8 Days and Counting With No Major Changes, What the Gamblers Say, Poll Selection 101, On Macroeconomics, Just for Fun Predictions

Projection Totals
Senate: 50+ Democratic Caucus (48 Dems, 2 Ind, VP Tie-Breaker), 50 Republicans
House: 231 Republicans, 204 Democrats




Several new polls in the past 72 hours but not a lot of new news to report. My House projection got closer, with generic polling data tightening slightly, leading to a 3 seat swing to the DEMs, but still solidly a projection for GOP control.

In the Senate, only 2 race rating changes and they are both pretty minor and technical. Ohio fell behind my magic (and arbitrary) 20 point threshold again and slips back to a "Likely Hold" versus a "Safe Hold" for the GOP, but at this point, 19 points is pretty much out of reach. Missouri also slips slightly below a threshold, with the current 9.9 point GOP lead moving it back into the "Lean" column versus the "Likely" column, but this is still a long shot for the Dems to flip this seat.

I thought rather than my normal comparison to other major political sites (our friends at electoral-vote.com, electionprojection.com and realclearpolitics.com), I'd take a break and bring back in the gambling money.

For frequent readers, you will know that intrade.com is the website that lets you bet on anything, including politics, in a stock-market style format. Gamblers tend to follow the polls pretty closely and are often pretty good at predicting election outcomes, although, I would argue based on the record of this site over the past 2 years, not nearly as good as a statistical study of poling data.

At any rate, here are intrade's odds on our closest races (all calculated based on the ratio of the contract price of one candidate to another)

California: DEM favored 3:1
Washington: DEM favored 5:2
Alaska: GOP favored 2:1 (vs. all others)
Colorado: GOP favored 3:2
Nevada: GOP favored 2:1
Pennsylvania: GOP favored 3:1
Illinois: GOP Favored 2:1
West Virginia: GOP Favored 4:3
Kentucky: GOP favored 6:1
Wisconsin: GOP favored 6:1

So, the gamblers pick the same winners as our projection, but not necessarily but the same order in terms of odds. I find a few of the odds a little surprising (how can Kentucky have the same odds as Wisconsin?), but generally not that surprising.

Why I Don't Use Partisan Polls
You may notice that in several races, my projections differ pretty significantly from those of other sites. This is partly due to the use of multiple methods of weighting and averaging, versus many sites that simply use a "most recent poll" or a simple average of recent polls. However, one issue that is pretty fundamental is the use of partisan-affiliated polls.

I do not use polls from partisan-affiliated firms such as Public Policy Polling in my averages. My reason is simple...if you are paid by or affiliated with a party or candidate, I cannot presume objectivity in your polling methodology.

In the West Virginia race in particular, there is a Public Policy Polling poll that shows Gov. Manchin leading by a whopping 10 points, whereas non-partisan polls all show him trailing by small margins. Now, it could well prove out that PPP is right and all the other polls are wrong. But PPP is a Democratic-affiliated firm, so I can't trust the sample selection and weighting, especially so close to an election.

Macroeconomic Issues
A fair criticism of my analysis of GDP growth versus parties in power (and one that I owned up to in my long list of caveats on the limits of such an analysis) is the impact of macroeconomic events far beyond the control of government on economic growth.

In that spirit, I'll commit to doing a similar analysis on three statistics that are directly in the control of government: taxes, spending and deficits. Results this weekend.

Some Just for Fun Predictions
None of these will happen (I hope), but just to have some fun in the current political environment, imagine what could happen:
(1) Alvin Greene wins the South Carolina Senate race with 76% of the vote, despite polling 30+ points behind immediately before election day. Greene attributes his wins to grass roots campaigning and then goes on to admit that he doesn't know what grass roots are or what a campaign is. Diebold swears by the unfailing accuracy of its voting machines.

(2) Christine O'Donnell pulls off a surprise upset in Delaware and immediately declares that she is, in fact, a witch and cast a spell on voters entering the booth to vote for her. She commits to making the cause of her life over the next 6 years Witch and Warlock rights.

(3) Marco Rubio wins big in Florida on Tuesday and announces Presidential exploratory committee on Wednesday. Sarah Palin criticizes his lack of experience.

(4) Harry Reid loses to Sharron Angle and declares that he will spend time with family and work on important social issues such as "breaking down barriers for negros".

(5) Rand Paul wins in Kentucky and declares that he really meant all the crazy stuff he said during the campaign (okay, this one probably will happen!)

More updates later in the week.
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Harry Reid: Shame On You, Big MA Upset Brewing?

If you have been living in a cave the past 24 hours, perhaps you missed Senator Harry Reid's revealed words about President Obama from the campaign trail in 2008. To be specific, Senator Reid said that then-candidate had a real opportunity to win because he was "light-skinned" and "had no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to".

You could certainly make an intellectual argument that America was more ready to accept a bi-racial President than a dark-skinned black President. You could similarly argue that if the President did not have strong command of proper language skills, he would not have been a viable candidate. Neither of these are the point.

The subtext of Senator Reid's remarks reveal a clear racism. First, the choice of the word "Negro", a word broadly considered offensive in the African-Ameican community for well over 40 years. Second, the notion that somehow President Obama's ability to speak without "Negro dialect" in some way set him apart from most African-Americans is simply wrong and deeply racist. Cory Booker can't speak to white people? How about Deval Patrick? David Patterson? Heck, Jesse Jackson speaks perfect English and he ran for President 22 years ago. What does Senator Reid think, that 95% of African-Americans go to work every day and talk like 50 Cent?

Perhaps Senator Reid's problem is that he doesn't actually know that many black people. At the time he made those remarks, there was but one African-American Senator, Senator Barack Obama. There is still only one African-American Senator, the embattled Roland Burris, and there will likely be none come December.

Michael Steele made the point on the Sunday talk circuit that there is a double-standard in play here, that if a Republican had made similar remarks, he would have been run out of town. And he has a point. The eagerness to forgive and forget on the left in this case in extremely inconsistent. When Senator Trent Lott made the remark that if Strom Thurmond had become President, "maybe we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have today", a reference which those of us familiar with Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat run for President assumed referred to civil rights legislation, but which Lott never explicitly said, seem downright mild compared with Reid's verbal offense.

President Obama has issued a statement of forgiveness and support for Senator Reid. I do not grant the President the right to make a determination of forgiveness on behalf of anyone beyond himself. If he wants to forgive Senator Reid, that is certainly his right. And I might forgive Senator Reid, who is clearly sorry, personally. But words have meaning and statements have consequences. Senator Harry Reid cannot lead the Democratic Party in the Senate after making such a deeply racist statement. He should step down immediately from his post.

No need to call for his resignation -- voters in Nevada have the opportunity to make their own judgement in November. And I suspect that this is just a nail in the coffin.

Coakley and Brown in a Dead Heat??? Not So Fast.
There was a poll that lit up the political internet yesterday, a Public Policy Polling look at the Massachusetts Special Election, taken from January 7th to January 9th that showed Coakley and Brown in a dead heat for the seat (actually Brown was up by a point.) The storyline was a familiar one -- candidate B (in this case Brown) is surging and candidate A will soon be toast.

Not so fast.

First of all, Public Policy Polling is a partisan-affiliated polling firm. The thing that is a little odd in this case is that they are affiliated with the Democratic party. Nevertheless, their release of polls can be politically motivated and the numbers can be shaded to serve a particular purpose. This wouldn't be an issue if the poll wasn't squarely at odds with the other available data. But it is.

The Rasmussen poll released three days earlier showed Coakley with a 9 point lead, 50% to 41%. Certainly Scott Rasmussen has been accused of a lot of things in the polling world, but being overly favorable to Democrats is not one of them.

Secondly, a Boston Globe poll that run through January 6th shows Coakley with a 17 point lead. This is consistent with the trend of Rasmussen polls showing somewhat closer races than other polls that we have seen in recent months.

The PPP poll appears, at least at this point, to be an anomaly. I have no doubt there will be several more polls released in the coming days to give us a better understanding of the state of the race.

For now, I'm leaving this a Likely Democratic Hold.