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Know when to fold 'em...

...and know when to run.

Chances are, if you're running for president, you won't win. Obvious though it may seem, it was still kind of surprising to me to actually read it in James Oliphant's article in The National Journal: "Running for the presidency is, at heart, a loser's game. In the past 35 years, scores of men and women have tried, and only five have made it."

Of the eight luminaries on this stage--including three governors, a senator, two congressmen, a Speaker of the House, and a pizza guy--a whopping 0% would go on to become President of the United States.

Because of this, not every candidate tries to see primary season through to the end--and why would they? Running a presidential campaign costs cash and credibility (just ask Rick Perry about the latter), and not every candidate has much to spare. Unfortunately, just looking at campaign data shows very little rhyme or reason as to when or why it is exactly candidates finally decide to pull out of the race. Maybe unforeseen circumstances, like the hospitalization of Rick Santorum's daughter in 2012, force the candidate to figure out his priorities. Maybe the campaign can't sustain the cash flow needed to keep a campaign going. Or maybe the candidate has simply decided it's a losing battle, with an impossibly narrow path to victory.

This question--how do we know when to fold 'em?--came up as I was developing a state-by-state model for eyeballing--and this is really, really, really rough eyeballing--who would win the Republican nomination for president next year. State-by-state polling, especially for early states like Iowa and New Hampshire, or delegate-rich prizes like Florida, is readily available, as is a tentative calendar for primary elections. Both of these should allow us to estimate, day-to-day, how many delegates each candidate has accumulated.

We're nine months out from the Canadian election and I don't feel like saying anything definitive about it just yet

As far as elections go, the Canadian federal election this year seems very distant—we’ve still got a good nine months to go before the current scheduled election day on October 19. (Which is odd, considering that every two years when we have national elections, the hot question always seems to be about what that election means for the elections two and four and twenty years into the future.) And no one’s paying attention in the US, and definitely not as much as they were paying attention to the 2014 midterms. While understandable, it’s one that Americans should be paying attention to, more so than the British ones. We’ve kind of got this special relationship with Canada. Yeah, Britain, we know we’ve got one with you too, but let’s be real here—long-distance relationships can sometimes seem a little, I dunno, let’s say distant, and besides, Canada makes much better food.

The current situation

While current PM Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have been in power since the 2006 elections, it was only in the most recent elections in 2011 that they have actually constituted a majority of the House of Commons—unlike in Britain, where Conservatives weren’t able to form a majority on their own to elect their leader as Prime Minister, Canada has no such rule. Therefore, despite his caucus comprising only 40% of the House after the 2006 elections, Harper has remained Prime Minister in the 9 years since.

It could very well change, however. The 2011 elections were unprecedented in the history of the Liberal Party, not because of the size of the Conservative victory (the Tories won less than 40% of the vote and only an 11-seat majority) but because of the size of the Liberal defeat.* In years past the Liberal Party of Canada had been referred to as Canada’s “natural governing party” because of its near domination of Canadian politics throughout the 20^th century, during which it held power for almost 69 years. It’s the same party responsible for the single-payer healthcare system we in America love so much (*cough*) and (thanks to the party’s historic reliance on the majority-French Quebec as a bedrock of its electoral support) Canada’s official English-French bilingualism.

Its 2011 defeat, however, was a shellacking worse than either major U.S. political party has suffered since 1936. The former “natural governing party” was reduced to a mere 34 seats out of the 308 in the House. This was not all to the gain of the Conservatives, who didn’t win anything resembling a landslide. Instead, it was largely at the gain of the New Democratic Party, which, like Britain’s Lib Dems, had historically been the third-place finisher in every election. That changed in 2011, when the New Democrats won over a hundred seats and became the Official Opposition (that is, second place) for the first time in its history. 

Jeb Bush's greatest advantage is being from Florida

Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia has long since anointed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as the "nominal frontrunner" for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. It's partly due to the lacklusterness of the opposition (third time's the charm, Mitt) and partly due to the fact that he's the only Republican so far to have officially announced an exploratory committee into a candidacy. But Jeb Bush has a fairly obvious advantage that comes into play not just in the general election but in the nomination fight, too: He's from Florida.

This may be less important for the general election than you think. While Mitt Romney's decisive loss in Massachusetts in 2012 and Al Gore's loss of Tennessee in 2000 probably burn sharply in the minds of the two men (probably more so Gore than Romney, since winning any other one state would have won Gore the presidency), those two are exceptions to the general historical trend: presidential candidates almost always win their home states. Before Gore, the last candidate to lose his home state at all (while winning at least one other state) was George McGovern, who lost his home state of South Dakota by over 8 points in 1972, and the last candidate to lose his home state while winning the presidency was Richard Nixon, who didn't need New York to win the presidency in 1968. (Nixon therefore belongs to an exclusive club along with Woodrow Wilson and James Polk, the other two presidents who were elected without the support of their home states.)

Even so, that may not be so much due to a "native son" effect as much as it's a result of the nomination process working. Democratic primary voters will probably nominate a moderate-to-liberal candidate; these candidates are easiest to find in places like New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and so on. Those moderate-to-liberal candidates will likely win New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California not necessarily because they're from one of those states, but because those states tend to vote for moderate-to-liberal candidates anyway, especially when given the choice between that and a moderate-to-conservative candidate. Of course, in a state as close as Florida is at the national level, being from there might make a difference. But for someone like Hillary Clinton (New York) or Rick Perry (Texas), there is no real home state advantage to make use of.

Primaries, though, are different. In a primary, it's no longer a broad spectrum of voters comparing the moderate-liberal candidate to the moderate-conservative candidate; it's now the right side of the political spectrum trying to pick its favorite moderate-conservative candidate out of a bunch of conservative candidates (for the Republican primary, that is). This means distinguishing between candidates ideologically is much more difficult, and other factors may come into play. One might be electability--does even the most partisan of Republicans really believe that, barring a massive, 1929-sized economic implosion, that Ted Cruz can beat Hillary Clinton? But another easy factor could be home state. I, as a New Jerseyan, might vote for Chris Christie in the Republican primary since he's from the state, and I know I can trust a New Jerseyan to serve the functions of the office well.

Britain has a 56% chance of not returning a government after Election Day

"Oh look, a squirrel. How quaint." - Tory PM David Cameron (right), to Labour leader Ed Miliband (left) and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg (center). No pun intended.*

Ever since this blog was started in March last year I had been fairly certain that there would be quite a bit of a hiatus at least for the beginning of 2015. After all, there's not much election that happens in odd-numbered years, save for some scattered state elections in the South (two of which, Mississippi and Louisiana, already seem to favor Republicans) and some mayoral elections. There's also the pre-presidential primary scramble, which promises to be interesting, and of course 2016 sees a totally unclear presidential election as well as a Senate map that's almost as favorable for Democrats as the map the Republicans had in 2014. But of course, 2016 is just under a year from now, and for the primaries only two major candidates, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former U.S. Senator from Virginia Jim Webb, have even formed exploratory committees. (That's if you exclude joke candidates like Jeff Boss, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of New Jersey in 2013, and then successfully petitioned to get on the ballot as the "NSA did 911" candidate.)

As it happens I get bored easily, and an off term from college almost certainly doesn't help. (For me, it's either watching elections or playing TF2 all day anyway.) So what's there to watch in 2015? A lot, as it turns out. This year, America's two closest allies have scheduled national elections: the United Kingdom election is on May 7, and Canada's tentatively scheduled its elections for October 19.

How much does it matter to the U.S. domestically? Probably not that much. But hey, it's something to do, so here's how it works.

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.