News & discussion on house and senate races

I had to change channels while watching Bush speak about this election; he still doesn't get it, that this election was a referendum on the war in Iraq. He's still talking about "winning in Iraq, and it's a part of the war on terror." He just is incapable of listening to the American People. He is not only dilusional, but have lost the ability to understand the world around him. All the "yes" men that surrounded him did him no favors.

Just received froma friend in Austrlia:

Congratulations, America!
And thank you.

Today the world is cheering you,
and at long last we welcome
you back into civil society.

Hastert out for minority leader job

I wouldn't bet on him staying in congress once the Foley fallout begins

Cycloptichorn

I was up until about 2 am last night after a four hour stint as a volunteer poll worker and a bunch of meetings. More meetings today and then tomorrow at 7 am I am flying to San Antonio for the better part of a week.

Johnboy is tired but very happy.

In 2004 I was a bit envious of folks like Sozobe who live and vote in a state (in her case, Ohio) that is "in play." Someday, I thought, maybe my state of Virginia could play such a pivotol role. Lo and behold, be careful what you wish for.

Virginiia WILL GO for Webb (d) over Allen (r-incum). Webb is up by some 7000 votes with a mere .12% of the votes to be counted (less than 3000). If there are still absentee votes to be counted, I suspect the bulk of them would have come from urban areas (favoring Webb) vs rural aread (favoring Allen). I am not sure that Allen will even request a recount if the margin is above 5000.

Not meaning to gloat, but on the "Put your money where your mouth is" thread, I could end up with a perfect score. Of course it was a very small number of players. None of the conservative posters would play.

Thank you for your efforts, RJB! It's great to get the info straight from someone who knows, too.

Does he have that option? What is the line of demarcation for recount refusal?

DKos had an interesting analysis that suggests that Allen won't even bother.

Allen was looking at a presidential run in 2008. This election was more about that than anything else.

This result, and all the blunders that went with it, have pretty much squelched that possibility. He will probably not feel like fighting much.

He should just go back to coaching the Redskins and put this political stuff behind him.

That was his dad, I think.

My understanding is that if the difference is under 1/2 of 1%, the loser has the option of asking for a recount.

Allen has the option to request a recount, Gus, if the margin of victory is less than 1%. 1% based on the reported number of votes cast (2,367,036) would be 23,000. Webb's lead is around 7,000.
This gets a little complicated. The election is certified on, I think, Nov 27th and Allen would have 10 days to ask for a recount. Recounts are only conducted (as I understand it) in precincts where the margin was 1% or less (which doesn't make much sense to Johnboy) and the state will pay for it only if the margin is less than 1/2%. Otherwise the challenger pays if the recount doesn't change the outcome in the precinct. I will have to more research on this.

If the difference is under 0,5%, Allen can ask for a state-funded recount.

If it's between 0,5% and 1,0%, he can still ask for a recount, but he'd have to pay for it himself (well, his party/campaign/etc).

In Montana the rules are tighter. There, a state-funded recount can be requested if the difference is smaller than 0,25%; and a self-funded recount can be requested if the difference is smaller than 0,5%.

(Saying this by heart, but I'm fairly certain, I was reading up about this in the morning.)

Ah, we posted at the same time, realjohnboy

Here, without any editorial comment is a little blurb of a story teaser on the start page of my computer this afternoon:

"Wall Street...came back from an early loss (Wednesday), rising as investors grew more confident that a huge victory by Democrats in congressional elections would ultimately result in gridlock and keep lawmakers out of the way of business interests."

I would like to thank snood, RJB, and nimh for answering my question and I would like to point out to soz that I was kidding about Allen coaching the Redskins, but, at the same time, if she was serious about that being his dad, well, then I guess I've learned something else.

There is a real danger that if I hang around this site too long you people will eventually educate me.

I was serious!



http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/26/politics/main2039589.shtml

<doing the "I taught Gus something" dance> <warning, it's a little salacious>

I wanna see! I wanna see!

Opinion polls did well

One thing that hasnt been said yet - but bears mentioning considering the scorn and ridicule that opinion polls often meet here - is that the polls did pretty well measuring the mood of the electorate in the various states.

Of course, it always remains important to look at the trend over several polls from different pollsters, rather than going on the one single poll. But those who did exactly that, could have gotten a pretty correct idea of how the races would work out.

At pollster.com, they did that - updating graphs for every Senate race, which tracked the average of the last five polls out. Yesterday, going just on the preliminary results of course, they did a quickie overview of how that average compared to the actual outcome. Here it is:



(Note that, "For brevity's sake, the table above displays the results for Joe Lieberman in the Republican column")

The average of the last five polls out had gotten the winner right in every of these 12 competitive races. What is more, it had gotten the margin of victory within 3% in all but two races. Only in Maryland (Cardin vs Steele) and in Pennsylvania (Casey vs Santorum) did the margin of victory turn out to be much larger: 10 instead of 3 points and 18 instead of 10 points, respectively.

Those two examples also highlight something else. I had been following the Pollster graphs, but my prediction of the outcome was nevertheless off by no less than 3 seats. This was because I tend to take small Dem leads in opinion polls with a grain of salt. Too often (Bush vs Kerry being a prime example), the actual result turns out to be 2-3% worse, in the difference between the two candidates, for the Dem in the race. Hence me brushing off 1-3% leads for the Dem in poll averages for Virginia, Missouri and Montana.

But as we now know, this time that didnt happen. In fact, the Dems overall did slightly better on election night than they had done in the final polls. Their average margin in the 12 states altogether (see table) was 5 rather than 3 points. And while Cardin and Casey in particular did much better than the polls had suggested, two candidates who did 3 points better than polled were also both Democratic: Klobuchar in Minnesota and Ford in Tennessee.

All of this may have something to do with what I saw dubbed somewhere as a "late countersurge". Somewhere - but Ive tried in vain for 10 minutes to find back where - I read an analysis of exit poll numbers in Missouri, which showed that voters who made up their mind 2-5 days before the election had broken towards Republican incumbent Talent, but that those who made up their mind only on election day itself had overwhelmingly broken to Democrat McGaskill. If that happened everywhere, it explains how the Democrats did even better than in the last polls out.

(It bears mentioning that in 1994, too, the defending party - the Democrats - appeared to have something of a surge the last few days before the elections - but it didnt help them none. Same with what had looked like a last-few-days surge for the Republicans now.)

http://www.tradesports.com/aav2/trading/tradingHTML.jsp?selConID=291848

Whereas the vaunted predicting power of the free market... not so much.

Cycloptichorn

not if you hang with the right bunch...