Close-Up: Overtime in Georgia

"Stalemate! You're all losers."

By "you all", I of course mean the vast majority of Americans living in one of the two states where runoff elections could decide control of the Senate. With less than two weeks before Election Day, people living in one of the dozen or so most competitive races are almost certainly sick of attack ads, faux-ksiness, largely cosmetic disagreement with President Obama, forced pride in Kentucky coal, alarmist and vaguely creepy Democratic fundraising emails, and door-to-door canvassers with a persistence rivaling that of a Mormon Jehovah's Witness selling a really good set of encyclopedias. Hell, I live in New Jersey and I'm already sick of hearing about how Aimee Belgard is a dishonest tax-and-spend liberal and how "T-Mac" (do not confuse him with "Mac T") is a North Jersey carpetbagger who hates women (the first part is true, however). Thank God I don't live in, say, Arkansas.

But don't be surprised if, for all the billions and billions of dollars thrown at this election, we still reach a stalemate on Election Night. Election Night. While it's likely that Republicans will pick up at least 6 seats on the night of November 4, it's also far from impossible that neither party reaches the finish line. In fact, one of the more likely scenarios come Election Night looks like this:

This is actually quite plausible since all we've done here is marked down the most likely outcome in each state. If a candidate wins more than 50% of the time in the 100,000 simulated elections, he or she is declared the winner. If both candidates receive under 50% of the vote in the relevant states (Georgia and Louisiana), the election is declared a runoff. In short, if we were to bet on any one combination of Senate results right now, this would be our top pick. But this sort of scenario is also the reason our forecast doesn't say January 3 (when the 114th Congress is sworn in) on it: it says "Democratic seats held on January 7, 2015" to account for the fact that Georgia doesn't hold its Senate runoff until January 6 next year, three days after the 114th Congress is sworn in. (It holds its gubernatorial runoff, should one be necessary, on December 2 this year.)

First things first: if you're keeping count, you'll see that this outcome, where elections in Georgia and Louisiana go runoffs, gives Republicans exactly 50 seats (their current 45 plus the 7 they pick up on Election Night minus the independent victory in Kansas and the undecided seat in Georgia, which is currently held by Republican Saxby Chambliss). As a result, Orman, who stated his intention to caucus with whichever party obtains a clear majority, would not make his decision yet, since neither Republicans nor Democrats control a majority. 

So in this scenario there would be two runoffs, and Democrats would have to win both to keep the majority. We've been keeping score on the probability of those two races going to runoffs, and it turns out that a runoff is still more likely than not to occur in Georgia, given Libertarian Amanda Swafford's low but consistent mid-single-digit polling. As a result, the probability of the Senate race in Georgia going to a runoff is estimated to be about 61%--that is, in 61% of the simulated elections neither Democrat Michelle Nunn nor Republican David Perdue receive 50% of the vote. 

Meanwhile, Louisiana, while touted for the past year as the most likely site of a brutal late-autumn runoff campaign, is by no means certain to go to a runoff. We estimate the probability of a runoff to be about 84%--the same as the probability of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen keeping her seat in New Hampshire. Those are very strong odds (about the same as the chances that a player holding a high pair in the hole beats a player holding two low cards before the flop), but not a certainty. This is likely because despite Republican Rob Maness's fairly strong but consistently third-place polling, there's quite a bit of undecided vote to go around--if a large enough proportion breaks for Sen. Mary Landrieu or Rep. Bill Cassidy, one of them may break 50%.

Regardless, however, runoffs seem likely after Election Day, which is why our forecast doesn't say "January 3, 2014" (the day the 114th Congress gets sworn in); it says "Democratic seats held on January 7, 2015". This reflects the fact that Georgia voters may have to endure two more grueling months of hand-shaking and baby-kissing before they can put themselves out of their misery in a runoff on January 6 next year. 

This wouldn't be an entirely new experience for Georgia. This very Senate seat went to a runoff in 2008, with Sen. Chambliss coming out barely on top with 49.8% of the vote to Democrat Jim Martin's 46.8% (a margin of about 110,000 votes). But in that year less than a month separated the general election in November 4 and the runoff on December 2; this year that gap would be more than twice as wide.

2014 vs. 2008 in Georgia

How does 2014 stack up against 2008? By some respects Democrats should be more optimistic about their chances this year than they were six years ago. Michelle Nunn is polling better now than Jim Martin was polling two weeks before Election Day in 2008. She has done a better job of fundraising than Martin did, and she doesn't have to contend with an incumbent who probably would have sailed to re-election in this sordid Democratic year had he run again. As a Democrat she should be suffering from depressed black turnout in a midterm year, especially compared to Martin, who benefited from higher-than-usual black turnout thanks to the presence of the country's first ever black major-party presidential nominee on the ballot--and yet she's polling better than he did.

David Perdue and Michelle Nunn, at the end of a debate in Perry, GA. Photo by Curtis Compton/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

But despite these advantages, it's looking more and more likely that neither Perdue nor Nunn will be able to put this race away by November 5. At this point in the cycle, two weeks before Election Day, the Senate race in Georgia had a 36% chance of heading for a runoff, with Sen. Chambliss at 46.2% of the vote in our average. With both Nunn and Perdue polling below 46.2%, and with spoiler Libertarian candidate Amanda Swafford polling about as well as her predecessor Allen Buckley did in 2008, it's more likely than not that this year will head for a runoff, too.

Unlike 2008, however, there's no reason to suspect that the runoff will be substantially worse for the Democrat than the general. In 2008 the runoff had dynamics closer to that of a midterm year than a presidential year--specifically, Martin suffered from the lack of a presidential election to draw young and minority voters to the polls on December 2. As a result, on December 2, almost 1.5 million people who voted on November 4 decided to stay home--and Martin took more severe losses than Sen. Chambliss did, shedding 847,000 voters compared to the incumbent's 639,000. In a way, the runoff was a counteractual--what would the electorate have looked like if there was no presidency at stake?--and its results showed that the non-presidential electorate would have elected to keep Sen. Chambliss for six more years. But this year, both the general and the potential runoff have dynamics like that of any midterm year--because it is a midterm year. Even without a presidential election at stake, Nunn is doing well--which bodes well for her prospects in a runoff. Or at least, it doesn't bode too poorly. TOSS-UP