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.)

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).

The Spoiler Effect: Polls vs. Reality

More often than not, third-party candidates have little effect on the ultimate result of an election. The eventual performance of most third-party candidates is lower than the margin of error of most polls (2%-4%), and so a poll that includes every single candidate running in the election (yes, even the Rent Is Too Damn High Party) provides no useful information about the likely results of the election. But when a third party candidate begins polling well (above the margin of error), pollsters would do well to include that candidate in their survey questions, so as to more closely reflect the range of choices voters have. A poll that gives a choice between Al Gore, George W. Bush, and Ralph Nader, for example, could give a different result from a poll that gives a choice between just Gore and Bush.

So in an election like the Senate race in North Carolina, where Libertarian Sean Haugh has been supported by about 10% of respondents on average in the polls that include his name, it'd probably be a good idea to continue putting his name in polls, since even considering sampling error Haugh's performance is probably fairly strong. Certainly it's strong enough to possibly tip the scales in favor of either candidate in a close race like North Carolina.

The Spoiler Effect

In Virginia's 2013 gubernatorial election, Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis captured over 146,000 votes--almost three times the 56,000-vote margin that separated Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli from the victor, former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe. His presence on the ballot may well have cost Republicans the governor's mansion. Last week, Cuccinelli consultant Chris LaCivitas had this to say about Libertarian candidates:

"Libertarians and quote-un-quote libertarian-minded Republicans exist for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to keep Republicans from winning general elections." -- Chris LaCivita