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. 

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.

Ratings Update: September 1, 2014

Just in time for the Labor Day campaign season kickoff, here's some ratings changes:

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:

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:

Ratings Update: April 27, 2014

Almost a month on from our first set of ratings, we've got new polling averages, new fundraising info, and we've also added 36 gubernatorial races to the mix as well as our original 36 Senate races. We're not going to list the ratings for all of our gubernatorial races here, but if you've been keeping up there are now two maps on the right-hand sidebar. We do, however, have some rating changes: