Saturday, October 16, 2010

Election Projections

The New York Times is reporting a consensus points toward 50-seat G.O.P. gain in house:
FiveThirtyEight’s projection for the U.S. House shows little change from last week. Republicans are given a 73 percent chance of taking over the House, up incrementally from 72 percent last week. During an average simulation run, Republicans finished with 227 seats, up from 226 last week; this would suggest a net gain of 48 seats from the 179 they hold currently.

However, there is considerable uncertainty in the forecast because of the unusually large number of House seats now in play. A gain of as large as 70-80 seats is not completely out of the question if everything broke right for Republicans. Conversely, if Democrats managed to see a material rebound in their national standing over the final two weeks of the campaign, they could lose as few as 20-30 seats, as relatively few individual districts are certain pickups for Republicans.
Meanwhile, Gateway Pundit is reporting: "According to the latest NPR Battleground Survey 86 Republican candidates are either tied or ahead of their democratic opponent in democrat-held districts."

The interactive map at Real Clear Politics implies as many as 73 seats will be picked up by Republicans; however, they think the result will be closer to 53.

The Huffington Post thinks the Dems could loss 60 to 70 seats. Wow. Just wow. When that's what your waterboy is predicting, you've really got problems:
During the last 14 days the White House and President Obama have gone on the attack, and their strategy is pretty simple: "Let's acknowledge the voter anger and make sure it gets funneled toward something else." Thus we have seen political attacks on just about everyone -- and everything -- out there. The problem, though, is that voters aren't angry with Karl Rove, John Boehner, the Chamber of Commerce or even the "undisclosed financing" of elections. Voters are angry about the economy and they have two devastating perceptions of this administration: voters think it is incompetent and that it has overreached over the past two years.

An even bigger problem for the White House is that voters may have already tuned the President out; virtually every possible metric used to evaluate the outcome of the midterm elections suggest a massive GOP victory. So let's just come out and say it: there is no reason to think that Republicans will do any worse than 1994 (when they picked up 54 seats) and there is plenty of data to suggest that it will, in fact, be a better year for the GOP. Our projection -- based on all current available data -- is that the GOP will gain between 60 and 70 House seats in November.

2 comments:

Oback Arama said...

The current perception of the voting public is that the Democrats are just plain incompetent at running the executive and legislative branches of government. With the Dem's pathetic new tactic of accusing everyone from Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce and Ed Gillespie (most people don't have a clue about who he is) of funneling evil foreign money to Republicans, we now know that the Dems are also incompetent at running national political campaigns. They've taken their highly "sophisticated" targeting of tax cuts and spending programs and are adapting it to target everything that they do with their incompetence. I say, keep up the good work until Nov. 2.

dsm said...

@Oback Arama,

When you said: "we now know that the Dems are also incompetent at running national political campaigns" did you know that they've compromised the privacy of their constituents?