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.

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.

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.

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:

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.)

Close-Up: The Quirks of "Red" Alaska

Alaska, to put it bluntly, is political backwater. Despite a spike in media attention to Alaska during former Gov. Sarah Palin's stint as the Republican nominee for vice president, commentators have given little coverage to elections in Alaska because at least in presidential elections, the result is a foregone conclusion: the Republican presidential nominee carried the state by double-digit margins in every election since 1996. National political campaigns simply don't reach Alaska, and for good reason--while Vice President Richard Nixon was in Alaska making good on his promise of a fifty-state campaign back in 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy was busy campaigning in large swing states like Illinois and New Jersey. Guess who won that one.

Nevertheless, the politics of the Last Frontier are so wildly different from the rest of the country that we don't believe throwing it in the column of "red states" does it justice. A certain late-night live comedy show parodied Gov. Sarah Palin's use of the word "maverick" back in 2008:

The Run-Down: March 31, 2014

To start off, we're going to give basically the crash-course summary of this election, of who wants what to happen.

Thirty-six elections to the Senate will happen on November 4, 2014: 33 "class 2 Senate seats" as well as three special elections in Hawaii, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. Currently, the Democrats have a majority in the Senate, with 53 Democratic senators as well as two independents in Vermont and Maine who are caucusing with the Democrats. Republicans, therefore, need to pick up six seats in order to capture the majority (in the event of a 50-50 split, Vice President Joe Biden would be able to cast a tie-breaking vote).

It's way easier than it sounds. The quirk of Senate elections is that if a senator is elected in a presidential election year, that senator's next election is guaranteed to be in a midterm year, and vice-versa. Midterm elections have historically been horrendous for the president's party: only twice since World War II (in 1998 and 2002) has the president's party gained seats in a midterm election. Even in a neutral or sort-of-okay year, we'd expect the Democrats to lose seats in the Senate. However, this year the Democrats' problem is much worse simply because they did so well six years ago, in 2008, when Senator Obama's popularity allowed him to win the presidential election and swept in a number of Democrats on his coat-tails. As a result of their stellar performance in 2008, not including the special election seats (which are safe for one party or the other, as described below) Democrats now must defend 21 seats, while Republicans only have 12 to defend. Even worse for the Democrats, the GOP seats this year consist of the safest ones that they were able to defend in 2008, while the Democratic seats include many marginal victories they won in competitive states like North Carolina, Louisiana, and Alaska.