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.)

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.

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.

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:

Close-Up: Doubly Dynastic

Only one half of the Senate match-up in Georgia has been settled: Michelle Nunn won the Democratic nomination essentially unopposed. Well, she faced three other Democrats, but they didn't exist as far as media coverage of the race was concerned. The proof? Unless you're from DeKalb County (home of runner-up, former state senator Steen Miles) or a member of the Board of Trustees of the Georgia Psychiatric Physicians Association (on which fourth place finisher Dr. Branko Radulovacki sat from 2007 to 2009), you don't recognize the names of any of the other candidates. (There's also a chance you read the Wikipedia article on the election, but even then the third place finisher, former U.S. Army Ranger Todd Robinson, doesn't have his own Wikipedia article, which is totally a good judge of notability.)

Establishment 3, Far Right 0

Three primaries were held in competitive states yesterday. It appears that most of the media hype around insurgent right-wing Republicans was just that--hype. Recognized "establishment" candidates won pretty easily over Tea Party-backed opponents in the following states:

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.