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: