Kyle Kondik updates the Crystal Ball’s Senate map:
Democrats have to hope that Republicans continue their multiple-cycle trend of blowing winnable races by nominating bad candidates: The likeliest places for that to happen are Georgia, Iowa and North Carolina. Any improvement in President Obama’s approval rating would also help, and it remains interesting that despite the president’s weak numbers, Democrats are typically tied or slightly ahead on most generic ballot surveys measuring voter preferences in the House, which can also reflect the national sentiment in Senate races.
That might end up being thin gruel for many Democrats, particularly Senate candidates and incumbents in Red states, but it could also lead to an election that is less about a big wave and more about certain Republican-leaning states aligning their senators with their presidential preference.
Trende’s model finds that “Republicans win the Senate about 80 percent of the time”:
Why is this different from outcomes predicted by other modelers, such as Alan Abramowitz and John Sides/Eric McGhee? Part of it is that the predicted outcomes really aren’t that different. Abramowitz’s most likely outcome is a GOP pickup of six, while this model’s most likely outcome is a pickup of eight. This has great substantive importance, but in statistical terms, the findings are well within the confidence intervals of the various models.
These other models also take a much broader swath, putting results from back to the 1950s into their data set. One of the assumptions behind this model is that something has substantially changed in the past few cycles as we’ve become increasingly polarized. Red states don’t vote for blue senators except in exceptional circumstances, and vice versa. There’s some support for this in the Sides/McGhee models; if they base their predictions off of findings from 1980 to the present, instead of from 1952 to the present, they find that Tom Cotton’s chances of winning in Arkansas skyrocket.
At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that these models are largely heuristic devices, especially this far out.
Meanwhile, Scott Bland reports that Democratic fundraisers are using Nate Silver’s predictions to scare up campaign contributions:
The last time [Silver] wrote about the Senate landscape, all the way back in July 2013, [he] said Republicans “might now be close to even-money to win control of the chamber” in 2014. He also cited North Carolina as “the closest thing to the tipping-point state in the Senate battle,” and called Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s seat in Louisiana “a true toss-up.”
That’s scary stuff if you’re a Democratic supporter, especially coming from an analyst whose accuracy made him a household name in the past few years. And the repeated name-dropping has probably opened some wallets for Senate Democrats.
“There’s a lot of testing, particularly for subject lines, to see what has the best open rates,” said Taryn Rosenkranz, a Democratic digital-fundraising consultant unaffiliated with the DSCC. “Using that name over and over suggests it’s successful, and people are opening and giving.”
The Dish 