If you were only looking at Senate models — which is all that all the other ‘competing’ models look at — you’d rightly be concerned that the Democrats are on track for a terrible night on Election Day. All the models (even Sam Wang‘s slightly-more optimistic model) currently predict that the Republicans are on track to control 51 or more Senate seats, enough for a majority. Our model, for instance, currently predicts the Republicans are on track to hold 52 seats, which would be a 7-seat gain from their current 45; the Democrats retain control in only 34 out of 100 of our simulations. If that holds, that’d be even worse than 2010, where the Dems lost 6 Senate seats on Election Day (although the damage hits 7 if you throw the Massachusetts special election of early 2010 in there). In other words: #DEMSINDISARRAY!!!1!
Hold on there, though; there’s a lot more to an election other than the bragging rights associated with whether it’s Harry Reid or Mitch McConnell who gets the task of filibustering everything that moves in the Senate. For starters, there’s also the matter of the gubernatorial races, which, as I mentioned, we also model, and nobody else does. Democratic gubernatorial losses also hit a net of 6 in 2010. What about this year? According to our model, the Democrats are on track to finish with a median of 23 gubernatorial seats, a net gain of 2 seats. If you squint closely at the histogram over the fold, you’ll see that the modal result (the one that occurs in the most simulations) is 24 gubernatorial seats (which would be a gain of 3). And if you look at the individual races listed in the totem pole to the right, you’ll see that the Democratic candidates are running above 50 percent odds in races that would pencil out to a net gain of 4 (Pennsylvania, Florida, Alaska, Kansas, and Maine, minus Arkansas). Throw in the still-promising races in Michigan and Wisconsin, and you’ve got Dems in … um … array?
Finally, there’s the matter of the House, which is where the real apocalypse happened in 2010. There’s no way to quantitatively model the House, at least not on a seat-by-seat basis; there just aren’t enough polls to give us an adequate level of information. (There are some imprecise measures based simply on generic ballot polling and historical House elections; for instance, the current 44-44 tie in the generic ballot projects out to a 6-seat Republican gain according to Alan Abramowitz‘s system.)
So, where the House is concerned, we at Daily Kos Elections tend to take off our sabermetrics hats and put on our old-school, cigar-chewing scout hats, looking qualitatively at factors like fundraising and national committee ad reservations to see where the real battles are. By this point in the 2010 election, we were seeing a steady drumbeat of polls showing Democratic House incumbents losing, and freshman incumbents in defensive races getting triaged by the DCCC. At this point this year, though, we can only point to three Dem-held open seats that appear to have been written off (NC-07, NY-21, and UT-04), and the only triage decisions so far have come in long-shot offensive races.
There are still around a dozen Dem incumbents in pure Tossup races — and we won’t be able to save them all, just given the law of averages — but most freshmen are in decent shape, and there are even a few GOP-held seats that either clearly lean the Dems’ way (CA-31) or where the Dems are doubling down (IA-03 and NE-02). A net Republican gain in the House of 6 may well be the correct guess.
We’ll discuss a mind-blowing analogy to this year’s election, plus the specific changes to the model this week, over the fold:
