SSP’s Competitive House Race Ratings: Final 2010 Changes & Chart

38 thoughts on “SSP’s Competitive House Race Ratings: Final 2010 Changes & Chart”

1. are tossups.  Both parties are treating them as such, spending magnificent gobs of money going after these open seats.  Intuitively, they seem like they should be Lean R given the environment, but they aren’t.  WA-03 and MI-01 have even polled within the MoE in recent public polls.

   AZ-01 and WI-07 are borderline.  Both parties have been spending in those districts, but it has not been as overwhelming as in the three open seats listed above.

   In GA-08, I suspect Scott does have the edge but don’t know for sure because one side or the other is full of crap w/r/t internal polling.

   I even wonder about TX-17, given the DCCC’s $500K outburst in the final week.  But the totality of info agrees with your call there.

   Dems have picked up the fight in FL-02 a little as well, but again the totality of info agrees with your call.

2. What are you basing his rating on?  Did I miss something here?

3. if anyone has posted this yet, but I found Ray Fair’s prediction of the Democratic share of the congressional vote. I won’t describe his equation here, but as you can see from clicking on the link below, his prediction is that the Democrats take 49.22 percent of the congressional vote. (In contrast, his prediction for the House vote in 2008 was 55.8 percent, and the actual percentage was 54.8 percent.) He doesn’t make any predictions about the number of seats that will fall, but assuming that there isn’t any serious third party effect and that Republicans take about 51 of the congressional vote, that puts the fate of the House into tossup status according to the link from CBS. Of course, he off by a point in 2008, so perhaps he will be off again.

   http://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu…

   http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-50…

4. I wouldn’t call PA-06 or PA-15 “lean”, and I think CT-04 and CT-05 are probably tossups, and I agree MI-01 should be considered a tossup, but these are minor quibbles.

   Thanks for taking the time, folks. You’ve made this whole ordeal a lot more bearable.

   Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a ballot to cast.

5. but if, as I’ve heard, SSP goes down today, where else do we head? (Will there be a post with “other election-night links”?) I needs my fix!

6. am I correct when I see that all the moves are toward the R side except for the one with the Republican challenger who dressed up like a Nazi (sorry, SS) soldier? ‘Tis a rough cycle indeed.

7. are considered safe and not on this list?

   My back-of-the-envelope calculation shows 255 current Dem seats minus 122 listed here = 133 safe Dem seats.

   Is that right?

8. What were considered to be the consensus toss-up House races in 2008? I know the conventional wisdom is that, in wave elections, toss-ups tend to break pretty consistently, but I would love to see an enumerated list and evaluate the results as a basis of comparison — since, very clearly, this is where the majority is going to come from.  Is there a way of linking to SSP’s ’08 race ratings?

9.  This is the place to put this link:

   This is where the election results will report on NYT:
   
   http://elections.nytimes.com/2…

10. 21 movements toward the GOP, 2 toward the Dems. Ugh. This all just feels so wrong going into election day – like the motherfarking bottom fell out this last week.

11. Is there a thread or someplace where we could mention the KEY lower ballot races and see how they are breaking?  That’s one thing that SSPers seem to do well.  For example, the State Senate/House are not up in NJ, but there’s a Special Senate in a Swing District (NJ-14) because Sen. Bill Baroni (R-only one to vote for Marriage equality) got a Port Authority position.  Assemblywoman Greenstein (D) is taking Sen. Tom Goodwin (R), who lost to her in ’07, but was picked to replace Baroni interimly. If you really want to see if Chris Christie has some strength, this is a race to watch.  It’s a lot of state employees who wouldn’t normally support Christie’s agenda, and Greenstein is pretty popular.  But Goodwin is from Hamilton (large population of the district) and the quasi-incumbent (for a few months).  

    Also, a new pet peeve.  When they say a race is “Too close to call” instead of “Too early to call”.

12. ex-Mariners star Jay Buhner robocalls for Dino Rossi (R) in Washington and the NFL caucus.

    Really, a lifetime .250 hitter is the best you can do?

13. This seems like the appropriate place to not only thank our moderators for doing all the hard work, but the commentators as well. As an addicted member of SSP and an occasional poster, I have really appreciated all the smart commentary on this site. Off the top of my head, DCCyclone, Conspiracy, spiderdem, StephenCLE, andryoo, GOPvoter, MassGOP, Roscoe, Zonorph, and so many others too numerous to mention (seriously, I don’t know how many times I’ve run across a comment from someone I’ve never heard of before, and been blown away). Also the state specific commentary from, among others, desmoinesdem (Iowa), hoosierdem (Indiana), Andrew (Minnesota) and atleft (Nevada) has been great.

    Also, to anyone who has posted a diary – thank you as well. I’ve done a couple – they’re hard work!

    I have to go to a party tonight where I probably won’t have internet access, so I won’t be able to click obsessively on SSP until later in the evening. I know I’ll be chomping at the bit to get back home!  

14. Thank you all, David and other SSP folk.

    Thought I might as well share: This is my hour-to-hour, congressional district-by-district guide to help assess the election results for the House tonight with.

    https://spreadsheets.google.co…

    For each race it’s got the name of the Dem (and sometimes the Rep), what Nate Silver expects the outcome and margin of the race to be, whether First Read called it a “key race”, how the National Journal ranked the race in their overview of seats most likely to flip, and how Larry Sabato, SSP and Campaign Diaries (Taniel) assess the race. Also added in a handful of relevant comments from a Reuters article and from an earlier thread here yesterday or the day before.

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