Author: JR12

Thanks to everyone who already voted in that little Condorcet poll I put up on Sunday about which senate races are likely to flip in 2010.  

I said I’ll leave the poll open, so I will, in case anyone still wants to vote:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~…

… but here are the results with 42 votes. [Edited from original version]

The results were actually pretty decisive – in the top 10, most of the races “beat” the next one on the list pretty decisively.  Kentucky and Ohio are now close at #4 & #5, but that’s about it.  There’s a near-tie at #10 and #11 (Illinois, Louisiana) with Nevada also close at #12.  But other than that, the top of the list looks very stable.  Here’s what you all said:

1. New Hampshire (OPEN-R)

2. Pennsylvania (Specter-R)

3. Missouri (OPEN-R)

4. Ohio (OPEN-R)

5. Kentucky (Bunning-R)

6. North Carolina (Burr-R)

7. Connecticut (Dodd-D)

8. Florida (OPEN-R)

9. Colorado (Bennet-D)

10. Illinois (Burris-D)

11. Louisiana (Vitter-R)

12. Nevada (Reid-D)

13. Arkansas (Lincoln-D)

14. Delaware (OPEN-D)

15. New York-B (Gillibrand-D)

16. Iowa (Grassley-R)

17. Arizona (McCain-R)

18. Georgia (Isakson-R)

19. Kansas (OPEN-R)

20. Wisconsin (Feingold-D)

21. Oklahoma (Coburn-R)

22. California (Boxer-D)

23. Tied: Alaska (Murkowski-R) & North Dakota (Dorgan-D)

25. Washington (Murray-D)

26. South Dakota (Thune-R)

27. South Carolina (DeMint-R)

28. Hawaii (Inouye-D)

29. Indiana (Bayh-D)

30. Maryland (Mikulski-D)

31. Oregon (Wyden-D)

32. Alabama (Shelby-R)

33. Vermont (Leahy-D)

34. Utah (Bennett-R)

35. New York (Schumer-D)

36. Idaho (Crapo-R)

After reading the “cattle call,” which is sort of interminable and starts to make my eyes glaze over, I thought, why not have a poll that would aggregate our guesses together and determine which races we (collectively) think are most likely to flip?

Here is such a poll:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~…

Go vote if you’re interested!  I’ll leave it open for a couple of weeks.

If this gets popular, then maybe some of the organizers of this site should look into doing it as a regular thing.

FYI for voting rule nerds: this poll uses Condorcet rules, which tend to be good for rank-orderings like this.  In effect, the poll asks whether more people rate X more highly than Y, or Y more highly than X.  It’s slightly more complicated than that, but not much.

If you ever want to use this service to create polls like this, here’s the URL:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andr…

It’s pretty quick & easy.  And the results are far more detailed & useful than the kind of simple add-up-the-numbers-and-who-wins type of polling tools that you usually see (one of which I think is built in on this site…)

UPDATE: Hey, I see a few people have already taken the poll.  Thanks!  This should be interesting…

http://rturner229.blogspot.com…

The Turner Report reports that Talent issued a statement saying:

I have decided to withdraw my name from consideration for the Senate in 2010, for several reasons. First, there are other qualified Republicans who are seriously investigating the race, and it is vital to prevent the kind of dissension that hurt my Party’s ticket so greatly in 2008. In addition, I have family and public obligations which this unexpected race would disrupt. Chief among the latter is my work as Vice Chairman of the Commission on WMD Proliferation and Terrorism, which is working to prevent a nuclear or biological attack on the United States.”

“I am still very interested in serving the people of Missouri in elective office, but the considerations I have recited in this statement are more important than my personal goals.”

“My political priority in 2010 will be electing a strong and qualified Republican to replace my friend Kit Bond in the United States Senate”