elections | The Micro Effect

Barack Obama Puts Harry Reid In The Spotlight

October 23, 2010 Published by: KJM

LAS VEGAS — Of all the races in the country this year, none is as important to President Barack Obama as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s reelection campaign.

The race carries unrivaled symbolism for Obama, who would emerge even more politically wounded than anticipated if Republicans defeat his top Democrat in the Senate.

The stakes were in full display Friday night at an outdoor rally in Las Vegas, when Obama — whose name has been chanted over the past three days by crowds at events from Seattle to Los Angeles — made a rare move and led the crowd in a chant of “Har-ry!”“I appreciate everybody saying Obama,” the president said as thousands of supporters screamed “O-bam-a!”

“But I want everybody to say Harry,” Obama yelled, leading them on moments after he stood on the stage with Reid, a former boxer, holding his hand in the air as though he had won a fight.

Reid is locked in a tight race against Republican Sharron Angle, a tea party favorite who has continued to be a force despite several high-profile campaign missteps. Obama made his fourth trip to Nevada Friday for a week-before-the-election rally and fundraiser to help Reid squeak out a victory despite low popularity in his home state and an adverse political climate.

The president vouched for Reid, whose opponent is running ads suggesting he got rich off of his position in the Senate, as an advocate for the middle class.

“Harry has never forgotten what it’s like to grow up in Searchlight, Nev. He knows what it’s like to be poor. He knows what it’s like to work hard. He knows what it’s like to hit some bumps in the road,” Obama said. “Neither Harry and I were born with a silver spoon in our mouths. Our families were working folk.”

For Obama, Reid’s campaign has all the elements that have made this election cycle a tumultuous one for Democrats.

His challenger has tea party backing, and few places in the nation have been as hard hit by the economic crisis than Nevada, where the unemployment rate is more than14 percent and the rate of foreclosures is the highest in the nation.

Reid’s race raises the stakes for Obama because of unique circumstances where all it could take for him to win would be large Democratic turnout — the president’s main 2010 role — and because it’s been cast as referendum on the White House’s big-ticket victories, all of which Reid helped muscle through: health care reform, financial regulatory reform, the economic stimulus package.

Reid is counting on minor-party candidates, including a Tea Party ballot line, and Nevada’s unique “none of the above” voting option to siphon votes from Angle, who also has low popularity in Nevada. Political strategists, including those working on Reid’s campaign, believe the dynamic would allow Reid to win with substantially less than 50 percent of the vote. Democrats have a registration edge of 60,000 more voters than Republicans, a 5-point advantage that’s decreased from more than 100,000 two years ago.

To get there, Reid is counting on Democratic turnout, powered by his statewide campaign organization, which he largely built in 2008 and thought would pay off for him in 2010. Indeed, the Obama organizational juggernaut was kept in place as Reid’s reelection geared up.

POLL: GOP leads widely, Dems in danger but race for House tight

October 6, 2010 Published by: KJM

In a poll of 12 hotly contested races that could decide who controls the House in the 112th Congress, Republican challengers are beating freshman Democrats in 11 — and in the last one, the race is tied.

But The Hill/America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) poll also detected a glimmer of light for Democrats; not one of the 12 Republican challengers has reached 50 percent, and half of them have leads so small that they are within the margin of error.

The 12 districts this week are the first of 42 in The Hill/ANGA polls that will be conducted in the next four weeks. The first week’s focus is on freshmen, next week’s is on open seats, the following week’s is on two-term incumbents, and finally, in the week before the election, the polls will be in districts of long-term incumbents thought to be in trouble.

“This is a particularly volatile set of districts,” said pollster Mark Penn. “Overall, we see a strong Republican trend in these districts, but given where these numbers are, the races haven’t broken yet.”

Republicans need to pick up a net 39 seats to win control of the House.

Despite leads for Republican challengers, the large number of undecided voters in most of these contests suggests they are still up for grabs. Meanwhile, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has millions more dollars on hand than its Republican counterpart.

Still, capturing a majority of voters appears easier for the challengers than the incumbents in these districts, given high disapproval ratings for President Obama and Congress among likely voters.

Overall, just 20 percent approve of the job Congress is doing, while 76 percent of likely voters disapprove. Fifty-five percent of likely voters fall into the “strongly disapprove” category. Among independents, that number is even more drastic — 83 percent disapprove of Congress, with 61 percent strongly disapproving.

The poll found that independent voters are breaking heavily for Republican challengers and that the GOP has a big “voter intensity” edge over Democrats.

In several of these districts, Obama was likely the difference-maker in 2008, helping then-Democratic challengers such as Mary Jo Kilroy (Ohio) and Tom Perriello (Va.) edge their GOP opponents.

Kilroy and Perriello won the two tightest congressional races in the country in 2008, Kilroy by fewer than 3,000 votes and Perriello by fewer than 1,000.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) beat Obama in half of th 12 polled districts, sometimes by a fairly wide margin. In Maryland’s 1st district, for example, where Rep. Frank Kratovil (D) trails Andy Harris by three percentage points, McCain routed Obama two years ago, winning by 19 points.

Kratovil’s ability to hang in the race despite the political winds and makeup of his district is attributable to his strong support among independents.

Kratovil is one of just two Democrats in the 12 districts who leads among independents — 38 percent to 35 over Harris.

In New Mexico’s 2nd District, Rep. Harry Teague (D) holds a two-point edge among independents over Republican Steve Pearce.

Teague, Kratovil and Rep. Glenn Nye (Va.) are the only Democrats of the 12 who voted no on healthcare reform. Nye is losing his race by 6 points.

Despite some ominous signs for Democrats in Perriello’s district, he’s one of the incumbents in this group who shows clear signs of strength. Perriello is one of the only freshman Democrats who leads his Republican challenger among male voters — 46 percent to 45.

Perriello is also within striking distance among independents, trailing by 9 points. That’s a smaller margin than some other freshmen, several of whom trail by double digits in that category.

The freshman Democrat in the worst shape in the Week 1 polls is from Obama’s home state of Illinois. Rep. Debbie Halvorson is losing to Adam Kinzinger by 18 points, 49 percent to 31. Kinzinger is ahead among most major demographic groups. He leads by 26 points among male voters, 11 among female voters; he leads all three age groups by 10 points or more.

The tightest race among the 12 is in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, a contest that has been a focal point for both national party committees. The National Republican Congressional Committee has already spent more than $650,000 running independent-expenditure ads against Rep. Mark Schauer (D-Mich.), but he remains tied with ex-Rep. Tim Walberg (R) at 41 percent in The Hill/ANGA poll.

Independents are largely split, with 37 percent preferring Walberg to 35 percent for the incumbent, Schauer.

“Very few of these races are really put away one way or the other,” concludes Penn, who said the outcome in these districts lies in whether undecided voters will stick to historical trends and break largely for challengers or support their lawmakers.

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The Bias Of The Generic Ballot

September 29, 2010 Published by: KJM

Henry Olsen at National Review Online has a smart critique up on my observation that the generic Congressional ballot may underestimate Democrats’ standing in House races this year. Let me warn you up front: this post is going to get into some fairly technical issues.

The most important question raised by Mr. Olsen’s article actually doesn’t have to do with the generic ballot per se, but rather boils down to whether polls of individual races tend to underestimate the standing of candidates who have relatively poor name recognition (as is often the case when, for instance, a non-incumbent is matched up against an incumbent in a U.S. House race). This is a real effect, and Mr. Olsen is right that it is something to be mindful of. Early in an election cycle, in fact, it’s something to be very cognizant of — candidates who are poorly known to voters generally have some upside in their numbers. By the time we reach Election Day, however, the bias against these candidates pretty much disappears — if nobody knows who you are by the morning of the election, well then, it’s probably too late.

Our House forecasting model has some ways to account for this: for instance, it tends not to look very much at polls of individual districts early in the election cycle, but tends to place more emphasis on them (at the expense of the generic ballot) as Election Day draws nearer. Also, looking at the number of undecideds in a poll can sometimes be informative: a 40-30 lead in the polls is not as solid as a 50-40 lead.

I owe Mr. Olsen a longer response on some of these points (I actually don’t think we disagree on very much). Perhaps more important, I owe FiveThirtyEight readers a more comprehensive overview of our House model in general.

But, for the time being, I want to focus on one particular comment that Mr. Olsen made. He writes:

But, as one noted prognosticator observed earlier this year, “On average the generic ballot has overestimated the Democrats’ performance in the popular vote by 3.4 points since 1992.” When this is applied to the AAF data Nate cites, it appears that the Democratic problem is not better than it appears; it’s worse.

The “noted prognosticator” that Mr. Olsen refers to is yours truly! As I wrote in April, there’s some history of the generic ballot overestimating the Democrats’ performance in the national House popular vote.

The House popular vote is what you get if you simply add up the votes for the Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively, across all 435 congressional districts. For instance, in 1998, Democratic candidates received a total of 31,490,298 votes for the House, while Republicans received 32,233,067, and candidates from other political parties, 2,154,221 votes. That translates into a Republican win of about 1 percentage point in the national popular vote. Most of the generic ballot polls that year, by contrast, had shown Democrats with a slight advantage, so this was one of those years in which it somewhat overestimated their performance.

This is only relevant, however, to the extent that you care about the aggregate House popular vote — which you might, for instance, if you were using the popular vote to back into an estimate of the number of seats that a particular party might gain or lose. (That’s what I was trying to do back in April.) If you’re working with this type of model, you have a decision to make about whether to apply a correction for the fact that the generic ballot has tended to overestimate the Democrats’ popular vote performance in the past. (For a variety of reasons — like the fact that the effect seems to have become less profound in recent elections, and that other types of polls haven’t shown a systematic bias toward one or the other party — it’s not quite so straightforward a decision as it seems, but it’s certainly something a forecaster has to wrestle with.)

That is, however, not the type of model we’re working with now, mainly because it isn’t very precise. Instead, we’re working from the ground up, trying to make calls on each of the 435 individual House races, and then aggregating those projections in a careful way to figure out how many seats each party is likely to control overall. So what we’re really concerned with is