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: