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.

Mississippi Senate, SAFE REPUBLICAN. I understand the hype in a potential Democratic pickup in a state where Democrats have only been going downhill since about 1964. Incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran is almost certainly rusty on campaigning since he hasn't really had to do it for decades now, and he faces a robust right-side primary challenge in state senator Chris McDaniel. For a primary challenge to a six-term incumbent, McDaniel is polling extremely well, keeping Sen. Cochran below 60% in every primary poll. But that's the thing--keeping Sen. Cochran below 60% is not the same as winning the primary. A lead is a lead, and Sen. Cochran has had a sizable and consistent one. Even if McDaniel wins, I said, he's still heavily favored to win. In response to the claim that McDaniel could be hurt by his "neo-Confederate" affiliation, I half-jokingly said that "being a neo-Confederate isn't as much of a problem as you might think it is, especially in a state that still has the Dixie Cross on its flag." The grain of truth in that joke is that in a state that overall goes as solidly Republican as Mississippi, there's very little that can really damage a Republican candidate's chances at election.

Minnesota Senate, LIKELY DEMOCRAT. The question here was, why not SAFE DEMOCRAT? After all, incumbent Sen. Al Franken leads all of his potential Republican challengers by double digits in almost all polling in a blue state that has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 13 out of the last 14 elections, which is an even better record than even deeper-blue Massachusetts. Putting aside the fact that the latest polls were conducted by Suffolk, a very Democratic-leaning firm, I wanted to bring up the fact that this is one poll. In other states that pollsters are calling pretty much every week, there's plenty of polling data available that should mitigate sampling error and house effects; with one poll there's a lot of uncertainty. What we can only really go by at this point is history and economic conditions, which is the sort of thing the Monkey Cage's Election Lab goes by--and Democrats should bear in mind that Sen. Franken won election by only 312 votes in what was otherwise an amazing year for Democrats nationwide. Not to say that he's vulnerable on the level of, say, Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado--he still retains highly favorable winning chances--but to put him at Safe Democrat I'd have to consider him to be safe on the level of Sen. Durbin in Illinois or Sen. Markey in Massachusetts, which I don't. I put him more on the level of Sen. Shaheen in New Hampshire, who is also rated at Likely Democrat.

There were also plenty of differences in gubernatorial races, too, but overall a lot of the differences I noted can be chalked up to semantics--what's the difference between a "lean Democrat" and a "likely Democrat", or a "likely Republican" and a "safe Republican"? The way I would answer it is: How much of a week's salary would you be willing to bet on it? If it's less than 100%, I'd say it's not safe.