Senate Forecast Update: Little Chance of GOP Takeover, but Dem Position Remains Precarious
by Nate Silver @ 12:01 AM
Although national trends continue to move slightly toward the Republicans — since the start of the year, our senate model’s trend estimate has them gaining ground on the Democrats at the rate of about 1 point per month in a typical race — that momentum was offset this month by recruiting failures in Wisconsin and New York, where Tommy Thompson and George Pataki declined to run. Therefore, our simulation projects Republicans to gain a net of 4.0 Senate seats in this November’s elections, a figure unchanged since last month.
However, this figure is somewhat misleading: although the model expects the Republicans to end up with 45 seats on average, it also thinks they’d end up with 48 seats if the election were held today. The reason for the discrepancy is not because the model is predicting a shift back in momentum toward Democrats before November; it makes no assumptions whatsoever about this. Rather it is because, if there were to be such a shift, the Democrats would be a position to hold or flip several seats (such as Colorado, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire) that they now narrowly project to lose. A large shift could also put North Carolina, Kentucky, Nevada and Indiana into the Democratic column. The Republicans, on the other hand, are close to "maxing out" on their potential gains, other than perhaps in Illinois, California, and Washington if Dino Rossi runs there. CONTINUED
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