Now that I’ve found this site, I have a place for my geeky weirdness statistical political self!
I am modeling, below, potential gains in the Senate. What I do is assign each race a probability of switching. Then I simulate the probabilities using R, and run it 1000 times.
Quick results:
Most likely result: Gain of 5 or 6 seats (23.9% chance of each).
Chance of gaining at least 1 seat: 99.8%
at least 2 99.4
at least 3 96.4
at least 4 87.9
at least 5 70.6
at least 6 46.7
at least 7 22.8
at least 8 10.0
at least 9 3.4
at least 10 .7
How I got these (feel free to correct me… these are guesses based on all sorts of things). I also need to add in for the new MS race:
1% chance of switching:
AL, DE, IL, MA, MI, MS, RI, WV, WY1, WY2
2% chance of switching:
AR, KS, SC
5% chance:
GA, IA, MT, NJ, OK, TN,
10% chance:
ID, NE, SD
15% chance:
NC, TX
30% chance:
AK, LA, ME
40% chance
KY
50% chance
MN, OR
80% chance:
NH, CO
90% chance:
NM, VA
Comments, questions, corrections?
I would rate Colorado lower at 60% (it looks tighter than expected I feel). And NM looks great but probably to 90%. NH looks better than NM, I would say.
Also, Louisiana is tighter than that. I would call it a 40% or 50% race.
Check Campaign Diaries’s Senate rankings! Maybe you could model those as well?
Probably around 10% to 15% depending on who runs from the seat created by Lott’s retirement.
One interesting thing, as you note, is who loses a GOP seat (or who wins for the Democrats) would have a big impact. Our biggest victory, IMO, would be taking down the architect of obstruction, Mitch McConnell. Maybe that would move the 60 rule back to its usual role of stalling only a select few controversial or important pieces of legislation rather than being abused as an everyday technique. Senate pickups in Colorado and New hampshire would be pretty big as Allard in particular is a knee jerk conservative road block.
And, yes, we will still have our own roadblocks in the Senate: DiFi, Baucus (probably), Ben Nelson, Carper, and semi pseudo sorta Dem Joe Lieberman. Can we get Holy Joe off chairing the committee that investigates past and current wrong doing? What a road block.
Others may be able to answer this question better than me, I’m interested in hearing your input.
It looks like the analysis above treats each race as an independent coin flip, with uncorrelated outcomes. Some races may behave this way, but I’d be surprised if they all did.
Example – the choice of presidential candidate for one of the parties depresses voter turnout across some region of the country.
I would move KY down to 30%, and move ME and LA up to 40%. I know this would have little effect on the results, sine swapping KY and ME would not change the predicted outcomes.
VA is a 99%
NH 80%
NM CO 75%
MN 60% (Im from there, the Dems certainly have an edge here)
OR 45%
LA ME KY 40%
NC AK 30% (We are just starting in NC, Dole’s polling horrible)
id agree with the rest of them, of course, we’ll all disagree on some of the actual competitive ones.
It’s crazy to think that we started this cycle with ME, MN, OR, and NH as our heavily targetted incumbents with CO as a great shot at an open seat. Now look, I’d say we have another 6 or so good-decent shots.