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May 23, 2006
An overview of the 2006 midterms (House).
I’ve seen a couple polls of the 2006 race, and the Democrats seem to have an edge here. For the first time in about a decade, their favorable rating is higher than the Republicans—and people are pissed at the Republican Party. Yet national polls are not all that important when analyzing a congressional election. With no Presidential candidate to act as a party standard bearer, and more importantly with no presidential coattails to ride on, each candidate must stand on their own merit. Each race must be looked at as it’s own creature...
Yet there are trends; in America (from about 1950 onward) incumbents have something like a 99+% reelection rate. Part of the reason (a large part) is that incumbents who feel they will probably lose tend to retire rather than invest in a doomed campaign. Thus the best indication that a seat up for changing partisan hands is it’s vacancy. Thus, I will develop some formulas with that in mind...
The first formula I will give is for seats with an incumbent running. We expect 1% of all these seats to change hands. I will calculate these separately—as if each Republican and each Democrat had an equal chance of winning or losing their seat. The formula is:
(Number of incumbent Republicans running)*01
(Number of incumbent Democrats running)*01
I also think that Democrats will gain roughly 75-80(*)% of all open seats. Therefore our formula shall be:
(open seats)*.75
And now we look at the makeup of Congress. Currently the House is split 231 Republicans and 202 Democrats (1 of those is an independent who votes Democratic) with a pair of vacancies. There are 30 seats in 2006 in which no incumbent will be running(**). Of these, 8 were held by Democrats, and 22 by Republicans. Therefore we can plug in our numbers:
(231-22)*.01=2.09
(201-8)*.01=1.93
So we expect 4 incumbents to lose their job, and they ought to be evenly split between the parties.
Which brings up the non-incumbent seats. Democrats will win between 22 (rounding down) and 24 seats.
Under the scenario with the smallest Democratic gains, this would leave the House with Republicans in charge: 215 (D) vs. 220 (R). Under assumptions with the largest gains, Republicans are still charge, but will have only a 3 person majority. This result seems to be inline with current speculation. The message to Democrats is obvious: don’t get your hopes up...
____
(*) there’s nothing particularly super scientific about these numbers. But they feel about right to me. You may feel differently...
(**)the two vacancies will have an incumbent with less than a year on the job
NB: Open Seat numbers from This Wikipedia article
Posted by Andrew at May 23, 2006 09:20 PM
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