Revisiting the jungle

In Louisiana there's another statewide election scheduled. And not the one scheduled for December 6, which will decide whether incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu will keep her seat for another six years or if Rep. Bill Cassidy can take it from her. In 2002, the runoff fight for this same seat was termed "Operation Icing on the Cake" by Republican operatives; the only thing a victory in Louisiana would have done for Republicans was pad their majority from 51 seats to 52. And this year it's similar, although since Republicans are more likely than not to lose several seats in the 2016 elections--which favor Democrats for the same reasons 2014 favored Republicans--every seat they can get will be helpful. But despite the dearth of polls since Election Day, there's not much reason to suspect that Landrieu has any better chances of keeping her seat after the December runoff. Although her effort to bring the Keystone XL pipeline to a vote on the Senate floor--where Landrieu claims to have a filibuster-proof sixty-seat majority--has finally succeeded, it has really lost much of its importance election-wise since 1) it turns out a lot of voters didn't really care about her seniority when casting their votes and 2) her seniority wouldn't mean much in the 114th Congress anyway, seeing as she'd be demoted to the ranking Democratic member of the Energy Committee, from the chairmanship that she holds now. (Meanwhile, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska appears to be very pleased about her own rise to the chairmanship.) The DSCC has pulled its spending from the state and Landrieu looks to still be deep in it. LIKELY REPUBLICAN

That's all we have to say about that. The real competitive election in the Pelican State is next year, when Louisiana (as well as Kentucky and Mississippi) holds its gubernatorial election. Not even counting the fact that this election is not held in a midterm year (it's one of five states that holds its state elections in odd-numbered years), there are some key differences between 2015's gubernatorial and 2014's Senate election that make next year's more complicated to evaluate:

The wave definitely broke, but why?

Stu Rothenberg offers one definition of a "wave" election, which I think is pretty good:

"For me, the “political wave” metaphor evokes the image of a surging ocean wave that is much larger than normal and deposits debris that otherwise would not have made it ashore without the violent surf.

Politically, that translates into an election surge that is strong enough to sweep candidates who wouldn’t ordinarily win – because of the make-up of their districts or the limited funding of their campaigns, for example – to victory." -- Stu Rothenberg, Rothenberg Political Report

Let's agree on one thing: Republicans shellacked the Democrats last night, at least in the Senate. They gave them a "thumpin'". Swamped, dominated, crushed, emasculated, thrashed, blown out of the water: there are a lot of words for it, but at least an eight-seat pickup in the Senate, the loss of only one governor when they had at least six incumbents at risk, and the securing of what could very well be the biggest House majority the Republicans have ever had since the 1920s indicate a wave, or something close to it. 

Democrats wish the GOP wave last night were this small.

Last Exit

Here we are, at the end of the line. Two years and $3.7 billion later, you can all finally go to bed (maybe). Expect the story of tonight to be the undoing of two waves--one, the Democratic wave in 2008 that picked up eight seats in the Senate, and two, the Republican wave in 2010 that netted six governorships.  

Senate races

11 Senate races remain at least marginally competitive (i.e., both sides have a greater than 1% chance of winning). An I indicates the incumbent.

In each of the following state summaries, I've identified the bellwether counties. Bellwether counties are those counties that have historically voted similarly to the state as a whole. A rule of thumb for identifying a state's bellwether county is to locate the county where the state's largest city is located; the largest suburban county right outside that county is the bellwether county. Complications arise when you have two regional candidates (such as two U.S. Representatives vying for office), but the pattern tends to hold pretty well.

Republicans are now a nearly two-to-one favorite to take the Senate

Two-to-one: not quite what I'd call betting odds. Republicans don't actually have a 66% chance of taking the Senate, but the 64% chance they have in our latest forecast is closer to it than any other forecast we've done since we'd started. Previously Republicans consistently had a slightly better than even chance of winning, usually in the mid-50s. The lowest they had gone was actually slightly worse-than-even chances of taking the Senate:

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.)

No Cellphones, No Callbacks, No Neutrality

We've hoped for a while that people have learned, through hearing about polls, that one poll by itself doesn't constitute a game-changer. It should only be regarded as part of a larger trend--because absent a major, substantive scandal or the death of one candidate, polling as a whole rarely swings suddenly in a new direction. However, even in this context the latest New England College poll does give us something to think about: is Sen. Jeanne Shaheen really down against Scott Brown?

In its survey of 921 New Hampshire likely voters, New England College found that Sen. Shaheen was just barely behind the former Massachusetts senator by less than one percentage point, well within the margin of error. But then again, a month ago Sen. Shaheen routinely led by 6 or 7 points. "Within the margin of error" is not a phrase she wanted to hear. And it's not as though this poll is a truly isolated incident. Recent polls from UMass - Amherst, the University of New Hampshire, and SurveyUSA all show a close race. So should we accept this New England College survey as part of the story? 

To put it in terms that we can actually understand

A lot of the probabilities I give, especially in the most competitive races, are pretty easy to understand. Rep. Bruce Braley's odds of beating Joni Ernst in the Senate election in Iowa (48%) are no better than a coin toss. Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes's chances of unseating Sen. Mitch McConnell in Kentucky (12%) are about the same as the odds of flipping a coin three times and getting three heads. But some of them are a bit tougher to grasp, especially in the safest seats. If we say, for example, that Shenna Bellows has less than a 1% chance of defeating Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, you should be getting two things from that statement:

1. Because the page is only so wide, we can't include all of the decimal places needed before we start seeing numbers that aren't zero. That's how low her chances are.
2. Her chances, however, are not zero. There is always the outside chance that she can win; very little in the world is 100% certain. The only candidate who is 100% assured of victory this year is Sen. Jeff Sessions, who is unopposed by any candidate. Even if he drops dead in the time between when I finish typing this sentence and when I click "publish", Alabama voters don't have the option to vote for anyone else. (Someone would be appointed to fill his place and then a special election would take place, probably next year, but the now-late Sen. Sessions would still be elected.)

But again, it's hard to get a real-life grasp on how low those chances are. FiveThirtyEight gets around this by using sports analogies in its "A Probabilist Equivalent From The Sports World" segment, where Messrs. Silver and Enten use a (presumably familiar) sporting statistic, such as "The GOP’s current chances of taking the Senate, 57.6 percent, are the same exact chances the New England Patriots had of winning Super Bowl XLVI against the New York Giants with eight seconds left in the first half." 

I have two problems with this, though. Problem #1 is that I'm not a sports guy, so I understand what he's saying even less than I did before he gave the analogy (although that's more a personal problem). Problem #2 is that the probability is near-meaningless unless it's A) greater than the arbitrary 95% confidence threshold statisticians and social scientists agreed on somewhere down the line or B) reporting a statistic that can be reproduced in repeated experiments. That sports analogy is neither; presumably that example means that in situations resembling whatever it is he just said, the team in the Patriots' position won 58% of the time. It can't be repeated, and even if some games come close to it the sample size isn't large enough to make that kind of probabilistic statement down to the decimal point.

I do, however, love myself some poker, so I find it easier to express these probabilities in terms of poker hands. This has some nice side effects, the first of which is that poker hands, being drawn from a fixed deck of cards, have expected probabilities predicted purely by math; we know that the probability of drawing any particular poker hand is 1 in 2,598,960. Second, poker as a game can be simulated and has in effect been simulated over the millions and billions of hands that have been played in its history. Not only can you calculate probabilities mathematically, you could also theoretically observe them, given the patience. 

For your amusement, here are some results I picked out:

Notes on the expanded three-way simulator

In simulating elections, we've so far been able to mostly ignore third-party candidates in determining the chances of victory--they've been so far behind that there isn't any need to calculate their probability of victory because it's essentially zero. In R code (the language under which our simulations are run) the relevant section of the simulator looks like this:

for(i in 1:100000) {
...
        if(D > R) {
              result <- 1 ## Democrat wins
        } else {
              result <- 0 ## Republican wins
        }

        cumulative <- cumulative + result
    }
    cumulative / 1000 ## Democratic win percentage

Close-Up: Independent Candidates in Sparsely Populated Prairie States Are Ruining Our Probabilities

Polls in the Great Plains delivered another defiant middle finger to our conventional wisdom about the Senate races this year. SurveyUSA released its latest survey of the state, and while Democratic no-name Rick Weiland remains at his sub-30% support, the major change is that this poll is the first one to put independent and former Republican Sen. Larry Pressler in a clear second place behind former Gov. Mike Rounds.

There's a bit of a paradox here, though. When we talk about third party candidates we inevitably wonder: is the candidate spoiling votes for the Democrat or the Republican? In South Dakota, before ever looking at the polls, we would guess that Pressler was spoiling votes for Rounds, the Republican, since Pressler represented South Dakota in the Senate as a Republican for 18 years before losing the seat to the man who currently holds it, retiring Sen. Tim Johnson. The trends seem to confirm this--Pressler's support has generally grown since the summer, while Rounds still remains ahead but seems to have trouble breaking the low 40s in the polls compared to the summer, where his best performance was 59% in the first iteration of the YouGov panel survey. (Note, however, that that survey did not include Pressler as an option.)

Larry Pressler, then (1979) and now (2013).

Ratings Update: September 30, 2014

Long story short, some new fundraising data came in, which was really helpful to our model for splitting undecided voters. As a result, Democrats' chances ticked up in two gubernatorial races and ticked down in two others, with no change in the Senate, where Democrats have a 42% chance of retaining the chamber. Not a pure toss-up like it was a week ago, but if you've got a gun to your head you really don't want to bank on that. 

And here are the gubernatorial races:

Partisan polls, new developments, and the Kansas that happened before Kansas

On September 3 the Democratic district attorney from Shawnee County, Kansas, Chad Taylor, officially announced his withdrawal from the election for U.S. Senate. This caused quite a stir among political observers, who then had to contend with the possibility of a unified challenge to incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts by independent Greg Orman. Drama ensued as Secretary of State Kris Kobach refused to remove Taylor's name from the ballot and there was a legal battle over it and now the Democrats are--kinda?--still on the ballot, but without Taylor's name next to the D. The Kansas Supreme Court hasn't made quite clear whether the Kansas Democratic Party has to nominate a replacement candidate.

It's that Senate race that's received a lot of attention in the last three weeks, but what's been neglected is that Alaska Democrats beat Kansas Democrats to the punch by one day. Gov. Sean Parnell was supposed to be a lock for re-election: after ascending to the office following Gov. Sarah Palin's resignation in 2009, Parnell was first elected to the position in 2010 by a margin of over 20 points, with the largest ever share of the vote for any Alaska gubernatorial candidate in history (59%). No one in the spring and even right up until the primary on August 19 questioned what seemed to be a fact of Alaskan political life. 

Of course, it's because no one counted on two earth-shakers.

Kansas and incumbency advantages in our model

I said last time that we have no clue what's going on in Kansas, and it just got harder to tell, since yesterday the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that Democrat Chad Taylor could have his name removed from the ballot. With Taylor presumably out of the picture (to be replaced by "random Democrat", if Secretary of State Kris Kobach's next order stands), the only polls that make sense now are the ones that ask about a matchup between independent Greg Orman and Republican Sen. Pat Roberts.

 

Unfortunately, that doesn't make matters any simpler. To begin with, very few polls asked about what would happen if it were just Orman vs. Roberts; in fact, the YouGov / New York Times / CBS poll didn't even include Orman in their question, as it was conducted when Taylor was still in the race. 

NEW: A table and a cool graph

From now on I'll be regularly updating a histogram and a table for the current Senate forecast. It's got some real nice red, white, and blue colors in it, and there's a link to it here. But it'll always be viewable from the little navbar at the top; just click "The Senate Outlook for November 4" and it'll bring you to the right tab.

For your convenience, though, here's what it's looking like:

Ratings Update: September 19, 2014

We're less than seven weeks out from the elections, and it's around now that some uncertainty begins dropping out of the forecast--mainly because 1) there's more polling out, giving us a more accurate picture of where candidates stand, and 2) there's less time for the underdogs to make up the difference before the election. So a lot of our ratings changes this time will be adjusting for that.

Decreasing robustness in the Republicans' path to victory

We use the word "robust" to describe things that still perform very well even when some of the basic assumptions behind it are violated. For example (and the word generally isn't used to describe them), cockroaches are pretty robust with regard to the environment, if the well-touted factoid that cockroaches can survive a thermonuclear blast carries any weight. No matter what environment we put them in, they're incredibly hardy survivalists.

With that in mind, we now say that the Republican path to control of the Senate is considerably less robust than it was a couple months ago. 

YouGov is back, and (probably) better

Usually I don't devote a lot of attention to a single pollster. That's almost as bad news organizations calling the New Hampshire Senate race a toss-up because one poll showed Scott Brown within the margin of error of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (well, actually two polls--and I was quite ashamed of my native Dartmouth College for reporting the race as such). Or the pundits who suggested that Oregon's Senate race was a toss-up because Monica Wehby led Sen. Jeff Merkley in one poll conducted by a Republican firm. Or the--you get the idea. But as I've said before, I'm paying a lot of attention to this YouGov survey because it's just so ambitious, and just crazy enough to work. Maybe.

To reiterate, I flagged the YouGov survey for a closer look because 1) it was longitudinal, meaning that it would try to track the same panelists in the months leading up to the election, and 2) it was an attempt to poll every race in every state. Even in a state like Utah, where neither Gov. Gary Herbert nor Senators Orrin Hatch or Mike Lee are up for re-election, YouGov assembled a panel of 1087 voters just to ask them the generic House ballot question. I found the sheer scope and ambition of the survey pretty cool.

Unfortunately, as I also wrote, it also sorta fell flat. Too many things--suspicious results, distorted weights, a distinct lack of Asians--seemed off for me to consider any of the results in our average. So I didn't, but I did decide to wait for the next iteration of the poll to come out before passing judgment on YouGov as a whole.

Candidate tiers of experience for the 2014 elections

Just really quickly while we're on the subject of candidate experience, I've been asked to publish a cheat-sheet for how I've coded this year's crop of candidates. Just click "read on" to view the tables.

Candidate quality and the forecast

With Alaska Republicans having finally nominated Daniel S. Sullivan as their choice for the Senate seat there--and with my vacation having finally ended--candidate-choosing time has pretty much wrapped up. In pretty much all races where primaries have yet to be held, the results are foregone conclusions--New Hampshire's Senate is going to be Jeanne Shaheen vs. Scott Brown, etc. (The exception is Rhode Island's Democratic primary for the governorship, which is still basically tied and probably won't be settled until September 9.) As a result, it's probably time to start talking about candidate quality.

"Candidate quality" is about as nebulous as political jargon gets. That's largely because it's a composite of a number of qualities that are just as nebulous as "candidate quality", if not more so: name recognition, political experience, etc. However, that doesn't mean we can't quantify it. Some, like FiveThirtyEight's recently published model, compute candidate quality as a function of the highest political office the candidate has ever held. Depending on what we're trying to calculate here, political experience appears to be the single best metric of candidate quality among all other possible variables, even better than favorability ratings (although those still probably play a role). But for us, candidate quality is all about trying to figure out how undecided voters will break once it actually comes time to put a name down on the ballot.

While (probably) not the same as others have done, I've very crudely measured candidate experience by putting candidates into "tiers" based on the candidate's political career to that point. Specifically:

Ratings Update: September 1, 2014

Just in time for the Labor Day campaign season kickoff, here's some ratings changes:

The last big Senate primary of 2014

By "big" I of course mean a competitive primary in a competitive state. (This is as opposed to something like Hawaii's Democratic Senate primary, which was a competitive primary in a non-competitive state.) That state is, of course, Alaska, where Republicans still haven't settled for sure who their challenger to incumbent Sen. Mark Begich will be.

According to polling, it's true, former Attorney General Daniel S. Sullivan has a comfortable lead--as he has in all polling conducted since the beginning of 2014. In the average he leads Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell by 10 points, 37-27, and 2010 nominee Joe Miller by 19. Sullivan has also raised more twice the amount of money raised by Lt. Gov. Treadwell and Miller combined. While he's been outspent slightly by Lt. Gov. Treadwell, I've written before that the size of the campaign war chest is an indicator of the candidate's strength not so much because of the money he spends, but largely because it indicates broader (or at least deeper) support.

The one thing Lt. Gov. Treadwell (and, to a lesser extent, Miller) may have going for him is Sullivan's potential perception as an "outsider": Treadwell has lived in Alaska since 1978, while Sullivan lived up and down the East Coast most of his life until 2009, when Gov. Sarah Palin tapped him to become Attorney General. In aggregate it may be a minor concern, but for some citizens it may be a dealbreaker. (Personally, I felt that the fact that Tom MacArthur moved down from North Jersey just to run in the NJ-3 primary was a major turn-off.) And in Alaska, with a population less than that of the Columbia, South Carolina metropolitan area, the aggregate is not very large. (Sorry, Columbia, but you were the smallest metro area that was still bigger than Alaska. Nothing personal.)

Still, that takes a backseat to polling and fundraising, which suggest that Sullivan has all the advantages. One other thing that may work in Treadwell and Miller's favor is that polling in Alaska has historically been highly inconsistent (and I'm talking standard deviations of 10+ percentage points here). In 2008, polling in the last month before the election suggested anywhere from a 1-point victory for incumbent Sen. Ted Stevens to a 22-point blowout for eventual winner Mark Begich. And in 2010, the one poll, taken less than a month before the primary election, put Sen. Lisa Murkowski 32 points ahead of the eventual winner, Joe Miller. So it could be that polls are vastly overstating Sullivan's performance and/or vastly understating Treadwell's performance. But then again, it could just as easily be the other way around.

Finally, there's also the somewhat amusing possibility that Anchorage voters will mistake Sullivan for the mayor of Anchorage, Daniel A. Sullivan, and vote accordingly. (I would laugh if this actually happened.) With 42% of Alaska's population, Anchorage is where the votes are anyway. Humor aside, though, it's Sullivan's race to lose here. LIKELY SULLIVAN

Fishiness in the YouGov longitudinal survey

First things first: Kansas's Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat there came out as expected, with incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts doing a little worse than polling predicted, although still coming out on top, 7 points ahead of runner-up Milton R. Wolf. So that's done. Kansas's Senate seat therefore remains SAFE REPUBLICAN for the general election in November, despite Democratic nominee Chad Taylor's surprisingly close performance in some polls.

Then there's the recent YouGov longitudinal survey conducted for CBS News and The New York Times, which I described as a "pollgasm"--there's just a ton of data in here. Importantly, I call it a "longitudinal survey" because its ambitious intent--as if polling a panel of 100,000 registered voters nationwide wasn't ambitious enough--is to track changes in opinion from that exact panel every month until the election. Since, for example, I participated in the panel as a voter from New Jersey, my understanding is that I'll be getting an email in a few weeks to ask me the exact same questions--whether I'll be voting for Sen. Cory Booker or Republican challenger Jeff Bell; whether I'll vote for the Democrat or the Republican running for Congress in my district (Aimee Belgard and Tom MacArthur, respectively, although YouGov doesn't know that); whether I approve or disapprove of President Obama's job performance, etc. And again in September, and ostensibly in October, too.

Ratings Update: July 31, 2014

Less than 100 days before the election on November 4, here's another ratings update:

Close-Up: Ghosts of Indiana in Kansas

The political Newspeak term we'd use to describe the prospect of Sen. Pat Roberts losing renomination to Tea Party activist and radiologist Milton Wolf is "primaried", as in "After Eric Cantor got primaried by David Brat in the June 10 primary, Republican fears that Thad Cochran himself would get primaried in the Mississippi runoff scheduled for two weeks later soared dramatically." However, Roberts campaign adviser David Kensinger elected to use a different phrase: "We're not going to get Lugar'd," he told The New York Times, a jab at 2012's surprise loser, six-term senator from Indiana Dick Lugar, who was notoriously crushed in that year's primary by Tea Party-backed state treasurer Richard Mourdock.

Sen. Lugar, apart from being perceived as not conservative enough, was confronted by the problem of not actually owning a home in his own state. The political Newspeak we'd use to describe that problem is "going Washington", and it occurs when a politician begins spending more and more time in the wealthy northern Virginia suburbs than in his home state. In his 36 years in the Senate, Sen. Lugar admitted, he had only spent 1,800 days in Indiana. While registered to vote in Indianapolis, the supposed "residence" at which he was registered to vote was actually an expansive, 600-acre farm about 10 minutes' drive outside downtown Indianapolis. "Getting Lugar'd" is a special case of getting primaried where the incumbent has physically lost touch with his home state by not living there anymore.

It's by Sen. Lugar's ghost that Sen. Roberts is now being haunted. Sen. Roberts' "home" is actually a house on a country club owned by two donors with whom he stays every once in a while when he visits Kansas. But there are three key differences between Kansas 2014 and Indiana 2012 that make Sen. Roberts a lot safer than Sen. Lugar:

Hooray! I was only partly wrong on Georgia

"Looking forward to" isn't the same as "winning", as Senate candidate Rep. Jack Kingston found out after his loss in the Georgia runoff yesterday. When the primary on May 20 proceeded to a runoff, many Georgia Republicans' favored candidates were forced out of the race. Excitement among those voters was lower as a result (it's a case of "KAREN FUCK YEAH" vs. "meh, Kingston I guess"), and turnout subsequently lowered--a common pattern in runoff elections that we saw in the last election to this Senate seat in 2008, when a whopping 1.6 million voters who voted in the hotly contested November election didn't vote in the December runoff.

Nevertheless, the departure of some strong runner-up candidates from the race meant that both David Perdue and Rep. Kingston were able to increase their vote totals. Rep. Kingston did much better than Perdue in this respect, closing the 30,000-vote deficit on May 20 to a less than 9,000 vote gap yesterday. In large part this was due to his dramatic improvement in the counties carried by Perdue in the May 20 primary. In Hall and Henry Counties, both suburbs on the edge of the Atlanta metro area, Rep. Kingston picked up more than 2,600 votes in the runoff compared to the primary. Perdue couldn't boast any equivalent improvement in the counties carried by Rep. Kingston on May 20. Just as a refresher (and so you can look at both maps next to each other), here's the May 20 primary again (red is Perdue, blue is Rep. Kingston, and green is Karen Handel):

2014 GOP Senate primary in Georgia by county and winner's share of vote.

The Georgia Runoff, Part Two

Where would coverage of the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Georgia be without a nice colored map?

May 20, 2014 GOP primary for the U.S. Senate in Georgia by county and winner's share of vote.

Three Reasons Why Jack Kingston Should Look Forward to Tomorrow

With one day left before July 22, the Republican primary runoff seems only to have tightened up since Rep. Jack Kingston and David Perdue advanced from the May 20 primary. However, that's a tightening in a marginal sense: Rep. Kingston is still favored for tomorrow. Here's why:

Reasons to be optimistic in Alaska

Only one red-state Democrat has yet to figure out who his Republican opponent will be. Senators Pryor in Arkansas, Hagan in North Carolina, and Walsh in Montana have gone through their primaries already, and Louisiana's jungle primary system means that Sen. Landrieu already has her GOP opponents scoped out. All that remains is Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska, who can't yet say for sure whether he's up against former Attorney General Daniel S. Sullivan, Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell, or 2010 nominee Joe Miller.

For reasons I've touched on before, I saw Sen. Begich, regardless of his eventual opponent, as probably the least-doomed of his fellow red-state Democrats. That was back in April, though, when Sen. Hagan looked like she wasn't doing all that well; now that she's seemed to have regained an edge over Speaker Thom Tillis, she's taken that spot. Nevertheless, I still see Sen. Begich as one of the least-doomed of red-state Democrats this year. For a refresher, here's the map of Sen. Begich's 2008 victory over incumbent Sen. Ted Stevens (slightly recolored):

2008 Alaska Senate election by county and by margin.

Stragglers: Georgia Runoff and the Rest

One thing that's bugging me right about now is the fact that I don't have access to Stata, the statistical package in which I do a lot of the stuff that goes in here. Fortunately, I do still have my Excel spreadsheets to enter polls and election results and create graphs, and I still have Microsoft Paint to make those maps I love so much. And a lot of the primaries are over already. As far as competitive races go, only the following primaries have yet to be held:

Ratings Update: June 30, 2014

It's that time of the month again!

One in the Senate:

Louisiana. Sen. Mary Landrieu has literally for months now trailed in most polling; the only polls in which she ties or maintains narrow (i.e. within the margin of error) leads are those polls which do not filter for likely voters--and especially in midterm elections, those polls tend to skew toward Democratic candidates. On the average--which, admittedly, is dominated by one poll conducted twenty days ago (the others have been two months old or older)--she trails Rep. Bill Cassidy 44-49. As we saw in Mississippi, there's plenty that can turn around between an election and the runoff (which is almost a certainty in Louisiana this year), but Sen. Landrieu faces a much tougher climate than Sen. Cochran, an old Republican in a heavily Republican state, did. LEANS REPUBLICAN

A bunch of maps and a chart that might help explain Mississippi

First things first: Call me easily amused, but I found it funny that Mississippi has both a Lincoln County and a Jefferson Davis County (the two opposing commanders-in-chief of the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War).

Second thing: Have I gotten myself a track record for being just slightly wrong now?

• In Iowa's June 3 primary, I predicted that state senator Joni Ernst would win the necessary 35% to avoid a convention nomination, but wouldn't win a majority. She did end up avoiding the convention--by clobbering her nearest competitors by 38 points.
• In Mississippi's June 3 primary, I said that neither state senator Chris McDaniel nor incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran would receive a majority; Sen. Cochran would lead, but the election would be forced to a runoff. I was right about the runoff but wrong about the standings (although McDaniel's lead was very, very narrow).

Now, most recently, I predicted that McDaniel would prevail in the runoff election held Tuesday. This, as you may recall, was mainly because 1) McDaniel had come in first in the actual primary and 2) most polling showed McDaniel up, and the few polls that had Sen. Cochran up gave him only narrow leads well within the margin of error. So you can imagine my surprise when Sen. Cochran defied the odds to be renominated for a seventh term in the Senate.

Another Tuesday, Another Primary

Today sees another slew of primaries in no fewer than five states, but by far the most watched election today will be Mississippi's Republican primary runoff election, due to its status as pretty much the last chance for the Tea Party to knock off an incumbent Republican, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's stunning loss in VA-7 two weeks ago notwithstanding. As you might have read before, Mississippi's GOP primary was a nailbiter in which state senator Chris McDaniel would have knocked off longtime incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran were it not for Mississippi's runoff law, which states that should no candidate receive 50% + 1 of the vote, a runoff election between the top two finishers must be held to determine the winner, much like in Georgia. 

 

That runoff is today, and from the looks of it McDaniel is favored to win the runoff. My average has him leading Sen. Cochran 49-44, with about an 85% chance of victory for the Tea Party-backed McDaniel. And not only is McDaniel doing at least as well as Sen. Cochran in all polling (the worst he's done is trail Sen. Cochran by one point, well within the margin of error), his performance has been remarkably consistent: barring one poll from NSON Opinion, McDaniel has remained in the high 40s to low 50s ever since the primary. Similarly, Sen. Cochran, barring one poll, has remained in the low-to-mid 40s since the primary. In other words, neither candidate seems to have any momentum: McDaniel isn't going down, and Sen. Cochran isn't going up. And that, of course, is good for McDaniel, who has the lead and looks ready to maintain the lead as the polls open. MCDANIEL VICTORY

Other states:

The Spoiler Effect: Polls vs. Reality

More often than not, third-party candidates have little effect on the ultimate result of an election. The eventual performance of most third-party candidates is lower than the margin of error of most polls (2%-4%), and so a poll that includes every single candidate running in the election (yes, even the Rent Is Too Damn High Party) provides no useful information about the likely results of the election. But when a third party candidate begins polling well (above the margin of error), pollsters would do well to include that candidate in their survey questions, so as to more closely reflect the range of choices voters have. A poll that gives a choice between Al Gore, George W. Bush, and Ralph Nader, for example, could give a different result from a poll that gives a choice between just Gore and Bush.

So in an election like the Senate race in North Carolina, where Libertarian Sean Haugh has been supported by about 10% of respondents on average in the polls that include his name, it'd probably be a good idea to continue putting his name in polls, since even considering sampling error Haugh's performance is probably fairly strong. Certainly it's strong enough to possibly tip the scales in favor of either candidate in a close race like North Carolina.

The Spoiler Effect

In Virginia's 2013 gubernatorial election, Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis captured over 146,000 votes--almost three times the 56,000-vote margin that separated Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli from the victor, former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe. His presence on the ballot may well have cost Republicans the governor's mansion. Last week, Cuccinelli consultant Chris LaCivitas had this to say about Libertarian candidates:

"Libertarians and quote-un-quote libertarian-minded Republicans exist for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to keep Republicans from winning general elections." -- Chris LaCivita

Eric Cantor's Contribution to Electoral History--and to the Senate Election in Alaska

There was a certain primary I dismissed offhand only hours ago as likely to be "more of a Kentucky than a Mississippi." That race was another one marketed as a "Tea Party vs. establishment" brawl, despite the fact that the "Tea Party" candidate wasn't really a tea partier. But the incumbent in the GOP primary for the 7th District in Virginia was actually just about as establishment as it gets--House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defending his seat against economics professor David Brat. With 99% of precincts reporting, Prof. Brat has unseated Rep. Cantor with 55% of the vote. In doing so, Rep. Cantor's become the first ever Majority Leader to have been primaried. Congratulations! (Note: I wish people would stop saying the "first Majority Leader since 1899" figure. There was no such thing as a House Majority Leader before 1899. It's just the first ever House Majority Leader.)

Not-so-Super-Tuesday Mk. III Update

When I called today "Super Tuesday Mk. III" last week, I sort of overstated it. Today's primaries have neither the excitement of the McDaniel - Cochran face-off on Super Tuesday Mk. II on June 3, nor the importance of the Georgia GOP primary on Super Tuesday Mk. I on May 20. In fact, there are only five states holding primary elections today:

Ratings Update: June 6, 2014

With Super Tuesday Mk. II three days behind us, I'm ready to make some changes, in addition to the change in Arkansas's gubernatorial election from TOSS-UP to LEANS REPUBLICAN. 

In the Senate: 

Mississippi yielded only one of two surprises from Tuesday: state senator Chris McDaniel placed ahead of incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran in the Republican primary in Mississippi; however, thanks to Thomas Carey's 1.5% share of the vote, neither of the two received the majority required to avoid a runoff on June 24. I slightly favor McDaniel in the runoff based on his performance in the primary, although with three weeks before the runoff anything can really happen. This runoff is a TOSS-UP. Former Rep. Travis Childers, the Democratic nominee, would vastly prefer to face McDaniel in the general election due to the latter's associations with neo-Confederate groups. He's probably right to do so; in the event that McDaniel wins the runoff, I'd change this race to LIKELY REPUBLICAN. (Remember, though, that this is conditional on McDaniel winning the runoff.)

Iowa was the other surprise from Tuesday: while state senator Joni Ernst's victory was completely in accordance with the polls, her 56% share of the vote defied polls that pointed to a victory that would just clear the 35% threshold required to avoid a convention nomination. The first polls taken after her victory (the most recent since three weeks ago) both have her leading, suggesting that earlier polls underestimated her support. This may be because Rep. Bruce Braley was the Democratic front runner long before the primary, while Ernst was only slightly ahead in a crowded field; now that both candidates have settled, poll respondents have a clear choice. Instead of leaning Democratic, I'd say this race is now a TOSS-UP. 

Governor's mansions

Maine (like Oregon in the last update) is really just an overdue change. There is no reason to think, from the limited polling available, that incumbent Republican Gov. Paul LePage is in as much danger as, say, Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, who has been down by more than 20 points in all polls taken since the primary there. Therefore I'm moving this one to LEANS DEMOCRAT. Bear in mind that both Rep. Mike Michaud, the Democratic front runner, and Gov. LePage both face complications in independent candidate Eliot Cutler, who came within 2 points of winning the governorship from Gov. LePage in 2010. Cutler isn't polling nearly as well this year, but Gov. LePage should still be wary of his candidacy--and hope that he takes more votes from Rep. Michaud (as often happens to Maine Democrats).

Other than that, the relative dearth of surprises from Tuesday means that the status quo is maintained. Democrats are still likely to pick up 2-3 governorships; the major difference now is that, should Sen. Cochran win his runoff (keeping Mississippi safely in the Republican column), control of the Senate is still a toss-up, but one that now favors Republican control instead of Democratic control, which is what I previously had.

EDIT: I forgot to mention a rating for Georgia's runoff election in the Republican primary between Rep. Jack Kingston and David Perdue. At the present time, by two very important metrics--polls and fundraising--Rep. Kingston has much greater support than Perdue does. In polls Rep. Kingston leads by double-digit margins. In fundraising, not only does Rep. Kingston still have almost $1.3 million on hand compared to Perdue's "mere" $460,000 (a huge advantage considering that the election is still a month and a half away), exactly none of Rep. Kingston's war chest is self-financed, which suggests that his fundraising machine is much more sustainable than Perdue's, which is pretty much all from his wallet at this point. I therefore call this one a LIKELY KINGSTON.

Super Post-Tuesday Mk. II Wrap-Up: Where I Went Wrong

Here we are past midnight, Wednesday, June 4, and we've one race yet to be decided. As of 1:35 AM in Mississippi, with 98% of precincts reporting, state senator Chris McDaniel leads incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran 49.6-48.8: a difference of 2,528 votes. Unfortunately, we probably won't know the exact results until tomorrow morning. Here's Emily Wagster Pettus of the Associated Press in Jackson:

Zero precincts reporting from Covington County. An election commissioner just told me she's home in bed & can't give us numbers. #MSSen
— Emily Wagster Pettus (@EWagsterPettus) June 4, 2014

At this point I think it's safe to say that Mississippi's going to a runoff.

Super Tuesday Mk. II Update: 11:19 PM

As it turns out, Joni Ernst's early lead in Iowa was not a fluke of which precincts turned in their votes first; with over 60% of the vote in, she has garnered 55% of the vote and appears to be heading for a non-convention victory. Sigh #1 for the Republican establishment.

Mississippi has become even less clear than it was before, as McDaniel has once again slipped below the 50% point required to avoid a runoff. He still leads Sen. Cochran, but even more narrowly, by less than 3,000 votes. Only 8% of the vote remains left to be counted, and increasingly it looks like the race is headed for a June 24 runoff. Still, when vote totals are running this close, 8% is more than enough to change a 3,000 vote gap.

New Jersey's GOP Senate primary is finally set: with 99% of the vote counted, Jeff Bell has won the right to lose to Sen. Cory Booker with a whopping 29.3% mandate from Republican voters. Best of luck to him.

Super Tuesday Mk. II Update: 10:50 PM

Still close in Mississippi: except now it's the other way around. Chris McDaniel now leads Sen. Cochran by less than 5,000 votes--50.2-48.3. Carey still holds 1.6% of the vote. 20% of the vote remains to be counted, which means there's still time for this to swing any way--McDaniel wins, Cochran wins; runoff, no runoff.

New Jersey is still close, with no candidate above 30%.

Iowa has begun reporting its votes, as well. In Iowa, primary candidates must win more than 35% of the vote to avoid a convention nomination. It's anyone's guess as to who would be nominated there--establishment Republicans fear that supporters of former Texas Rep. Ron Paul could steer the nomination toward a less moderate candidate. Like the polls said, most of the candidates are receiving under 20% of the vote. The exception is state senator Joni Ernst--our average had Ernst at 36%, just enough to avoid a convention even without any undecided voters breaking for her. As it stands she currently has over 53% of the vote. With only 22% of the vote in, it's not safe to call this race hers, but it's something to look out for. As I've been doing anyway.

Super Tuesday Mk. II Update: 10:18 PM

Finally Iowa's gotten on the ball and results are filtering in. And they tell us--absolutely nothing, because only 0.4% of the vote is in. Whatever, we can wait.

In Mississippi, things are looking slightly better for Sen. Cochran, who at least has more than 50% of the vote now. With the gap between Sen. Cochran and McDaniel at just over 5,000 votes out of over 166,000 counted, there's still room to call this one either way as more of the 40% of the remaining precincts report in.

In New Jersey the race has only gotten closer. With 28.2% of the vote, Jeff Bell leads Rich Pezzullo even more narrowly than before; meanwhile, less than 25% of the vote remains to be reported. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a recount tomorrow, although I doubt Sen. Booker really cares--it's still a safe seat for him.

Super Tuesday Mk. II Update: 9:44 PM

Some preliminary results in:

• Two incumbent Republican governors have easily defeated primary challengers. South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, with under 30% of the vote in, both lead their primary challengers by 60-70%.
• In South Dakota again, former Gov. Mike Rounds has secured the Republican nomination for Senate with 57.8% of the vote and just over 30% reporting. He's set to face Democrat Rick Weiland, who ran unopposed, in November.

And now, two non-results:

• New Jersey: Over half of the vote is in and the Republican vote is still split four ways with no clear leader: businessman Rich Pezzullo is ahead with 31% of the vote, but only five points ahead of political consultant Jeff Bell.
• Mississippi: The one that everyone's said they're watching, and as it turns out, it may well have been. Sen. Thad Cochran leads state senator Chris McDaniel by 600 votes with 32% of the vote in--but it may not be enough to avoid a grueling runoff campaign, since neither have 50% thanks to Thomas Carey, who has 1.6% of the vote. Cochran leads McDaniel 49.6-48.8. Meanwhile, former Democratic U.S. Rep. Travis Childers has easily won the Democratic nomination.

The Mississippi Update

So far polling has shown both incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran and state senator Chris McDaniel both polling well below the 50% required to avoid a runoff (which is entirely possible, considering that a third candidate, Thomas Carey, is in the race (but isn't being talked about at all by the media and has only pulled in single-digits in the polls). 

A few things to note:

• Sen. Cochran just barely edges out McDaniel in my average, 44-43. Statistically, it's a dead heat.
• However, since an apparent eleventh-hour polling surge for McDaniel, the Tea Party-backed state senator has polled much more consistently than Sen. Cochran. McDaniel's poll numbers have been above 40% since April, while Sen. Cochran's have not broken 45% since then. This is a contrast from the six months prior, in which McDaniel never broke 40% and Sen. Cochran had polled above 50% multiple times.
• Incumbency is important--there are quite a few undecided voters that will probably largely break for Sen. Cochran based on name recognition, which, if anything, is the thing that will help him avoid a runoff. However, I believe the importance of incumbency drops sharply as election day approaches--by that time incumbency should have translated into leads in the polls. If anything, Sen. Cochran's poll numbers have only gone down.

Because of all this, I think this primary election will be too close to call. If I were to be specific about it, I'd say that Sen. Cochran will come in first but with less than 50% of the vote--meaning a runoff election between Sen. Cochran and McDaniel on June 24.

Super Tuesday Mk. II and Quick Ratings Update: June 1, 2014

Normally I make the necessary rating changes at the end of the month; however, we have another Super Tuesday coming up, so we'll hold off on that until afterward in case we have any primary surprises. Not that we had any on the last Super Tuesday (May 20), but still. Primaries are going to be held in the following states:

Close-Up: Doubly Dynastic

Only one half of the Senate match-up in Georgia has been settled: Michelle Nunn won the Democratic nomination essentially unopposed. Well, she faced three other Democrats, but they didn't exist as far as media coverage of the race was concerned. The proof? Unless you're from DeKalb County (home of runner-up, former state senator Steen Miles) or a member of the Board of Trustees of the Georgia Psychiatric Physicians Association (on which fourth place finisher Dr. Branko Radulovacki sat from 2007 to 2009), you don't recognize the names of any of the other candidates. (There's also a chance you read the Wikipedia article on the election, but even then the third place finisher, former U.S. Army Ranger Todd Robinson, doesn't have his own Wikipedia article, which is totally a good judge of notability.)

Establishment 3, Far Right 0

Three primaries were held in competitive states yesterday. It appears that most of the media hype around insurgent right-wing Republicans was just that--hype. Recognized "establishment" candidates won pretty easily over Tea Party-backed opponents in the following states:

More on the Louisiana runoff

A couple days ago this article on the Fix at The Washington Post popped up in my Google Alerts. In it, Aaron Blake brings up something I had written about five days earlier--the very strong possibility that the Senate election in Louisiana will proceed to a runoff due to the inability of the two highest-polling candidates, incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu and U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, to break 50%. 

Blake suggests a pretty simple (and pretty good, roughly) way to interpret the polls that don't ask about the head-to-head between Sen. Landrieu and Rep. Cassidy--just stack up the votes for Republican candidates--that includes state representative Paul Hollis and retired USAF Col. Rob Maness as well as Rep. Cassidy--and those are the votes Republicans get in the runoff.

Nationalizing the Races

One way to look at the 2014 midterms--any midterm, really--is to consider them to be a referendum on President Obama. That is, voters will vote mostly based on their perception of President Obama rather than on their perceptions of the candidates running in their district or state. In such a world, where local races are completely nationalized, Democrats are doomed. As of December 2013 (which is a long time ago according to campaign time, but recent enough to make some judgments), in only one state--his native Hawaii--is his approval rating above 60%; moreover, of the 12 most disapproving states, two, Alaska and Arkansas, are home to two of the most vulnerable Democratic senators in the country. 

Of course, we don't live in that world. Regardless of whatever pundits might say about how the president's favorability impacts the races in the states, the fact is that the elections this year don't have President Obama vs. a generic Republican on the ballot. They're about two candidates that have their own records and their own personal appeal on which to run.

Pollsters Are Looking at the Wrong Race in Louisiana

Don't get me wrong; the Senate race is the only statewide one this year. (Louisiana holds its statewide elections every fourth year; the most recent one was in 2011.)

What I'm referring to is the Pelican State's unique (well, within the United States) system of elections, a holdover from when New Orleans was the largest city in the French North American colonies. A holdover from French civil law, Louisiana doesn't hold primaries; instead it pits every candidate that files from all parties into a great one-versus-the-world battle, known as a "jungle primary". If no majority is reached by a single candidate, the two highest-performing candidates advance to a runoff held on December 6. This allows for some great political theater, but it's hard on pollsters who have to decide which candidates to include in their polling, especially since it's possible for multiple candidates to run from each party.

Fielding Questions: Defending More Ratings

I had a nice conversation with the president of the Dartmouth College Democrats the other day about our latest ratings. Apparently he was pretty happy with them--I don't want to chalk it up to partisan wishful thinking, but I feel that might be at least part of the reason he's pretty optimistic about Democratic chances in Mississippi. (By the way, that isn't something to be ashamed of--go ask Nancy Pelosi what she thinks about the chances of a Democratic House majority in 2014. I guarantee you that she won't scare away donors by telling the truth.) While he's happy with our current predictions that have Democrats just barely holding onto the Senate (at this time, we're saying 50-50, with Vice President Joe Biden providing the tiebreaking vote), he did question some of our other ratings that maybe weren't as friendly to Democrats as he thought they should be.

As a result, we think it's fair that we should address two of his concerns, and maybe justify some of the ratings we maintained and therefore didn't include in the last update (because who wants to hear again about all 72 elections in a single post?). We're not changing any of the ratings; this is just a brief recap of the ones that seemed questionable to him.

What We're Doing with This Campaign Finance Stuff

In partnership with Dartmouth Rootstrikers we've been keeping track of monthly polling averages for all of the races we've been watching, including the 34 Class 2 Senate elections plus the two special Senate elections, as well as all 36 gubernatorial elections this year. Rootstrikers, if you didn't know, is a group (largely students) devoted to reducing the influence of money in politics. In part this is an extension of our study over the winter, in which we found a negative correlation between the amount of money spent in a Senate race and the margin of victory in that race: the more money was spent, the more competitive the race was.

Close-Up: The Bill Clinton Effect

Vulnerable Democrats across the country are distancing themselves from President Obama, even as his disapproval rating continues to fall nationally. In some places that distancing takes the form of hand-waving the president's relevance to the election, as Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska has done by taking the line of "mend it, don't end it" on the Affordable Care Act. In other places, like Louisiana, it takes the form of outright chastising the president's agenda, as Sen. Mary Landrieu has taken to doing, especially on his energy policy.

And then there's Kentucky. In February, former President and Democratic "Explainer-in-Chief" Bill Clinton hit the campaign trail in support of Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, whose family has a long relationship with the Clintons. It's a boon to Sec. Grimes, who can campaign on the popularity of a former president, rather than campaign against the unpopularity of a current president. Among the Democratic establishment, Clinton commands better fundraising capacity than any other Democrat in the country, save for possibly President Obama himself. Unlike many Democrats these days, Clinton is still popular in the South, as he is across the nation. And if the psycholinguists at NC State are to be believed, even his accent can help with Southern voters. (Sec. Grimes's accent is still noticeable, although not nearly as recognizable as Clinton's.)

Ratings Update: April 27, 2014

Almost a month on from our first set of ratings, we've got new polling averages, new fundraising info, and we've also added 36 gubernatorial races to the mix as well as our original 36 Senate races. We're not going to list the ratings for all of our gubernatorial races here, but if you've been keeping up there are now two maps on the right-hand sidebar. We do, however, have some rating changes:

Brief notes on the North Carolina GOP Senate primary

SurveyUSA just released the first poll of the Republican primary field North Carolina's Senate election since they held their debate yesterday. And it looks pretty rosy for House Speaker Thom Tillis. Prior to the debate, Speaker Tillis had consistently led in the polls, but only by only by 6 or 7 percentage points, and not nearly enough to break 40%, which is the required plurality a candidate must win in order avoid a runoff election. Now he's at 39%, well within the margin of error of the necessary 40% and leading his closest opponent, Tea Party activist Greg Brannon, by 19 points. 

We can't say just yet that Speaker Tillis can comfortably assume an easy road to the nomination without a potentially grueling runoff campaign against Brannon or the other major contender, Baptist pastor Mark Harris of Charlotte. After all, this is just one poll, albeit one that comes after the second debate in which the candidates failed to distinguish themselves from each other. Specifically, the three other candidates who aren't Thom Tillis failed to distinguish themselves from the Speaker, who was the only candidate at the debate who held elected office. If none of the other candidates can present himself (or herself, in the case of nurse practitioner Heather Grant) as a viable yet distinct alternative to Speaker Tillis, current polling suggests that Republican voters will defer to the Speaker's superior political experience and name recognition.

But if we had to guess? We'd say an outright Tillis victory in the primary on May 6. If you happen to be a North Carolina Republican, go vote. Civic duty and all that.

New Polls Out, Have Political Junkies Questioning Meaning of Existence

I said something a while ago about one poll not being news. What about, I dunno, four?

Campaign junkies are (or at least, I am) either excited, disgusted, or perplexed by the latest set of polls out from Upshot, a new 2014-midterxtravaganza section from The New York Times, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. You've got David Lauter at the Los Angeles Times giving a positive "always look on the bright side of life" spin, especially on Sen. Mark Pryor's chances in Arkansas. Then on the other side you've got the always-prescient Karl Rove at Fox News raising some admittedly reasonable objections to the poll methodology. And then you've got non-partisans wondering why these polls bucked trends so hard.

That's me, the last one. (I'm also a bit excited, but only because these are the first polls to come out of some of these states in weeks.) 

So, first things first: what do the polls say?

Gerrymandering: Tough to Avoid

One of the most attractive scapegoats for the polarization of Congress is the practice of gerrymandering, the deliberate drawing of House districts to achieve a desired result in congressional elections. Because the districts are (for the most part) drawn by state legislatures, it's easy to see why this is a tempting argument: it places blame squarely on the politicians in Carson City or wherever that the people dislike so much. (Don't take it personally, Nevadans--I used you as the example because by several metrics you're the most gerrymandered state in the Union. It's only partially your fault, which I'll get to. For the most part I'll be dumping on Pennsylvania.) Pennsylvania is actually one of the less gerrymandered states for its size (it's apportioned 18 congressional districts, so there's a lot of room for creativity):

Pennsylvania House districts, 113th Congress (2013 - 2015).

Obama Ascendant: Is It Enough?

The results of the elections in November will in no small part be determined by President Obama's popularity by the end of the year. Republicans, who have been relentlessly hammering the president over the Affordable Care Act for the last four years, know it, and they've squeezed quite a bit of mileage out of it. Democrats know it too--especially Democrats running in red states that Gov. Romney won in 2012. The latest ad from Sen. Mary Landrieu shows the Louisiana Democrat calling the Obama administration policies toward oil and natural gas "simply wrong":