Nate Silver: Four Special Election Races Show 2010 Republican Wave Still Cresting

To save time, I will just say he includes a lot of caveats. And they're not fake caveats; they're real this-may-not-mean-anything caveats.

But caveats aside:

The Republican Mark Amodei, however, leads by 22 points as of this writing, an easy victory, meaning that he overperformed the P.V.I. [Partisan Voter Index, aka, Party advantage] by 12 points.

Meanwhile, Mr. Turner’s winning margin in the New York district, 8 percentage points as of this writing, represents a 18-point G.O.P. swing from the P.V.I.-projected results.

[Then add in Democrats overperforming in NY-23 by 17 points, but Republicans overperforming in that California race we lost, but not by all that much.]

... Republicans have overperformed the P.V.I. baseline by an average of 7 percentage points across the four races. That squares with what we saw in 2010, when Republicans won the popular vote for the House by an aggregate of 7 percentage points.

In other words, the four special elections, taken as a whole, suggest that Democrats may still be locked in a 2010-type political environment.

This, he says, probably wouldn't mean too many Republican pick-ups, as we've picked up most of the ones we can realistically grab. (But there is that cute scientist woman in Arizona who deserves a seat...)

But the real problem comes in Senate races. The Democrats have, once again, twice as many senators up for reelection than we do, and on top of that, they have a lot of blue senators in red states up for reelection.

He concludes:

Based on multiple regressions of the data, the evidence is suggestive, if not yet conclusive: President Obama is a stuttering clusterf*** of a miserable failure.

Okay, he didn't conclude that. But let's not split hairs.

posted by Ace at 10:04 AM

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