Congratulations to SSPer JFM110, who earned a shout-out from Rachel Maddow last night for his passionate diary on the over-representation of guys named “Steve” in Ohio’s congressional delegation:
It just goes to show that you never know who might be reading your work here at the Swing State Project!
Just as we did in 2006, the Swing State Project is having a downballot election prediction contest. We’ve handpicked fourteen hot House and Senate races (and one gubernatorial race) from all across the country for you to think hard about and submit your best guesses.
The rules are simple: Only one entry per person will be accepted (so if you post multiple revisions, we’re only going to look at your last post), submitted as a comment in this thread (e-mail submissions will be junked). Submissions will be accepted until midnight Eastern on Monday, November 3rd.
What we’re interested in is the final margin between the Democratic and Republican candidates (except for the tiebreaker), and the goal is to have the lowest score possible. So if you think that Debbie Cook will beat Dana Rohrabacher by a score of 55-45, what we care about is that you think it’s going to be D+10. If she wins 53-47, that’s D+6, so you get four “error points” added to your score. (Remember, fewer points = better.)
This also means that if Cook wins 50-40 (and third parties take the rest), you’ve still “nailed it” according to our system and get a perfect score of zero for the race. If, on the other hand, you call it D+10 and it winds up being R+10, you’ll get 20 points added to your score.
So let’s cut to the chase! Here are the races that we’ve selected:
WA-Gov: Gregoire (D) v. Rossi (R)
AK-Sen: Stevens (R) v. Begich (D)
MS-Sen-B: Wicker (R) v. Musgrove (D)CA-46: Rohrabacher (R) v. Cook (D)
FL-25: M. Diaz-Balart (R) v. Garcia (D)
LA-01: Scalise (R) v. Harlan (D)
NE-02: Terry (R) v. Esch (D)
NH-01: Shea-Porter (D) v. Bradley (R)
NM-02: Tinsley (R) v. Teague (D)
NY-13: Straniere (R) v. McMahon (D)
OH-02: Schmidt (R) v. Wulsin (D)
PA-11: Kanjorski (D) v. Barletta (R)
TX-22: Lampson (D) v. Olson (R)
WY-AL: Lummis (R) v. Trauner (D)And the tiebreaker:
MN-Sen: Coleman (R) v. Franken (D) v. Barkley (IP)
Ideally, your entries should look something like:
WA-Gov: D+6
AK-Sen: R+8
And so forth. However, for the tiebreaker (MN-SEN), please predict the EXACT FINAL SCORE for each candidate. You are free to predict final scores for the other races as well, but you’ll make our lives a lot easier if you list the expected margin first as shown above.
Once again, the deadline for your submissions is midnight Eastern on Monday — so get your predictions in soon. The top three finishers (ie, those with the lowest overall scores) will be treated to some of SSP’s favorite chocolate babka (as pictured here).
Have at it!
Check out the Quick Hits in the top-right corner: They now have comments enabled. Now, clicking on a Quick Hit will take you directly to a page for that QH alone, where you should see a “Post a Comment” link at the bottom. Hard-refresh your browser if you don’t see the changes.
A big thank you to Paul Preston (aka “soapy”) of SoapBlox for installing this, and to Open Left for helping to develop this feature.
So go ahead and give it a whirl!
What perfect timing – on the same day SSP celebrated its fifth birthday, we also welcomed our five millionth visitor! Five years ago, I certainly never imagined passing a milestone anything like this. Here’s to five million more!
It’s hard to believe, but today is the Swing State Project’s fifth birthday. I started the site all those years ago to focus (as you’d expect) on the swing states in the 2004 presidential election. At the time, we were in the midst of Primary Wars I (only then, of course, it was just the Great Primary War), but I was very eager to discuss the real fight that lay ahead – how we were gonna beat George Bush.
It was in that spirit that I created SSP, truly as a “project” for all those interested in educating themselves about the presidential battleground. I count myself among that number – I was largely a neophyte. Sadly, the 2004 election didn’t turn out the way we wanted, but I learned a great deal along that journey nonetheless, and I think a lot of readers did as well.
After the election, I imagined I would shutter the site, but Tim Tagaris convinced me to keep it running and to shift the focus to downballot races. We left the site’s name unchanged (leading to much confusion in subsequent years), but focused like a laser on House, Senate and gubernatorial races. The site really found its voice at that time, particularly in the run-up to the OH-02 special election in August of 2005. I certainly felt like I found my blogospheric calling, and it’s a niche I’ve truly grown to love.
Along the way, many people have been vitally important to this site’s success. Tim of course was the inspiration and main force behind SSP’s transformation into its present form. It goes without saying that James L.’s tremendous hard work, brilliant writing, and wicked sense of humor sustain this site every day. And undoubtedly I’m very grateful to Trent and Crisitunity for joining the team and devoting their time and effort to make this site so excellent.
But most importantly, I have to thank you, the readers. You truly have turned this into more than just a site but a flourishing community of intelligent, inquisitive, and committed Democrats always eager to learn more – and to keep each other on our toes. When people ask me for advice about starting up a new blog, I always say, “Write for yourself – don’t expect an audience.” But the fact is, there is nothing like the feedback and validation that a thriving community can provide. You guys make it all worthwhile.
So please join me in wishing the Swing State Project a very happy fifth birthday, and to many more to come. To victory in November!
You may have noticed that the Swing State Project has added a new feature – a “quick hits” section in the top right corner. We’re using this for news items which might not merit a full-length blog post but may nonetheless be interesting. You can click through on any individual story, bookmark this link to the full section, or add the quick hits as an RSS feed.
Let us know if you have any feedback. Thanks!
Many times over the past few months, we’ve been asked if and when we’d fundraise for another candidate. We’ve said all along that we’d hold our fire unless and until we saw a very special opportunity emerge. That time is now.
Over the past two cycles, SSP has only endorsed three candidates: Jon Tester and Paul Hackett in 2005 and Travis Childers earlier this year in his groundbreaking Mississippi special election race. Today, we add a fourth: Georgia Senate candidate Jim Martin, who is waging an uphill but increasingly competitive battle against the repugnant GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss.
As with Childers, we were the first prognosticator to give this race a highly competitive rating, and the polls have shown this contest dramatically tightening in recent weeks. We would never ask our readers to donate to a candidate unless we truly believed that we stood a fighting chance of winning — and I believe that Jim Martin is within striking distance.
As Markos writes, Jim Martin is a progressive candidate across the board — a veteran state legislator, a sharp consumer advocate and friend of labor, and a thoroughly committed Democrat. You couldn’t ask for a better trade than replacing Saxby Chambliss, a man who slandered triple-amputee Max Cleland in his 2002 Senate race, with Jim Martin.
We’re not predicting a Martin win. But we are saying that this is a crucial opportunity, and Martin needs every last dollar he can get. While we would all love for the DSCC to flood Georgia with ads and resources, it’s time to put our money where our mouths are. If we expect Chuck Schumer to step up, we should be prepared to do the same.
Our goal? The same as in April: $2300 for Martin. In other words, that’s the equivalent of one “maxed out” big dollar donation.
Together, we can do this. So please support Jim Martin today with whatever you can manage.
After neglecting to update the Swing State Project’s comprehensive timeline of GOP disasters for a while, I’ve gone through the backlog and have updated the list with more than a month’s worth of shame and scandal in the Republican family.
Check it out and let us know if there’s anything we missed.
Longtime readers of the Swing State Project are well aware that I like to keep close tabs on party committee spending, especially for those in House races. As the DCCC has begun to crank its independent expenditure shop into high gear in recent weeks, I had been toying with the idea of assembling some kind of stand-alone “tracker” of all third-party independent expenditures for House races. Egged on by Populista, I’ve finally put one together.
You can check it out here. The idea is to track “blue money” and “red money” for each contested district, bundling DCCC and NRCC expenditures with cash spent by their respective allies. As far as the visual presentation goes, it may still be a bit of a work in progress, but all the information is there.
Now, there are a few caveats: 527 electioneering expenditures, like those from Freedom’s Crotch Watch, are not filed in the same clear-cut manner as standard IEs, so we won’t be including such numbers in our tracker. (Indeed, Freedom’s Watch has been known to not file any reports at all sometimes.) I’m also not including very minor expenditures (e.g. van rentals, field supplies, or lunch for volunteers) by third parties, as the focus here is mostly on paid media campaigns. You also won’t see any expenditures made to influence primary elections, which means that you won’t see any numbers from the likes of the Club For Growth yet; we’re strictly dealing with the general election here.
So, without further ado, here it is: SSP’s House Race Independent Expenditure Tracker. Bookmark it and check it often, because I’ll be updating it daily. It will also be available as a link in the right-hand sidebar.
We’re delighted to announce that long-time Swing State Project community member Crisitunity is joining us as a contributing editor. As many of you know, Crisitunity’s specialty is longer-form quantitative analysis, examples of which include the home-grown “PVI-Voting Pattern Index” and this excellent diary comparing the racial/ethnic characteristics of members of Congress and their districts. Expect to see more pieces along these lines right here on the front page.
I’ll give our newest contributing editor a chance to introduce himself, but for now, please welcome Crisitunity aboard!