: Republicans Have A 3 In 4 Chance Of Winning The Senate

By Nate Silver

After two months of forecasting, it comes down to this: Republicans are favored to win the Senate. Their chances of doing so are 76 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast, which is principally based on an analysis of the polls in each state and the historical accuracy of Senate polling.
But they are not necessarily favored to have the race “called” for them on Tuesday night. Because of a variety of circumstances like possible runoffs in Georgia and Louisiana and the potential decision of Kansas independent Greg Orman about which party he chooses to caucus with, the outcome of the Senate may not be determined until days or weeks from now. The forecast refers only to the probability that Republicans will eventually claim control of the Senate by the time it convenes in January.
Still, for Republicans, it would be worth the wait after failed attempts to win the Senate in 2010 and 2012. They’ve been modest favorites in the FiveThirtyEight forecast all year, in part because the national environment is favorable for them: the group of states holding key Senate elections lean red; several Democratic incumbents have retired and the others were last elected in 2008, a high-water mark for the Democratic party; President Obama is unpopular and midterm elections have a long history of being challenging for the president’s party.
Unlike in 2010 or 2012, however, the polls have moved toward Republicans in the closing days of the campaign — making their position more robust. The movement has been clearest in states like Kentucky, Arkansas and Georgia that typically vote Republican, suggesting the election may be converging toward the “fundamentals” of each state.

Difficult Math For Democrats, But Uncertainty About Poll Accuracy

The uncertainty in the forecast is fairly high. Compared to Republicans’ roughly 75 percent chance, President Obama had about a 90 percent chance of being reelected in 2012, while Democrats had a 95 percent chance of keeping the Senate that year, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. And Republicans had about an 85 percent chance of winning the House on Election Day in 2010.
For Democrats to make good on their 25 percent chance of keeping the Senate, they would need to win two or three races where they are underdogs according to the polls. Nevertheless, the GOP’s advantage is narrow in many states. Furthermore, polls in midterms and other elections have sometimes proved to have a systematic bias, overestimating the performance of one or the other party in most or all competitive races. If the polls underrate Democrats, they could win.
The uncertainty runs in both directions, however. Historically, the polls have been just as likely to be biased toward Democrats as they are to be biased toward Republicans. If Republicans beat their polls, they could win North Carolina and New Hampshire, which only narrowly favor Democrats, and finish with as many as 55 Senate seats — a potential 10-seat swing.
It has sometimes been hard this cycle to place the states into neat groupings. Republicans need to win a net of six seats from Democrats. But at least three of these — Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia — are all but guaranteed Republican pickups, while a fourth, Arkansas, has become increasingly certain. On the other hand, Republicans could easily lose Georgia and Kansas, meaning that they’d need to win a gross of seven or eight Democratic seats to finish with a net of six.
The battle will mostly be concentrated in the eight states which neither party has established more than a 95 percent probability of winning. These are Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire and North Carolina. Other states — particularly Arkansas, Kentucky and Michigan — were once competitive but would now require pronounced polling errors for the trailing candidate to win.
Still, eight is a large number of competitive states. The good news for Republicans is that they’ll win the Senate if they split them 4-4. The better news is that the forecast favors Republicans in five of them — Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa and Louisiana — while it gives even odds in a sixth, Kansas. Only New Hampshire and North Carolina favor Democrats. The math is not impossible for Democrats — but it’s difficult.

That may be why some Democrats have begun to hope the polls are “skewed” against them.
Indeed, the FiveThirtyEight model accounts for the possibility that the polls could have an overall bias toward one party. But suppose they do not. In the final set of simulations we ran, Democrats won just 14 percent of the time when the overall bias in the polls was less than one point in either direction. This represents what we’ve called the “squeaker” scenario — Democrats eke out victories in just enough of the competitive states to win, even though the polls do a reasonably good job overall.
The Democrats’ alternative is the “shocker” scenario — the case where the polls do prove to be skewed against them. In the simulations where the polls had at least a 1-point Republican bias, Democrats won the Senate 61 percent of the time. (As should be obvious, Democrats will have no chance at all if the polls prove to have a Democratic bias; instead, Republicans will finish with something like 54 seats.) At this point, most of the Democrats’ 24 percent overall win probability comes from the “shocker” scenario. Their situation is not as bad as Mitt Romney’s was in 2012, but their chances are slim if the polls are basically telling the right story.

Forecasting Models Largely Agree

Although the polls could be wrong, there isn’t much disagreement about what they’re saying. Of the seven forecasting models tracked by The New York Times, all point to a Republican win, and most with about the same probability (75 percent) as FiveThirtyEight’s forecast. Furthermore, they agree on the outcome of all states but Kansas. These include models that rely on polls alone and those like FiveThirtyEight’s that account for polls along with other factors.
Those other factors — the so-called “fundamentals” — have tended to converge with the polls over the course of the year. If used properly, they can make a forecast more stable and reduce the statistical noise associated with polling. But they make little difference now, since even those models that once used the fundamentals no longer weigh them heavily. The modest exceptions are in Kansas and Alaska, where the polling has been sparse and (especially in Alaska’s case) potentially unreliable; the FiveThirtyEight model sees the fundamentals as favoring Republicans in each state. But it would still have Republicans favored on the basis of the polls alone in Alaska. And in Kansas, the fundamentals are not enough to make Republican Pat Roberts the favorite.

Expect A Long Night — Unless Republicans Get A Big Win Early

Even if Republicans win, the outcome may not be determined quickly. David Perdue, their candidate in Georgia, has gained in the polls — but the model still has the race going to a runoff about half the time. Louisiana will almost certainly require a runoff. Alaska’s vote may take days or weeks to count, as it has in the past. The FiveThirtyEight model — even with its optimistic forecast for Republicans overall — estimates there’s just a one in three chance that the election will be called for them on Tuesday night or early in the day on Wednesday. For Democrats, meanwhile, there’s almost no chance to win without going to “overtime;” the party will hope to extend the race for as long as possible.
There are two Republican wins, however, that could end the race quickly. Pay attention to races in North Carolina and New Hampshire. Both states have early poll-closing times (7:30 EST for North Carolina and 8:00 EST for New Hampshire) and a Republican win in either state would require Democrats to run the table in almost every other competitive race. But Republican wins would simultaneously indicate that the polls might be biased toward Democrats rather than against them, making a Democratic sweep the rest of the night very unlikely.
Although this represents FiveThirtyEight’s pre-election forecast, we’ll be tracking the elections for as long as it takes on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. That will include live updates of our forecast as our partners at ABC News project the winners of various states. We’ve appreciated your readership this election cycle and we hope you’ll join us tonight for our liveblog coverage as the results come in. It should be a fun one.

Nate Silver @natesilver538

Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.

The Most Reliable Guide To Campaign 2014? History

November 04, 201411:56 AM ET

Ron Elving

Then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas was all smiles after Republicans took over the Senate in an eight-seat rout in 1994.

John Duricka/AP

Still wondering where to put your money on the Senate races tonight?
There's been a lot of contradictory data flying around in the final hours and days of Campaign 2014, so don't feel alone. You can find polls in swing states that say the races are too close to call, and you can find others that show the Republican candidate opening a lead. You can, of course, listen to the party advocates and pundits, but while highly expert they are always pushing a given point of view.
So if you want a reliable guide to the outcomes on the Big Board this year, you will be best served by looking to history. A few salient facts from the recent and not-so-recent past are your best guide.

• The first historical rule is this: President Obama is midway through his second elected term, which means that if his party controls the Senate (as Obama's does), it will likely lose its majority status in this midterm. This has been true for every president we have re-elected since World War II, regardless of party.
• The last four presidents who served two full terms — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower — all had to deal with a Senate controlled by the opposition party in their last two years in office. Reagan, though popular in the fall of 1986 and actively campaigning for GOP incumbents, still lost eight seats and Senate control to the Democrats that November.
• The second historical rule is like unto the first. This is the sixth year the president's party has been in power, which means it stands to suffer substantial losses in the Senate whether it is the majority party or not. This has been true for both chief executives from both parties, and it applied even to the legendary Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose Democrats suffered terrible losses in both House and Senate in 1938.
• Overall, the average Senate loss in a midterm for the president's party is four seats over the last 80 years. In sixth-year midterms, it is substantially higher. This includes the sixth year of the JFK-LBJ presidency (1966) and the sixth year of the Nixon-Ford regime (1974).
• The one exception to the six-year rule? Bill Clinton in 1998, who had already lost control of the Senate in an eight-seat rout in 1994. Clinton in the fall of 1998 was embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and about to be impeached by the House. But the economy was going great guns and the country did not share the House GOP's enthusiasm for impeachment. Clinton was in fact above 60 percent in the Gallup Poll, far more popular than he was for his first midterm.
• In the last five elections that saw control of the Senate shift from one party to the other, the new majority party picked up an average of roughly seven seats, net. If you eliminate the high end (12 seats in 1980) and the low end (two seats in 2002) of this scale, you still get an average of about seven seats net. This year, a seven-seat net gain would be just enough to give the GOP control (plus one seat for insurance).
• In most election years, the Senate race outcomes do not divide equally between the parties. Typically, the party that gains seats wins all or nearly all the close races, protecting its own while capturing seats from the other side. In 2010, Republicans triumphed around the country without losing any of their incumbents. In 2006 and 2008, Democrats protected all their incumbents without a loss.

Expect the Unexpected: 5 U.S. Senate Races Where the National Media Is Probably Misreading Polls & Democrats Need Chaos & One Day Left: The Most Competitive Races For Governor 3NOV14

MAINSTREAM media pundits may be pushing the gop / tea-bagger win in this election, but then there is this to consider from +AlterNet. Maybe the Democratic GOTV ground game will surprise everyone, or maybe it will all be for naught because with everyone calling for the gop / tea-baggers to take the Senate Democratic voters will just get discouraged and just stay home. I hope not, and we will know by tomorrow night just how much Steven Rosenfeld knows about American politics compared to +FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver.....

Expect the Unexpected: 5 U.S. Senate Races Where the National Media Is Probably Misreading Polls

If you live in one of these states, your vote really counts.

Photo Credit: http://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/

November 3, 2014  |  

 

The time has come in 2014’s midterm elections to stop looking at polls and start looking at actual voter turnout figures—from absentee ballots already mailed in to early in-person voting. Those preliminary results reveal that many tightly contested U.S. Senate races are far too close to call.
National outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post are predicting that Republicans will emerge with a Senate majority once all the ballots are counted. But one of the nation’s best-respected voter-turnout experts, Michael P. McDonald of the University of Florida, says not so fast—and explains why.
In key states where the national media has reported that Republican Senate candidates have an early lead—such as in Iowa and Colorado—the momentum is now shifting to Democrat voters, McDonald said, in a detailed analysis that essentially said that Republicans have been voting earlier than Democrats but are seeing their numbers eroded by the escalating Democratic turnout.
“The Republican sweep screaming in the headlines is overblown,” he wrote. “Senate control is up for grabs and Democrats have a decent chance to defy the polls. I expect that the election will be so close that we won’t know who won until all ballots are counted and the vote is certified several days following the election, not to mention highly probable run-off elections in Georgia and Louisiana.”
Let’s go through some of the key states and compare what McDonald is adding to the mainstream media analysis, as typified in Associated Press reports.
Iowa
The AP says that both parties have increased their early voting turnout from 2010, with more Republicans voting early than Democrats—21,200 to 8,500. That boosts confidence in the GOP Senate nominee, Joni Ernst. McDonald said that as of last Thursday, there were 367,000 mail-in ballots that had been returned, leaving 111,000 still out there. Iowa also is an Election Day registration state, where people can decide to go vote at the last minute and do so.
“There are two reasons why Iowa may end in overtime,” he said. “First, there are the unreturned mail ballots. The number of outstanding ballots will decrease by Election Day, but there will still likely be thousands of ballots in the mail when the vote is tabulated on election night. If the election margin is within a few thousand votes, the media may not call the election pending the disposition of these ballots.”
In other words, Ernst’s perceived early lead is going to keep shrinking. Whether that enables Democratic Congressman Bruce Braley to win is an open question. But if the margin is under 1,000 votes, you can expect a tough legal fight over qualifying provisional ballots and possibly Election Day registrants.
Colorado
Colorado has a new voting system that the national media doesn’t quite understand. Before this year’s election, the state identified all legal eligible voters and encouraged them to register, and it also sent mail-in ballots to every registered voter. As in Iowa, Republicans have always been more organized than Democrats with getting their absentee ballot voters to mail them in. The AP and other have noted that registered Republicans have an 9-point lead over registered Democrats in returned ballots, concluding that Democratic Sen. Mark Udall is headed to defeat.

McDonald, again, says not so fast, noting that independent voters—not affiliated with either party—are only just beginning to mail in their ballots. “It is common to see unaffiliated voters turn their ballots in later than party affiliated voters, who tend to be the most committed to their candidates and thus most comfortable about voting earliest,” he said. “At the very least, the margin between Democrats and Republicans will diminish as more unaffiliated voters return ballots.”

Colorado also is an Election Day registration state, he noted. “Unregistered people who might take advantage of Election Day registration tend to be younger, persons of color, poorer, and less educated, i.e., Democrats.”
Lousiana
The bottom line in Louisiana is that the state’s U.S. Senate race is likely headed for a runoff election in the first week of January, 2015, because there’s a crowded field and nobody is expected to get more than 50 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, in early in-person voting, registered Democrats are turning out in much higher numbers than in previous federal cycles.
“Registered Democrats are up 117 percent compared to 54 percent for Republicans,” McDonald said. “Those Democrats are not just old school Southern Democrats who have yet to change their party registration. African-American turnout is up 196 percent compared to Whites' 64 percent.”
The AP has reported that polls suggest Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu will need a huge African-American turnout to be re-elected, but national pundits often forget that she has twice won Senate elections in runoffs—in 1996 and 2002.
Georgia
Georgia voters don’t register by political party, but the state tracks voting by race. So far, the national media has reported that African-Americans have accounted for about a third of the early votes, which is much higher than the 2010 midterms and the 2012 presidential election. The conventional wisdom is that Democrat Michelle Nunn would need more support from communities of color to capture an open Senate seat over Republican David Perdue, and they point to a Tea Party wave in the state in 2010 and Mitt Romney beating President Obama by almost 8 points two years later.
However, there is a wild card in this race—a Libertarian candidate who is getting a few percentage points in pre-election polls. “The unknown is how much Whiter will the Election Day electorate be? This is the crux of the polling,” McDonald said. “My best guess is that this election goes to a runoff.”
That means there is a second U.S. Senate that might not be settled, in this case, until mid-December when Georgia would hold that special election.
North Carolina
This is a state where Democrats are seen as having gained an advantage in early voting—despite many new voter laws written by Republicans that have made the process more bureaucratic and are seen as barriers to first-time voters. As of last Saturday, 1.15 million residents had cast ballots by early in-person voting or by mail, and the number of registered Democrats was 15.7 percent higher than registered Republicans. That spread is likely to shrink, McDonald said, noting that there’s also a Libertarian in the U.S. Senate race drawing about 4 percent in polls. The bottom line here is the winner might not be known for days.
That’s because apart from in-person voting at Tuesday’s polling places, the state will keep accepting mail-in ballots until Friday, McDonald noted. Also, there are still 35,000 absentee ballots that haven’t arrived, and the state has a history of disqualifying large numbers of provisional ballots—those given to people lacking the required forms of voter ID or who are not listed in poll books.
“In 2010, North Carolina accepted 15,964 and rejected 10,563 provisional ballots,” McDonald wrote. “The number of rejected provisional ballots may be higher since the state no longer allows voters who cast a ballot outside of their home precinct.” In short, he predicts this Senate race will go into “overtime.”   

Democrats Need Chaos

8:22 PM By Nate Silver

Democratic Senate candidate Bruce Braley holds a copy of the “Dewey Defeats Truman” photo as he speaks to supporters during a campaign stop Monday in Ottumwa, Iowa.

Charlie Neibergall / AP

Democrats are down to about a 25 percent chance to retain the Senate, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight forecast. A 25 percent chance isn’t nothing. The average National League hitter hit about .250 last year.
But what would a Democratic Senate win look like? Harry Enten and I pondered that question earlier. There are two basic scenarios.
First, Democrats could win in a squeaker. If the races behave more or less independently from one another, Democrats could keep the Senate by narrowly winning a number of states where they are only modest underdogs in the polls.
Alternatively, the Democrats could win in a shocker, with the polls proving to have a systematic bias against them. These things happen, although — as we’ve emphasized repeatedly — the polls have just as often had a systematic bias against Republicans.
We’ll consider the “squeaker” vs. “shocker” distinction in more depth in our final Senate update early Tuesday morning. But there’s another thing that would characterize a Democratic win. It would, very probably, require some electoral chaos.
We’ve talked before about the strong possibility the Senate’s outcome will not be determined on Tuesday or even by later this week. Instead, resolution may require one or more forms of “overtime”: Greg Orman deciding who to caucus with if he wins in Kansas, runoffs in Georgia or Louisiana, a slow vote count in Alaska and possibly one or more recounts.
Even as Republicans have consolidated their overall position in the polls, overtime remains more likely than not. While our model gives Republicans a 75 percent chance of winning, it shows only a 30 to 35 percent chance that a Republican victory would be called by midday Wednesday.
But if Democrats win, it will almost certainly require overtime. We show just a 5 percent chance the election will be called for them on Tuesday or early Wednsday.
Let’s do some arithmetic. (You can follow along on the ‘math’ tab on our Senate interactive.) Democrats need 50 seats. They start with the 34 they’re holding over from the current Senate. In another 11 states, they’re at least 95 percent likely to win according to our model; that gets them to 45.
Let’s also give Democrats North Carolina and New Hampshire, where they’re narrowly ahead in the polls. Democrats aren’t certain to win these, but if they don’t, all of this math won’t matter. These are must-win states for Democrats; in our simulations, they lost the Senate 98 percent of the time they lost New Hampshire and 97 percent of the time they lost North Carolina.
That gets Democrats to 47 seats. They need three more.
Iowa and Colorado are their next best choices if they want to avoid chaos. Although there have been disputes about where the polls stand in those states, the circumstances in Iowa and Colorado are otherwise normal — no runoffs, no major third-party candidates. They’ll be called on Tuesday or early Wednesday morning unless they’re so close as to be in recount territory.
That gets Democrats to 49 seats. They need just one more, and here’s where they run out of good options.
Mark Begich could win in Alaska. But that’s one of our chaos states. In the past two Senate races there, the outcome took 15 days to call. Begich would not only have to win, he’d have to win by a definitive margin — and that’s unlikely.
Kansas? If Orman wins, it’s a chaos state.
Georgia? It’s a chaos state unless one candidate gets past 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff. The Republican David Perdue is close to 50 percent in some polls, and he could easily cross that threshold. But a winning majority in Georgia on Nov. 4 has become a real long shot for Democrat Michelle Nunn. At this point, she’s probably hoping to facilitate a runoff and take her chances later on.
Louisiana? Chaos state. Democratic chances of holding the Senate have become grim enough that they might have to count on Sen. Mary Landrieu to pull through. But Landrieu is even more likely than Nunn to require a runoff; our model now gives Landrieu less than a 2 percent chance of winning an outright majority on Tuesday.
Arkansas? Kentucky? They aren’t chaos states, but the polls have broken against Democrats in both states, and there’s no time left to make up ground. Our forecast gives Sen. Mark Pryor just a 6 percent chance of winning in Arkansas and Alison Lundergan Grimes just a 3 percent chance in Kentucky.
So Democrats are very unlikely to win a “clean” victory on Tuesday or Wednesday. The messier things get and the longer they take to resolve, the better their chances.
Of course, Democrats have benefited from a little chaos before. After the 2008 elections, they gained a 60-seat super majority in the Senate only after Al Franken won a lengthy recount in Minnesota and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched parties. In 2001, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont defected from the GOP and began caucusing with Democrats, giving them majority control.
If Democrats do hold the Senate, it is likely to be very narrowly — probably either 50-50 or 51-49, counting two to three independents and Vice President Biden’s tie breaking vote. But as the Jeffords example proves, a 50-50 or 51-49 majority in the Senate is not so safe: Any party switch or any special election can potentially flip it.
A chaotic Democratic win — or a chaotic Republican one — could beget more chaos later on.

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Nate Silver @natesilver538

Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.

One Day Left: The Most Competitive Races For Governor

By Harry Enten

With the election just a day away, FiveThirtyEight is projecting Democrats and independents to gain a net of three governorships. But an unusual number of races are quite competitive; in nine states, the trailing candidate has at least a 20 percent chance of winning, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecasts. Five races are 61-39 or closer — compared to just one such race in our Senate forecast.

Let’s look at some of the closer races. We’ll go by region, from north to south and from east to west. The forecasts are based on polls through Sunday night; we’ll capture any polls released Monday in an update Tuesday.

New England

The Maine race revolves around two-and-a-half candidates. Independent Eliot Cutler, who has been lagging in the polls, told his supporters they could back another candidate if they choose. He stopped airing some of his ads, and one of Cutler’s big supporters, independent Sen. Angus King, is now backing Democrat Mike Michaud.
You might think Cutler’s decision would sink Republican Gov. Paul LePage’s re-election. LePage snuck by four years ago when liberals split their vote between Cutler and Democrat Libby Mitchell. The result has been something of a mismatch: a conservative Republican in blue Maine. The state has elected Republicans before — for years both its senators were Republicans, and one still is — but typically it elects moderates. LePage is much more conservative than Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins, for instance, according to OnTheIssues.org. And LePage has been more unpopular than popular for most of his term.
But Cutler hasn’t dropped out of the race, and not all of his votes will go to Michaud. FiveThirtyEight is estimating that he’ll get half as many votes as he would had he not semi-dropped out. With LePage winning a greater share of Republicans than Michaud is Democrats, Michaud is only a 57 percent favorite.
In Massachusetts, Republican Charlie Baker has an 86 percent chance to defeat Democrat Martha Coakley. Yes, this is the same Coakley who lost to Scott Brown in the special Senate election in 2010. Whether Coakley blew this race is an open question. Her favorable rating — 42 percent favorable vs. 47 percent unfavorable, according to the most recent Western New England University (WNEU) poll — didn’t help.
What cannot be debated is that Massachusetts has a history of electing relatively moderate Republicans as a check on its liberal legislature. Before Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick was elected in 2006, there hadn’t been a Democrat elected governor of Massachusetts since Michael Dukakis in 1986.
Baker has run a fairly good campaign. He has spent a ton of money on television and is well liked by Massachusetts’s voters. In the WNEU survey, Baker’s favorable rating was 52 percent compared to an unfavorable rating of just 27 percent. That’s great for any politician in any state these days.
Next up: Rhode Island, where the picture is a lot less clear. FiveThirtyEight has Democrat Gina Raimondo as a 75 percent favorite because she has led Republican Allan Fung in every poll taken of the race, but there have been very few public polls conducted compared to other competitive races. The last live telephone poll by Brown University had Raimondo ahead 38 percent to 37.4 percent for Fung, with independent Bob Healey at 11.8 percent.
While it would be easy to assume the Democrat can’t lose in Rhode Island given Democrats’ dominance of the state in presidential elections, it’s important to realize how unique Rhode Island’s politics are. It is the least polarized state in the union with plenty of liberal Republicans (think Lincoln Chafee) and conservative Democrats. No Democrat has been elected governor since 1992.
Raimondo is seen as a moderate. She has failed to pull together the Democratic base after a hard-fought primary. She is winning 26 percentage points less of the Democratic base than Fung is winning of the Republican base. Raimondo has also been outspent in the general election. Raimondo is the favorite, but it’s easy seeing either of these candidates winning.
Wrapping up our tour of New England, the Connecticut gubernatorial race is perhaps the closest in the country. FiveThirtyEight has Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy with a 56 percent chance of holding off Republican Tom Foley. It’s nearly a coin flip. In a rematch of the same race four years ago, Foley and Malloy have traded polling leads all campaign. Malloy won in 2010 by just 0.5 percentage points, nearly identical to his 0.6 percentage-point lead right now. Before Malloy, Connecticut, like Massachusetts, hadn’t elected a Democrat governor since 1986.
The reason Malloy is in trouble is simple: the economy. Per Gallup, Connecticut residents rank far below the national average in confidence in the economy — they’re less likely than to think that it’s a good time to get a job and that taxes are at the proper level, and less likely to be satisfied with the state or city they live in. According to a Quinnipiac University poll taken in September, Foley had a double-digit lead on Malloy on the question of who was best to handle jobs and the economy, government spending and taxes.
Will the state’s Democratic lean be enough to drag Malloy across the finish line? We can’t be sure. Foley’s favorable ratings have not been great, but they are much better than Malloy’s. The incumbent has consistently had a higher unfavorable rating than favorable rating.

The South

I’ve written about Florida twice before. The story has been the same throughout campaign season. Voters dislike both candidates — former Republican governor turned Democrat Charlie Crist and current Republican Gov. Rick Scott. Both candidates’ net favorable ratings (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) have been negative for most of their campaigns. The race may be remembered more for the fact that it features the two most disliked gubernatorial candidates over the past decade than for any particular policy or issue.
Quinnipiac has found that voters think neither candidate is trustworthy and that they say Scott doesn’t care about people like them. Scott was able to close an early deficit in the polls by vastly outspending Crist; more than $100 million total has been spent on the race so far. Yet the recent gap in spending between the two sides hasn’t been nearly as pronounced as it was earlier.
Florida voters have to choose one of these guys. FiveThirtyEight thinks Crist is slightly more likely to be that guy; he has a 60 percent chance of winning.

The Midwest

Earlier this year, there was an anti-incumbent mood in the Midwest. Three governors — Republican Rick Snyder of Michigan, Republican Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Democrat Pat Quinn of Illinois — looked like they might lose earlier in the cycle. Now, all three are favorites.
In Michigan, Snyder was elected four years ago as one tough nerd, someone who would provide an economic stimulus to a state that badly needed it. But voters aren’t convinced the economy has improved. According to Gallup, Michigan residents are far less likely to have confidence in their state’s economy than the average voter nationwide.
Democratic challenger Mark Schauer has tried to leverage that angst to his advantage. He has pointed out that the governor’s policies have not resulted in rising job growth. Snyder contends that the Michigan has grown jobs, if slowly, under his administration and that lowering taxes helped to keep the economy afloat in a state that was hard hit by the 2008 recession.
Voters seem more likely than not to give Snyder a second term. According to EPIC-MRA, most voters think the state is headed in the right direction and have a more favorable view of Snyder than Schauer. The race should be close; FiveThirtyEight projects Snyder to win by less than 2 percentage points. That is good enough to be a 75 percent favorite.
Gov. Scott Walker faces his third election in Wisconsin in the past four years. He’s loved by Republicans and hated by Democrats. There was some belief that an investigation of the Walker campaign’s possibly illegal coordination with outside groups might damage the incumbent’s prospects, but it doesn’t appear to have moved opinion much.
Walker is viewed the same way by Wisconsinites as he has always been. According to the Marquette Law School Poll, which has used a likely voter sample all year, Walker hasn’t ever had an approval rating above 51 percent or below 47 percent among registered voters. Not surprisingly, his polling numbers against Democrat Mary Burke have been more consistent than sappy moments on “Full House.” He has led by an average of 3.7 percentage points over Burke among likely voters in polling taken this year by Marquette. FiveThirtyEight projects Walker to win by 2.6 percentage points.
Burke will need the polls to be wrong to win. Marquette’s most recent survey found that a majority of voters thought the state was headed in the right direction and that Walker was up 7 percentage points among likely voters. That may be overstating Walker’s lead, though it’s doubtful the poll is off by enough for Burke to win. Walker is a 75 percent favorite.
Quinn, of Illinois, looked to be in the most danger of these three incumbents. My polling-based analysis in early summer had him with a 25 percent chance to beat Republican Bruce Rauner. At the time, however, I warned that Quinn probably had a better shot than early polls suggested. Quinn is a Democratic governor in a Democratic state. He won in 2010 despite an approval rating of 40 percent (at best) and with only about 15 percent of voters saying the state was heading in the right direction.
This year, Quinn’s approval rating is again between 35 percent and 40 percent. And again, he looks like he may win. His campaign has somewhat successfully painted Rauner as an out-of-touch millionaire. According to a recent Chicago Tribune poll, voters are more likely to say Quinn is in touch with people like them. They also view him as more honest than Rauner, even if they think Rauner can better handle the economy.
The fight between an incumbent people don’t approve of and a challenger with his own flaws has resulted in a close race, but one in which Quinn is a favorite. The FiveThirtyEight model gives him a 66 percent chance of winning.

The Plains States

There’s really only one competitive gubernatorial race on the Great Plains: Kansas.
Republican Gov. Sam Brownback is in trouble for three related reasons: a Republican party split, economic woes and education. For as long as most of us have been alive, Kansas has leaned to the right, practicing its own brand of moderate Republicanism. Brownback, though, has governed as a pure conservative.
It has hurt him; Democrat Paul Davis has been endorsed by scores of moderate Republicans upset by cuts to education necessitated by Brownback’s large tax cuts.
According to SurveyUSA, taxes and education remain among the most important issues to voters in 2014. The result has been disenchanted Republicans. The share of registered Republicans in Kansas was 9 percentage points higher than the share of self-identified Republicans, according the latest Marist College poll. Many of these Republicans now identify as independent, a group Davis is winning by a 26-point margin.
Although polls have narrowed from a few months ago, most surveys have Davis riding Republican discontent to a lead. He’s an 82 percent favorite.

The West

The issues facing Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper in Colorado are considerably different. Voters are not upset with the economy; they’re upset about social issues. After the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Hickenlooper, along with a Democratic legislature, enacted tough gun-control laws. Voters didn’t like that. They turned out two Democratic state senators in a recall in 2013, and voters still disapprove of Hickenlooper’s handling of gun control, according to Quinnipiac.
Likewise, Coloradans are upset with Hickenlooper over his stance on the death penalty. Voters in the state are overwhelmingly in favor of the death penalty, but Hickenlooper turned against it while in office. Hickenlooper’s Republican challenger, Bob Beauprez, and his allies have emphasized Hickenlooper’s changed position in television ads.
Yet even in his worst polls, Hickenlooper is liked by as many voters as dislike him. Polls have shown that he is running a few percentage points ahead of Democratic Sen. Mark Udall. That could make the difference in a tight race. Although FiveThirtyEight’s model forecasts Udall losing, it has Hickenlooper ahead by 0.5 percentage points and winning 57 percent of the time.
Alaska is perhaps the strangest race of the cycle. As I discussed previously, Republican Gov. Sean Parnell is being challenged by a unity ticket of former Republican turned independent Bill Walker and former 2014 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Byron Mallott. In other words, there is no Democratic nominee for governor. To make matters even stranger, former governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has endorsed Walker and not her former running mate, Parnell. Why?
It has a lot to do with taxes and energy prices. Oil prices continue to fall at a rapid pace, which is a big deal in Alaska. This lead to statewide deficits. Those have been made worse, Walker would argue, by the tax cuts on oil companies drilling in Alaska, which Parnell signed into law. This reversed the taxes Palin had signed into law when she was governor. Walker has argued that the state must cut spending even more than it has under the Parnell administration to erase the deficits. Parnell has argued that Walker and his team will cut education funding.
This back and forth has left Walker with a slight advantage. FiveThirtyEight gives him a 61 percent chance of winning. Given the much-discussed lack of accurate polling in Alaska and the long time to count ballots, the winner of this race may not be known for days or weeks to come.

Bottom line

There are a lot of tight races. Five seats are forecasted to flip from Republican to Democratic or independent control: Alaska, Florida, Kansas, Maine and Pennsylvania. Two seats are projected to flip from Democratic to Republican control: Arkansas and Massachusetts.
If all the FiveThirtyEight favorites win, Republicans will have 26 governorships in 2015, Democrats will have 23 and independents will have one.
CORRECTION (Nov. 3, 1:10 p.m.): A previous version of this article incorrectly said no Democrat had been elected governor of Rhode Island since 1990. A Democrat was elected in 1992.

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FiveThirtyEight’s Senate Forecast 10OKT14 REMEMBER TO VOTE ON 4 NOV 14!!!!!

IF the gop / tea-baggers win control of the US Senate then the Democratic Party has nobody to blame but itself. Self defeating allegiance to the grand betrayal of the Obama administration and DINOS, the failure of the party to promote and back progressives, the inability of the party to reject the control of both the Democratic and republican parties as well as our government by the rich, corporate America, the bank-financial cabal and the military industrial complex is the reason the electorate is uninspired and uncommitted. I have done nothing for and have not donated to any Democratic candidates who are not Bold Progressives endorsed by the PCCC / +BoldProgressives and +Daily Kos. I strongly encourage all liberals and progressives to check out these two groups and donate to and / or volunteer for the candidates they have endorsed. I am done with candidates who do not represent the best options for our nation and best represent my values and concerns. I am a proud member of the +Senator Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party. Some of our candidates will win, some will loose. The result of the election, the ensuing state of our nation, will be on the current administration, the Democrats and gop / tea-baggers and the electorate. God help us all. From +FiveThirtyEight .....

FiveThirtyEight’s Senate Forecast

FiveThirtyEight’s election forecasting model combines hundreds of opinion polls with historical and demographic information to calculate odds for each Senate race. We estimate the probability that each party will win control of the Senate by running those odds through thousands of simulations. The forecast is updated regularly.

 

• Republicans have a 57.8% chance of winning a majority.

  Democrats have a 42.2% chance of keeping the majority.

  There is an 18.4% chance Republicans will control 52 seats and Democrats will control 48 seats.
• More 2014 Midterms
• More Politics

Senate Control Could Come Down To Whole Foods vs. Cracker Barrel Oct 8

How FiveThirtyEight Calculates Pollster Ratings Sep 25

How The FiveThirtyEight Senate Forecast Model Works Sep 17

After The Midterms, The Diversity Gap In The House Will Be Wider Than Ever Sep 15

IOWA IS KEY TO DEMOCRATS HOLDING THE SENATE, PLEASE SUPPORT BOLD PROGESSIVE BRUCE BRALEY 21SEP14

REP BRUCE BRALEY D IA is in a very tight race for the US Senate seat from Iowa. The PCCC / BoldProgressives.org is supporting him because he is a Progressive Democrat. His victory in the Iowa election is vital to the Democratic Party keeping control of the Senate, protecting us from the extreme right wing agenda of the koch brothers /corporate America republican controlled House. If you can please donate to Bruce Braley's campaign (I did, $5.00), and if you are in Iowa please consider volunteering for his campaign. From the PCCC / Progressive Change Campaign Committee

---

Huge news out of Iowa: Two polls this past week showed Bruce Braley, the populist progressive who's running to replace Senator Tom Harkin, edging out his right-wing opponent.
This is big. His Tea Party opponent -- the one who ran infamous ads about castrating pigs -- got a lot of help from the Koch Brothers and special interests this summer. She spent much of the summer narrowly ahead.
Here's what one political analyst said about this race on ABC's This Week:

"If you ask me what race on Election Night will determine who takes the Senate, whether the Democrats keep it or the Republicans take it, Iowa is it. And if the Republicans take Iowa, they're taking the Senate back."

Can you chip in $3 to help bold progressive Bruce Braley build on his narrow lead in the polls -- and prevent a Republican takeover? Donate here.
Bruce Braley is exactly who should be replacing Tom Harkin in the Senate. Progressive Sen. Tom Harkin told supporters this past week:

"If you want to thank me for my service, there is really only one way I want you to do that. Make sure that this Senate seat remains in good, fighting, progressive hands with Congressman Bruce Braley."

Elizabeth Warren endorsed Bruce Braley in an email to PCCC members, saying, "Bruce Braley led the Populist Caucus in the House of Representatives – and is focused on economic fairness, investing in education, and addressing our retirement crisis."
Please chip in $3 to help Bruce Braley keep his lead and defend against corporate money and attacks in the coming weeks.
Thanks for being a bold progressive.
-- Keith Rouda, PCCC organizer

Senate Update: Democrats Take Another Small Step Forward 16SEP14

THE latest US Senate forcast from +FiveThirtyEight 
It is obvious we can not sit on our butts, campaign contributions are needed for funding get out the vote operations, canvasing and voter registration. We need to keep up the pressure on both republican / tea-bagger candidates as well as the electorate. If you live in a state holding a senate election this year volunteer for the Democratic candidate, even an hour or two every few weeks can make a difference. If you can't volunteer consider making a donation. Again, no matter how much you are able to donate it can make a difference. I posted an appeal for donations for Sen Al Franken D MN and I donated $5.00, that is what I can afford right now. But it adds up and it helps. Read this, and consider everything at stake and do something to help the cause for the good of our nation. AND REMEMBER TO VOTE ON 4 NOV 14!!!!!

Senate Update: Democrats Take Another Small Step Forward

7:53 PMSep 16 By Harry Enten

Democrat Chad Taylor listens to arguments before the Kansas Supreme Court on Tuesday in his petition to remove his name from the ballot after he withdrew from the U.S. Senate race.

Charlie Riedel / AP

Another day and another uptick in the odds that Democrats keep control of the Senate this November.
The latest FiveThirtyEight forecast gives Democrats a 47 percent chance of keeping at least 50 seats. Republican chances of winning a majority have dropped from 64 percent when the FiveThirtyEight model launched two weeks ago to 53 percent Tuesday.
The biggest mover Tuesday: Kansas. A new Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey put independent Greg Orman ahead of Republican Sen. Pat Roberts 41 percent to 34 percent. Democrat Chad Taylor, who has suspended his campaign and is appealing to the Kansas Supreme Court to remove his name from the ballot, came in at 6 percent. It’s the second poll in a week to have Orman ahead, though the previous one had Orman up by only 1 percentage point.
The Kansas race is still volatile. Besides the question of whether Taylor will be on the ballot, Republicans are only now waking up to the fact that they have a competitive race on their hands. In the polls released since Taylor dropped out, Orman has garnered an unusually large — 25 percent to 30 percent — share of the Republican vote. That could change.
We continue to have only limited polling in Kansas, and so the FiveThirtyEight model is still giving weight to the state’s long history of favoring Republicans. Roberts has a 51 percent chance of winning, according to the latest forecast. (Kansas is the closest race in the nation, according to the model.)
Yet, Kansas is part of an unnerving trend for the GOP; Tuesday was the latest in a string of bad polling days for Republicans. A PPP poll released Tuesday in North Carolina gave Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan a 44 percent to 40 percent lead over Republican Thom Tillis. Just a week ago, Hagan had no better than a 50 percent chance of winning, but PPP is the fifth pollster to release a survey in the past week that has her up by at least 3 percentage points. Hagan is now a 70 percent favorite.
Why have Democrats been moving the ball? It’s not the national environment, which favors Republicans. And many less competitive races haven’t moved one way or another.
On Monday, my colleague Nate Silver suggested one theory: Democrats have been out-fundraising Republicans by a substantial margin in many of the most competitive races. The Cook Political Report’s Charlie Cook noted in a column Monday that Republicans are worried mega donors on the right are not opening their wallets to the degree they did during 2012 campaign.
And a new report released by Wesleyan Media Project, using data from Kantar Media/CMAG, reinforces Nate’s hypotheses. Democratic Senate candidates and the outside groups supporting them have enjoyed advertising edges in almost all the competitive Senate contests over the past few weeks. Three of their larger advertising leads have been in Colorado, Michigan and North Carolina — the three states where we’ve seen the biggest movements toward Democratic candidates in the FiveThirtyEight forecasts. New Hampshire, one of the few competitive states to move toward the GOP over the last week, is also one of the few states where Republicans have had an advertising advantage.

It’s important not to oversell this point. Democrats also have large advertising advantages in states where the polls don’t look so good for them, including Georgia. And the raw number of ads each side is airing is less important than what time the ads are on, because people are more likely to be watching television at some times than others.
Still, it’s clear that Democrats are dominating the airwaves. The question is whether Republicans and their affiliated groups can catch up. If they can, then we may see a reversion to the mean, and the Republicans’ more robust position might be restored. If Democrats maintain their lead on the air — and if that edge is what’s driving the Democratic run over the past few days — then they might able to overcome a bad national environment.
Check out FiveThirtyEight’s latest Senate forecast.

Harry Enten @forecasterenten

Harry Enten is a senior political writer and analyst for FiveThirtyEight.

Related

Senate Update: Democrats Add By Subtraction In Kansas

Senate Update: Optimistic Numbers For GOP In Colorado And Iowa

Updated 1:28 pm EDT | Sep 19

The Model’s Output

Republicans have a 54.8% chance of winning a majority.

Democrats have a 45.2% chance of keeping the majority.

There is a 15.4% chance Republicans will control 52 seats and Democrats will control 48 seats.

By Harry Enten, Al Johri, Ritchie King, Allison McCann, Dhrumil Mehta, Andrei Scheinkman and Nate Silver.

Daily Kos Elections Poll Explorer: Kansas switcheroo blows up our model (in a good way) & Daily Kos Elections Poll Explorer says Democrats have 47% chance of holding the Senate (right now) 4SEP & 25AUG14

FOR those who love politics.....
Thu Sep 04, 2014 at 06:29 AM PDT

Daily Kos Elections Poll Explorer: Kansas switcheroo blows up our model (in a good way)

by David Jarman

Distribution of likely number of Democratic Senate seats

I'm ordinarily not a big believer in "game changes;" they may be good at selling superficial books about presidential elections, but if you actually drill down into, say, the polling data from the 2012 election, all of those supposed "game changes" barely moved the needle at all when they happened. But we may have had a genuinely game changing event on Wednesday, in a previously sleepy race that was on few people's radars as competitive; it changed not only the trajectory of one race, but the overall likelihood of Democratic control of the Senate. On Wednesday, the Democratic nominee in the Kansas Senate race, little-known and underfunded Shawnee Co. District Attorney Chad Taylor, pulled the plug on his candidacy right before the deadline. Now ordinarily, you'd think that would reduce Democratic odds in Kansas from almost zero (5 percent, according to our model on Wednesday) to absolute zero. That's not the case at all, though. There is also a much better-funded and more appealing independent candidate in the race who might caucus with the Democrats if he wins: Greg Orman. Taylor and Orman were splitting the vote against the Republican three-term incumbent, Pat Roberts, who was already weakened by a mediocre primary win over Milton Wolf and accusations that he doesn't actually reside in Kansas.
Previous polls of a three-way race showed Taylor and Orman, added together, outpolling Roberts ... but combined vote shares are of no value in a first-past-the-post system. However, the most recent Public Policy Polling look at Kansas tried out permutations with just Taylor vs. Roberts, and Orman vs. Roberts. Roberts would beat Taylor 43-39, but Orman (thanks to crossover votes from moderate Republicans) would beat Roberts 43-33. (In a three-way race, it was Roberts 32, Taylor 25, and Orman 23.) And in a remarkable bit of team-player-dom, Taylor seems to have taken those polling results to heart and pulled the plug on his sputtering campaign.
Put visually, here's the trendline from the old version of the Kansas race:

And here's the trendline from the new version, as of Wednesday:

The switch to a two-way race between Roberts and Orman, where Orman has a 10-point lead, dramatically changes the trajectory of the Kansas race. Where the Democrats previously had a 5 percent shot of winning the race, they now have a 54 percent shot! That same shift also has a big impact on the overall Senate picture, suddenly making the Democrats more likely than not to retain control of the Senate. In our last full-length look at the Poll Explorer last Thursday, Democratic odds of retaining the Senate were 45 percent, and it had stayed parked there at 45 for most of the week, ticking up to 46 percent on Wednesday. However, the Kansas news boosts Democratic odds of controlling the Senate up to 56 percent overall.
Why such a big boost? Last week, I'd used the analogy of a plate-spinning contest. Although the Democrats had enough races, where they had even odds or better, to enable them to hold 50 seats (which would give them control, thanks to Joe Biden's tiebreaking vote), they were spinning a lot more wobbly plates than the Republicans. If only one of those plates fell, they'd lose the whole game. Well, with the Kansas news, the Republicans have essentially been handed their own wobbly plate. The Kansas race is still hardly a sure thing, in itself, but it gives the Democrats a much bigger cushion against failure somewhere else.
Shouldn't a 10-point lead, though (which would be considered to be outside the margin of error) give Orman better odds than 54 percent, though? There's a whole other wrinkle to the Orman candidacy, which we'll explain further over the fold:

While the shift from 5 percent odds to 54 percent odds is a huge jump anyway, it would be much higher if Orman were to simply confirm he would caucus with the Democrats. On the surface, it's a reasonable assumption that he'd caucus with the Democrats. Orman ran for the Senate in the Democratic primary in 2008, and his issues page — where he says, in rather oblique fashion, that he's pro-choice and supports immigration reform — makes it clear he'd be very uncomfortable as a Republican. However, Orman isn't saying that. (Nor would it be wise for him to do so; he'd probably shed a number of moderate Republican votes as soon as he put on a blue shirt, in a state where he can't afford to lose any of those votes.) Instead, he tiptoes around the issue, saying that he'd seek to work with "work with the other independent Senators to caucus with the party that is most willing to face our country’s difficult problems head on and advance our problem-solving, non-partisan agenda." But more importantly, he also says:

With that said, if one party is clearly in the majority, he will seek to caucus with the party that was in the majority as that would be in the best interest for the state of Kansas.

Here's where the modeling gets tricky, and it starts to cross over from mere poll aggregation into game theory. In order for the Democrats to "win" the Kansas race, they have to not only see Orman defeat Roberts, but they also have to garner a majority of the other seats anyway. If Orman wins, but the Republicans already have a majority with or without Orman, then Orman just caucuses with the Republicans anyway, and the Democrats have "lost" that race too. In other words, here are the potential scenarios:

Democrats win 48 seats, Republicans win 51 seats: Orman caucuses with the Republicans, pushing that total to 48 D, 52 R. Democrats win 50 seats, Republicans wins 49 seats: The Democrats will have a majority anyway because of Joe Biden's tiebreaking vote, so Orman caucuses with the Democrats, pushing that total to 51 D, 49 R.
Democrats win 51 seats, Republicans win 48 seats: Orman caucuses with the Democrats, pushing that total to 52 D, 48 R.
Democrats win 49 seats, Republicans win 50 seats: Here's where the real uncertainty enters the picture. There's no "clear" majority (in other words, if Orman throws in with the Democrats, the Dems will have a majority because of Biden; if he throws in with the Republicans; the Republicans will have a majority), and Orman needs to go one way or the other, unless fellow indie Angus King decides to leave the Dem caucus and join Orman on a two-person magical unicorn ride. Our model, awesome as it is, still can't predict Orman's state of mind, so in all 49 D/50 R scenarios, we're allowing Orman a 50 percent chance of caucusing with the Dems and 50 percent chance of caucusing with the GOP.

So that's why Democratic odds of "winning" the race are 54 percent, even though Orman's personal odds of winning the race are much higher. In all scenarios where the GOP ends up with 51 seats or more regardless of what happens in Kansas, and half of the ones where they end up with 50, an Orman win just pads the Republican total further. And that's why our histogram no longer resembles a neat, tidy bell curve any more (if you want to see what it looked like, check our post from last week). Scenarios where the Democrats win exactly 50 seats, which used to be the modal result, are now pretty rare, now mostly involving permutations where Roberts wins the race instead. Most of those 50-seat scenarios instead get turned into 51-seat scenarios, since at that point Orman gets turned into a bonus Dem. Fifty-one seats is the new mode, while fifty seats is the new median. Either 50 or 51 is enough for control, so now the Democrats retain control in the majority of all Monte Carlo simulations.
While Kansas is largely responsible for the Dems' move upward, if you look at the totem pole, you'll also notice that Mary Landrieu's odds in Louisiana have increased significantly (perhaps too much to be truly realistic, from 47 percent to 76 percent). That's thanks to one poll that didn't attract much attention, a poll released by the Senate Conservatives Fund that had Landrieu leading her likely runoff opponent, Republican Bill Cassidy, 49-43. Why, you might be asking, would a right-wing group leak a poll showing a Republican in such dire straits? Well, it was to show that their preferred candidate, Rob Maness, trailed Landrieu by slightly less (48-44), as well as improving his share in the jungle primary. Whatever their purposes, though, the model counts it as something of an own-goal, boosting Landrieu's averages even further because it's a Republican partisan poll and the model downweights Cassidy even further!
In addition, two polls that put Michelle Nunn in a small lead (after a long series of ones showing her losing) boosted her odds somewhat, from 14 percent last week up to 23 percent now. That's balanced, however, by several polls in Kentucky showing Mitch McConnell expanding his lead a bit, moving Alison Lundergan Grimes's odds there from 22 percent down to 18 percent.

Let me repeat these caveats until I'm blue in the face: As happy as this shift made me, the fact that the Democrats have a 56 percent chance of controlling the Senate this week is in no way a prediction that they will control the Senate, any more than, when we were talking about this last week, the fact that the Democrats had a 45 percent chance of controlling the Senate was a prediction that they will lose the Senate. The overall proposition is still, entirely, a coin flip. The coin has simply gone from being very slightly weighted in one direction to very slightly weighted in the other direction. Finally, let's take a look at the gubernatorial races. For one brief day, the median number of Dem-held state houses ticked up to 23, which would be a two-seat improvement over what they currently have. However, that ticked back down to 22 today, which is a one-seat gain. That's largely due to polling fluctuations in Florida, where a SurveyUSA poll on Tuesday gave Charlie Crist a 45-43 lead, but then a Univ. of Florida poll on Wednesday gave Rick Scott a 41-36 lead.
Overall Democratic odds of gaining gubernatorial seats continued to move up, though; it was at 52 percent last week, and now it's up to a 60 percent chance. That's in part due to improved odds in Georgia and Arkansas (which the Democratic candidates are still on track to lose, though), but more than anything due to Alaska, where there was an entirely separate switcheroo in a three-way race where the Dem and indie had been splitting the anti-incumbent vote.
There, Democratic nominee Byron Mallott dropped out to become the Lt. Governor on a ticket with independent candidate Bill Walker. What few polls we'd previously seen of a head-to-head matchup between Walker and GOP incumbent Sean Parnell showed a very close race, and even a Walker lead in one case, so that boosted Dem odds here from 1 percent to 37 percent. (To make things simpler, we're counting Walker as a de facto Democrat here, since policy-wise he'd be a big improvement on Parnell, even though there will be an "I" next to his name; there's no need to ask about who he's going to caucus with, seeing as how governors don't caucus with anybody, so Walker's individual odds are what's important.)
We'll be continuing to post updates like this several times a week, as we see if the Democrats can keep building on this momentum or not. Our permanent Poll Explorer Senate and gubernatorial pages are updated every day, so please check them frequently; you can bookmark them, or find them in the "Blogroll" list in the right column on the main Daily Kos Elections page.

Originally posted to Daily Kos Elections on Thu Sep 04, 2014 at 06:29 AM PDT.

Also republished by Kansas & Missouri Kossacks and Daily Kos.

Mon Aug 25, 2014 at 06:30 AM PDT

Daily Kos Elections Poll Explorer says Democrats have 47% chance of holding the Senate (right now)

by David Jarman

Distribution of likely number of Democratic Senate seats

Daily Kos Elections is pleased to announce the introduction of its Poll Explorer! The Poll Explorer is a statistical model that allows us to track public opinion in each Senate and gubernatorial race this year, and from there, predict the likely outcome of each race and the number of seats that each party will control after the election is held. This is an ongoing feature that will be available from now until the November election. We'll be doing posts like this one, describing the current state of the election, several times a week from now until Nov. 4; however, there will also be permanent pages for all the Senate and gubernatorial data which will be updated every day, and which you can bookmark and access at any time. As the headline states, today's version of the model shows that if 100 elections were held today, the Democrats would control the Senate in 47 of those elections. That means that it's slightly likelier than not that the Republicans will win the necessary 50 seats for control. The median number of seats that the Democrats end up controlling, in the hundreds of thousands of simulations that we run, is 49. (In other words, if you lined up every single result in order, 49 seats is the point where 50 percent of the results would be higher than that, and 50 percent would be lower.)
However, there's an interesting quirk here: the likeliest distribution of seats would be 50 Democratic-controlled seats and 50 Republican-controlled seats, which, thanks to Joe Biden's tie-breaking vote, would allow the Democrats to retain control. That result is only very slightly likelier than the second-likeliest outcome, though, which is 49 Democratic-controlled seats and 51 Republican-controlled seats, and the more outlying results are more likely to be Republican-friendly (for instance, it's much likelier that the Democrats will end up controlling 46 seats than they will control 53 seats), which explains why the Republicans have slightly better than 50-50 odds overall. (In other words, 49 Democratic seats is the median, while 50 is the mode.) You can see the full distribution of the range of likely numbers of Democratic seats in the bar chart, known as a histogram, shown above.

And there's one more quirk here, too. If you look closely at the specific races, you'll notice that the Democrats have greater than 50 percent odds of winning 50 individual races. The Democrat-held seats that they are, individually, on track to lose are South Dakota (1 percent odds), Montana (1 percent), West Virginia (1 percent), Arkansas (37 percent), and Louisiana (46 percent). The Democrats are currently on track to win Iowa (51 percent), North Carolina (58 percent), Colorado (63 percent), Michigan (72 percent), Alaska (82 percent), and New Hampshire (82 percent). However, you have to take the races into consideration as a whole. Think of the fight for the Senate as a plate-spinning contest: the Democrats are currently spinning a lot more plates than the Republicans, and it only takes one more plate falling for them to lose control. The Democrats have a lot more wobbly plates (North Carolina, Iowa, Colorado) than do the Republicans (Louisiana). In a majority of simulations, one of them still falls, even though individually each plate has a better-than-even chance of not falling; such is the nature of probability.
Before you start running around in circles screaming that "even the liberal Daily Kos" says the Democrats are going to lose the Senate, please bear in mind this most important caveat: this is not a prediction that the Democrats will lose the Senate, any more than if we gave the Democrats a 53 percent chance of controlling the Senate, it would be a prediction that the Democrats will win the Senate. It's merely a reflection of the fact that control of the Senate is truly a coin flip, and if there's any contention between us and 538 or the New York Times over what specific percentage should be applied, it's purely an argument about whether that coin, as of today, is ever-so-slightly weighted toward the Democrats or Republicans.
Moreover, the model is merely a description of the polls. If the polls are simply wrong, then the model will be wrong, too. We aren't terribly concerned about that, as poll averaging produced highly reliable results in the 2008 and 2012 presidential races. Nevertheless, statistical modeling is only one potential approach to forecasting an election, and Daily Kos Elections will continue to offer more subjective and gestalt-based Senate and gubernatorial race ratings as well (in much the same way that baseball teams that have incorporated a more sabremetric approach continue to employ scouts, as well).
We'll delve more thoroughly into how the model works and why we're doing this, over the fold:

The Daily Kos Elections Poll Explorer is an adaptation of Votamatic, which was a site developed for 2012 by Drew Linzer that correctly predicted the 332-206 outcome in that year’s presidential election. We've repurposed the Votamatic model to work in the Senate and gubernatorial context as well. It's a Bayesian model that, first, creates smoothed trendlines for each individual race and then runs thousands of Monte Carlo simulations to see how likely Democratic candidates are to win each race, and how likely Democrats are to win the Senate and gubernatorial playing fields as a whole. If you would like to read a much more detailed explanation of each step in the process, and how to interpret the various charts, that can be found at our How It Works page.
The model draws its data from the Daily Kos Elections Polling Database, which is scrupulously maintained by our own Steve Singiser, and which is a great resource if you want to zoom in on the complete polling history of a particular race. We cast as wide a net as possible including all public pollsters (and yes, that includes Rasmussen), under the assumption that averaging all polls will smooth out each individual pollster's house effects or other quirks. We also include polls from partisan pollsters, such as those leaked by campaigns, although we uniformly adjust partisan polls to make them less favorable to the candidates who commissioned them.
We’ve stress-tested the model by retroactively applying it to the 2012 election, which finds it correctly predicting all but two Senate races. Those races are Montana and North Dakota; those two races, it's worth noting, also stumped other prominent aggregators. (And that's simply because there wasn't a robust selection of polls of the Montana and North Dakota races, and the majority of those polls were, at the end of the day, simply wrong; more gestalt-based predictors who weren't bound to models were able to get one or both those races right.)
Now that you know how it works, you might be wondering: why do we need another model? After all, there are perfectly serviceable predictive models courtesy of sites like 538, the New York Times' Upshot, and the Washington Post's Election Lab. Part of the problem, though, is that every model is built on its own set of assumptions; in fact, the next step for some enterprising person might not be to build a model that aggregates the polls, but one that aggregates the aggregators. Models may not just have, for instance, different ways of accounting for polls from partisan pollsters or polls that are too old, but also give different emphases to other factors, like polls of the generic congressional ballot, economic data, or historical trends in midterm elections.
Part of what sets our model apart is that it doesn't account for those economic or historical factors; it's just the polls. Historical factors are relevant earlier in the cycle, when there simply isn't adequate polling data and you need something to fill the gap, but they aren't (as) necessary now that we have a suitable number of polls in all the key races. In other words, this is intentionally set up to be an all-meat, no-special sauce model. Omitting those factors, however, means that this isn't a "predictive" model; we don't add in expectations that voters will swing toward the Democrats or Republicans between now and Election Day. The range of possible outcomes that we calculate for the Senate and gubernatorial races simply starts from where we estimate public opinion to be today, then adds in uncertainty about how voters' preferences might change over the next two-and-a-half months.
To the extent that the models are poll-driven, though, the end results aren't too different; our expectation that the Republicans have a 53 percent chance of taking the Senate is quite close to the NYT's prediction that they have a 65 percent chance of doing so, or the Washington Post's prediction that the GOP has a 63 percent chance of taking the Senate. They see the same polls as us, and there's only so much you can do differently in interpreting them.
The slightly more pessimistic result that these other aggregators arrive at has largely to do with the way that their models rely less on polls and more heavily on economic and fundraising data, which is something that we consider, at this point, already be showing up in the results pollsters are finding. If anything, the Democratic candidates are currently overperforming in the polls compared with what economic and historical fundamentals would lead you to expect. However, if a late-breaking wave or black swan event suddenly causes that Democratic overperformance to head south, that too would be rapidly reflected in the polls.
And there's one other key difference that separates us from the other aggregators: we are also looking at the gubernatorial races. It's not as sexy a topic, since you don't get a prize for holding the majority of gubernatorial seats, and at any rate the number of likely Dem-held gubernatorial seats isn't hovering right between 24 and 25. But gubernatorial races are hugely important, both in terms of establishing progressive policies in individual states and building a presidential bench, so we want to give a similar focus to gubernatorial races using the same method.
As you can see in our gubernatorial histogram, the median outcome would be that, after the election, the Democrats will hold 21 gubernatorial seats. As you can see on the histogram, the modal outcome would be for the Democrats to hold 20 seats. Twenty-one is the current number that the Democrats hold (which is why that column is gray), so that means the likeliest outcome would be either no net change or a net change of one in the GOP's direction.

That may sound surprising, when most pundits would say the Dems are on track to pick up a seat or two. However, the most current round of polls do not support that conclusion. Take a look at the totem pole of races to see the specifics: as most pundits expect, the Democrats have overwhelming odds in picking up the Pennsylvania (99 percent) and Maine (91 percent) races. In addition, they're on track to pick up Kansas (surprising a few months ago but not surprising now, at 63 percent) and Wisconsin (that is a surprise, but it's a total coinflip at 52 percent). However, they're also on track to lose not just Arkansas (19 percent) and Illinois (10 percent), but also Connecticut (11 percent) and Hawaii (15 percent). Many people assume that the dark blue lean of Connecticut and Hawaii will save those races in the end (and that's particularly the case in Hawaii, where David Ige beat unpopular Neil Abercrombie in the primary—bear in mind, though, that the model does reflect polling of an Ige/Duke Aiona race). For the moment, though, the polls—which are all we're relying on here—do not support that idea.
To reiterate, none of this—not the percentages for the individual races, nor the percentages for the Dems' overall odds of holding the Senate—are set in stone. The percentages can, and will, fluctuate quite a bit over the coming months. That's why we'll be updating the model with new data every day, which you can see by visiting the permanent pages. I'll also be writing a full post like this one several times a week, discussing what has changed in the model since the last post, and what individual polls may have changed the numbers. So please follow along as we track the stretch run for Election '14.

Originally posted to Daily Kos on Mon Aug 25, 2014 at 06:30 AM PDT.

Also republished by Daily Kos Elections.