Politics

There’s no doubt that the Tea Party could get the Republicans in trouble in certain Senate races. In Nevada and Kentucky, for example, Sharron Angle and Rand Paul knocked off candidates preferred by the G.O.P. establishment to win their primaries. Although the FiveThirtyEight model has both Ms. Angle and Mr. Paul as slight favorites in the general election, the races are closer than they otherwise might be.

With Senator Lisa Murkowski’s concession in Alaska late Tuesday night to the insurgent candidate Joe Miller, the Tea Party has now played a role in defeating two Republican incumbents (Robert F. Bennett of Utah is the other). In these two cases, the Tea Party is on much firmer tactical ground.

Nobody would mistake Ms. Murkowski and Mr. Bennett for liberal, but they have not been strict party-line voters. Mr. Bennett, like his colleague Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, had not been averse to gestures of bipartisanship. He teamed with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a liberal Democrat, to propose a market-based universal health care bill. And Ms. Murkowski, though not an authentically moderate senator like Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, was between the fourth and eighth most liberal Republican in the Senate, according to several rankings systems. Read more…

We talked this morning about the Democrats’ poor electoral position — already shaky, it is probably now deteriorating further — but we haven’t talked as much about why they are in this predicament. This is for a good reason: once you get past the premise that the state of the economy plays a large role (something that pretty much everyone would agree with), this is a difficult question to answer.

The reasons for the Democrats’ decline are, as we say in the business, overdetermined. That is, there are no lack of hypotheses to explain it: lots of causes for this one effect. The economy? Sure. Unpopular legislation like health care? Yep. Some “bad luck” events like the Gulf Oil spill? Mmm-hmm. The new energy breathed into conservatives by the Tea Party movement? Uh-huh.

And this hardly exhausts the theories. Read more…

I don’t usually like to comment on individual polls. Most of the time, when a poll produces an “unusual” result, it simply reflects random noise and the best advice is to wait for the next edition of the poll to come along, when more often than not it will revert to its previous position.

The poll stealing the headlines this morning is from Gallup, and for good reason: it gives the Republicans a whopping 10-point lead on the generic ballot. This is, in fact, a record for the Republicans: Gallup has been conducting this survey for almost 70 years, and Republicans have never managed to have quite that large of an edge before.

The poll is probably an outlier of sorts, by which I mean that if you were to take the exact same survey  and put it into the field again — but interview 1,450 different registered voters, instead of the ones Gallup surveyed — you would most likely not find the G.O.P. with a 10-point advantage. This week’s generic ballot survey by Rasmussen Reports actually bounced back toward the Democrats somewhat (although still showing them with a 6-point deficit); polling averages have them trailing by around 5 points instead; and there was no specific news event last week that would have warranted such a large shift in voter preferences. Read more…

On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported a downward revision in the second quarter gross domestic product to 1.6 percent, from 2.4 percent. While the headline number was bad, the devil is in the details. The downward revision does not signal a new contraction or a double-dip recession. Instead, this revision demonstrates how one component of group that comprises a macro-statistic like the G.D.P. can skew the numbers.

First, let’s look at the G.D.P. equation:

1. Personal consumption expenditures, which account for 70.52 percent of G.D.P.
2. Gross domestic investment, which accounts for 12.61 percent of G.D.P.
3. Exports net of imports, which subtracts from G.D.P. because the United States imports more than it exports
4. Government spending, which accounts for 20.53 percent of total G.D.P. Read more…

Those who bemoan the excessive partisanship in the country today might take comfort from some unlikely seeming residents in governors’ mansions. Red states like Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma,  Tennessee and Wyoming have Democratic governors; blue states like California, Connecticut, Hawaii,  New Jersey and Vermont have Republican ones.

Although states like Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee have tended increasingly to vote Republican in recent presidential elections, they have relatively large numbers of registered Democrats, and often elect Democrats to local and state offices. Conversely, although the states in New England (as well as New York and New Jersey) have few registered Republicans, they have large numbers of independent voters, who are sometimes eager to counterbalance Democratic dominance. Still, when one considers that Wyoming cast just a third of its votes for President Obama, and Vermont just 30 percent for John McCain, these results stand out by comparison.

But it’s increasingly in doubt how much longer these aberrations might persist. Republicans are favored, overwhelmingly, to take back the governorship in Wyoming this year, where Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, is retiring. Democrats, meanwhile, are more likely than not to win in Vermont, where the Republican incumbent, Jim Douglas, has declined to seek a fifth term. Likewise for a whole series of states in which incumbents are retiring or unable to run because of term-limits: Republicans are favored in Kansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee this year, as are Democrats in Connecticut and Hawaii. Read more…

Updated

Voters in states like Illinois and North Carolina, where both the Republican and Democratic nominees for Senate are unpopular and where the number of undecided voters remains high, might lament the choice before them. Sure, if they wanted to register their displeasure with the major-party nominees, they could vote for a minor-party candidate instead (LeAlan Jones, the Green Party’s nominee in Illinois, has polled as high as 14 percent in some surveys). Or they could simply stay home.

But other voters, especially those who might consider it their patriotic duty to vote, might wish for a more affirmative way to register their displeasure with their choices. In Nevada, they have that option — the ability to cast a literal protest vote.

Since 1975, Nevadans have had the choice of voting for “None of These Candidates,” which appears as a ballot line along with the named candidates. The option has waxed and waned in popularity. But in 1976, None of These Candidates actually won the plurality of votes in the Republican primary for a United States House seat. (The nomination was awarded to the second-place finisher, Walden Earhart.) And in other cases, the ballot option has played a spoiler role: the 1.2 percent of voters who selected None of These Candidates in the 1996 presidential race was larger than the margin separating Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. And in the 1998 Senate race, the 8,125 votes for None of These Candidates easily outdistanced the 395-vote margin between Harry Reid and John Ensign, allowing Mr. Reid to be re-elected.

Read more…

Joe Miller is not yet assured of victory over Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: With just 1,668 votes separating the candidates, the official result may not be known until September when at least 7,600 absentee ballots are counted. But a victory for Mr. Miller is considerably more likely than not, and even if he were to fall a few votes short, the election will have been far closer than anyone anticipated.

But a closer look at the race finds that there were signals that Mr. Miller had a tangible possibility of achieving the upset.

Start with the polling, of which there wasn’t much. The only public poll of the race, conducted in early July by Ivan Moore Research, had Ms. Murkowski leading Mr. Miller, 62 percent to 30 percent, among likely Republican primary voters. But that same poll also found that only 46 percent of the state’s  registered voters knew who Mr. Miller was at that point — and only 31 percent had developed a definitive impression, positive or negative, about him. In contrast, 98 percent of registered voters knew Ms. Murkowski’s name, and 82 percent had formed an impression of her.
Read more…

The forecasts are based on a program designed to evaluate current polling and demographic data, and to compare these present-day conditions to outcomes in United States Senate races over the past six election cycles.

The Democratic majority is in increasing jeopardy in the Senate, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight forecasting model. The Democrats now have an approximately 20 percent chance of losing 10 or more seats in the Senate, according to the model, which would cost them control of the chamber unless Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who is running for the Senate as an independent, both wins his race and decides to caucus with them.

In addition, there is an 11 percent chance that Democrats will lose a total of nine seats, which would leave them with 50 votes, making  them vulnerable to a defection to the Republican Party by a centrist like  Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut or Ben Nelson of Nebraska. On average, over the model’s 100,000 simulation runs, the Democrats are projected to lose a net of six and a half Senate seats, which would leave them with  52 or  53 senators. (Even though the G.O.P. primary in Alaska remains too close to call, that outcome is unlikely to alter the model.)

The forecasts are based on a program designed to evaluate current polling and demographic data, and to compare these present-day conditions to outcomes in United States Senate races over the past six election cycles. For instance, in recent  cycles, a Senate candidate with a 7-point lead in the polls 10 weeks before  the election won about 80 percent of the time, and a candidate with a 12-point lead won about 95 percent of the time. Although the model, which correctly predicted the outcome of all 35 Senate elections in 2008, is not quite this cut-and-dried, it is this recent  track record that forms the backbone of its projections. Read more…

FiveThirtyEight.com premiered on March 7, 2008, three days after Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Democratic presidential primaries in Texas and Ohio — victories that were widely described as giving her momentum in her race for the Democratic nomination. Mrs. Clinton was already well ahead in the polls in the next big primary contest, in Pennsylvania.

From reading news reports or watching the nightly gantlet of cable news programs, the message seemed to be that there would be a close fight between Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama through the final contests in June (and perhaps to the Democratic National Convention in August) — with each candidate about equally likely to prevail.

To those of us who had been following the numbers, however, the outcome was hardly so uncertain. Presidential nominations are not determined on the basis of momentum; they are determined on the basis of delegates, and Mr. Obama had a significant advantage there — thanks to a long string of victories in midsize states throughout February, and huge margins in some smaller states on Super Tuesday that gave him a lead of about 150 pledged delegates. Even if Mrs. Clinton had achieved a 25-point victory in Pennsylvania, she would still have trailed by more than 100 delegates, and it would have been all but impossible for her to catch up with few large states left to vote. Read more…