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:

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? 

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).

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.