Politics

Republicans captured control of the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Following is a live blog from Election Night.

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As you buckle in for tonight, here is FiveThirtyEight’s hour-by-hour, district-by-district guide for watching the election returns, updated with our latest House forecast.

(All times listed here are Eastern Daylight Time.)

Of the 37 governor’s races on Tuesday’s ballot, only 12 are in much degree of doubt. Democrats should win the races in New York and Arkansas and — barring abnormally bad polling — also those in California, New Hampshire and Maryland.

Republicans have a much longer list of likely or near-certain victories. Alphabetically, it goes: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming. They are at least 90 percent favorites to win each of these races, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecasting model, although Nathan Deal’s race in Georgia may require a run-off.

Governor’s contests can often go overlooked when control of Congress is at stake, as it is tonight, but these wins will be extremely helpful to Republicans in a couple of ways. First, governors often have tremendous control over redistricting, which will take place throughout the country before the 2012 elections. Second, they will help Republicans, a party with few popular national figures, rebuild its bench. Some of the Republican governors that voters will elect today may become future presidential or vice presidential candidates. Read more…

While Republicans retain a plausible path toward taking control of the Senate on Tuesday night, it would involve their winning at least two seats in which they appear to be underdogs, while simultaneously avoiding upsets in several other races in which they are narrowly favored. Unless the Republicans have a significant wind at their backs and are overperforming in most parts of the country, their chances of doing so are slim.

The state that appears to have gotten away from Republicans is West Virginia, where Joe Manchin III, a Democrat running far to his right, appears to have created some space in the polls between himself and his Republican opponent, John Raese. Mr. Manchin has leads of 4 and 5 points in two new polls released within the past 24 hours, margins which — in recent years — have held up quite reliably on election day.

Mr. Raese’s chances are perhaps greater than the typical candidate in his position — in part because of the unusual dynamics of the election (Mr. Manchin has a 70 percent approval rating, but President Obama is overwhelmingly unpopular in the state) and in part because polling has been thin in the state, so the two surveys cannot quite be considered a consensus. Nevertheless, both polls showed Mr. Manchin’s position improving after he distanced himself from President Obama and virtually every major policy program on the Democratic agenda, and he now appears likely to win on the basis of his personal popularity: he has an 89 percent chance of doing so, according to the model.

Should Republicans be unable to win West Virginia, they would probably have to win both Washington and California to take over the Senate. Read more…

Republicans are well-positioned to win control of the House of Representatives in tomorrow’s elections, and quite possibly to achieve the largest gain made by either party in a Congressional election since World War II.

Our forecasting model, which is based on a consensus of indicators including generic ballot polling, polling of local districts, expert forecasts, and fund-raising data, now predicts an average Republican gain of 54 seats (up one from 53 seats in last night’s forecast), and a median Republican gain of 55 seats. These figures would exceed the 52 seats that Republicans won from Democrats in the 1994 midterms.

Moreover, given the exceptionally large number of seats in play, the Republicans’ gains could be significantly higher; they have better than a one-in-three chance of winning at least 60 seats, a one-in-six chance of winning at least 70 seats, and have some realistic chance of a gain exceeding 80 seats, according to the model.

However, the same factors that could provide Republicans with extraordinarily large gains if their turnout is strong tomorrow could also cut against them if Democrats turn out in greater numbers than expected, or if the polling has underestimated the Democrats’ standing.

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While our forecast and a good deal of polling data suggest that the Republicans may win the House of Representatives on Tuesday, perhaps all is not lost for the Democrats. Here’s one possible scenario for how things might not end up as expected.

It was hard to pinpoint exactly when in the night things started to go wrong. But at some point, a trash can was knocked over in John A. Boehner’s office in the Longworth House Office Building. A half-hour later, a hole was punched in the wall at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters.

Republicans didn’t really have much reason to be upset. They were going to pick up somewhere between 29 and 34 House seats from Democrats, pending the outcome of a recount or two and the receipt of mail ballots in some Western states. They gained five Senate seats from Democrats, and won the governorships in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida, among many other states. It had been a wave election, indeed — but a wave on the magnitude of 2006, rather than 1994.

For most of the evening, Republicans had still seemed quite likely to pick up the House, perhaps by some margin. Exit polls that (erroneously, it turned out) suggested a nine-point generic ballot win for the party colored the early coverage. So, when Baron Hill, the vulnerable Democrat in Indiana’s 9th district, held on to win his seat by a surprisingly robust nine point margin, it was mostly ignored. Instead, coverage was focused on the dozen or so Democratic incumbents who lost their races early in the evening — some of them as expected (like Alan Grayson and John M. Spratt Jr.), but others of which (like Gerry Connolly of Virginia and Chellie Pingree of Maine) were more surprising.

But in states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Democrats held up surprisingly well. Mary Jo Kilroy, who had been all but written off, held her seat in Columbus, as did a trio of Democrats — Christopher Carney, Bryan Lentz and Patrick J. Murphy — in Pennsylvania. Ted Strickland won the gubernatorial race in Ohio, and Joe Manchin III was elected to the Senate in West Virginia (by double digits, in fact). Joe Sestak appeared to have upset Pat Toomey in the Senate race in Pennsylvania, although the Associated Press had yet to call the race because of accusations of irregularities in Philadelphia.

New York was another problematic state for Republicans: their gubernatorial nominee, Carl P. Paladino, was defeated by almost 40 points, and of the six or seven House seats they had hoped to win there, they had instead picked up just one, while another — the upstate 20th district — remained too close to call.

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There’s a lot of consternation in my inbox and Twitter feed tonight about the generic congressional ballot.

Gallup’s generic ballot poll has Republicans up 15 point among likely voters, or at least their traditional model does; their higher-turnout model has Republicans up 10 instead.

Fox News, whose models haven’t had a Republican lean in the past but have something of one this year, has Republicans up 13. CNN has them up 10. Rasmussen, up 9. YouGov, plus 8.

The CBS/New York Times poll has them up 6, as does the survey from Pew Research, as does an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that asks voters which party they’d prefer to see control Congress (not technically a generic ballot poll, but the questions usually produce similar results.)

The Politico/Battleground poll has Republicans up 5. The ABC News/Washington Post poll has them 4 points ahead. Bloomberg has them up 3. Marist shows a tie. Newsweek, somehow, actually has Democrats ahead 3 points among likely voters.

Some of these polls have Democrats gaining a point or three, and some show just the opposite. Some show the enthusiasm gap widening; others have it narrowing.

You might think all of this has to do with different likely voter models, since each company has its own ’special recipe’ to separate likely voters from unlikely ones. But that only explains some of the difference.  Read more…

Earlier tonight, we talked about how candidates can sometimes find themselves swimming upstream through no fault of their own. If they have little support elsewhere on the ticket — a decent Democratic gubernatorial nominee burdened by a weak Democratic Senate candidate, or vice versa — they may find some voters whose primary interest is in another race simply voting the party line against them.

Two gubernatorial candidates, however — one Democrat and one Republican — are hoping to buck those trends, and new polling suggests that their odds of doing so have increased.

The Democrat is Ted Strickland, the incumbent governor of Ohio. Mr. Strickland’s teammate on the ticket is Lee Fisher, his current Lieutenant Governor, who is badly losing his Senate race to the Republican candidate, Rob Portman. But two new polls, one from Public Policy Polling and one from the Columbus Dispatch, have Mr. Strickland trailing his gubernatorial opponent, John Kasich, by margins of just 1 and 2 points. Other recent surveys have also implied a trend toward Mr. Strickland: the Quinnipiac poll published last week, which in early September had shown him trailing Mr. Kasich by 17 points, had him cutting his deficit to 6.

Mr. Strickland still trails in all but one recent poll (a CNN survey gives him a 1-point lead), and so the race should be thought of as leaning toward Mr. Kasich. But early voting numbers have been reasonably strong for Democrats in Ohio, and it is one place where they could benefit from the residue of the infrastructure left over by Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, which generally had much stronger field operations than John McCain’s. Read more…

Dawn breaks over New York City on Wednesday, Nov. 3. Democrats catching the early train to work are thinking about adding a little whiskey to their morning coffee. Because the headlines they are reading are truly terrible.

Not only did Republicans take over the House, but they also did so going away — winning a net of 78 seats from Democrats. Seven seats in New York State changed hands; so did six in Pennsylvania, five in Ohio and four in North Carolina. Party luminaries like Jim Oberstar and Raul Grijalva were defeated. Barney Frank and Dennis Kucinich survived, but they did so by just 2 points apiece, and their elections weren’t called until 1 a.m. Democrats picked up just one Republican-held seat — the open seat in Delaware — but Joseph Cao somehow survived in his very Democratic-leaning district in New Orleans. Virtually every race deemed to be a tossup broke to the Republican. Read more…

We’re gearing up for what is certain to be a very exciting and — given that there are a number of crucial races on the West Coast, particularly for the Senate — very long Election Night.

Among other things, we’re hoping to be able to update our House and Senate takeover projections as the night progresses. While we almost certainly won’t be updating our forecasts for individual seats, and we definitely won’t be “calling” any races until The New York Times does, we do hope to provide some forecast of the overall number of seats that Republicans are most likely to win in each chamber, and their probability of taking over both the House and the Senate. These top-level projections would be updated a couple of times an hour as the returns roll in.

In the process of preparing our model to do this, I’ve started to home in on the seats that are likely to tell us the most about the disposition of the House as Election Night progresses.

In particular, what I’ve done is to take all 435 House seats and sort them in order of the margin we project in each one — from the Republican Ron Paul’s district, the Texas 14th, which we expect him to win by about 65 points, to the Democrat José E. Serrano’s New York 16th in the Bronx, where he should be re-elected by 70 points or so. Read more…