Frightening Predeictions for Senate Democrats in Upcoming Midterm Elections from NY Times and WAPO

It’s Halloween time, but Senate Democrats have more to fear than ghosts, goblins, witches and vampires … NT Times and WAPO predict Democrats are the Walking “political” Dead …

With just days to go before the 2014 midterm November 4th elections, two very liberal papers, the New York Times and Washington Post, are predicting a GOP Senate takeover. The NY Times predicts that there is a 69% chance that the Republicans will win control of the US Senate.  According to the Times, Republicans will win Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota and Kentucky, West Virginia and Montana, leaving the seven most competitive states below in question. The NY Times predicts that Democrats will win the senate races in New Hampshire, North Carolina and Kansas; however, the GOP will run the rest of the seats in play in Georgia, Iowa, Alaska and Colorado. If the New York Times is correct, the GOP will hold a 52-48 control of the Senate after the elections.

According to our statistical election-forecasting machine, the Republicans have a moderate edge, with about a 69% chance of gaining a majority.

State-by-State Probabilities #
To forecast each party’s chance of gaining a majority, our model first calculates win probabilities for each individual Senate race. In addition to the latest polls, it incorporates the candidates’ political experience, fund-raising, a state’s past election results and national polling. More about our methodology.

However, if Democrats think that the NYT’s 69% chance of a GOP victory is bad … the WAPO is predicting a 95% chance of the Republican party taking back control of the US Senate.

The model’s factors fall into three categories:

1) The national landscape. On average, the better things are going in the country, the better the president’s party will do in an election.  We capture national conditions using two measures: presidential approval and change in gross domestic product. At the same time, the president’s party usually does worse in midterm years than presidential years even after accounting for the first two measures, so our model takes account of that, too.

2) The partisanship of the state or district. Obviously, House and Senate candidates will do better when their party dominates a district or state. We measure this with Obama’s share of the major-party vote in 2012. In Senate races, we also include the incumbent’s share of the major-party vote from the election six years before, which is the incumbent’s share of the Democratic and Republican votes, combined with an indicator for whether that incumbent is running or the seat is open. The incumbent’s previous election matters mainly when the incumbent is running again.

3) Key features of the race. The model currently takes account of whether the incumbent is running, which captures the well-known incumbency advantage in congressional elections. For the Senate, we also build in each candidate’s level of experience in elective office. In the Senate, we categorize experience into five levels, from someone who has never held an elective office to an incumbent senator. For states where there hasn’t yet been a Senate primary, we impute candidate experience using historical averages from similar races.  (After the primaries, we will also add candidate experience to the House model.  There, the measure will be simpler: whether the candidate has held any elective office.)

Question: The NY Times and WAPO have been among the two most liberal media outlets that have carried the water for Barack Obama and Democrats, why are they calling the election now for the GOP? Is it because they want to put out faux-news and give Republicans voters a false sense of security or is it because they see the handwriting on the wall and are trying to mantain some sort of credibility by finally reporting the truth?

Harry Reid literally begs for money as he sees his job of Democrat Senate Majority Leader slipping away. Just curious Dingy Harry, if you can triple one’s gift, you need money how? I have a deal for you, You can just double my donation of $0.00.

But I’m emailing once more because this moment is absolutely critical. I know you’re a busy person, but this is an absolute MUST-READ:
Our Final Weekend Get Out The Vote Push is on the chopping block: We’re still $1,389,071 short with 24 hours left.
If we don’t fill that budget gap, we’ll be forced to scale back our plans to mobilize 575,000 voters this weekend. These are voters who could determine the outcome of the whole Senate.
I’m begging for your help to close the gap IMMEDIATELY. If we fall short before the last end-of-month deadline tomorrow, our chance to keep the Senate gets a whole lot smaller.
Will you pitch in to the Final Weekend GOTV Push before the final deadline in 24 hours? We’ll triple-match your gift.

Other nightmarish 2014 US Senate predictions for Democrats. None of the pollsters are predicting that Democrats will maintain control of the Senate and Harry Reid (NV-D) will no longer be Senate Majority Leader.

• Five Thirty Eight Politics
• Daily Kos
• Huffington Post
• Princeton Election Consortium
• Predict Wise