Unlikely Voter

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It’s technically Tuesday morning early as I write this, but I’m going to use the polls released on Monday, so this will be filed as this Monday’s projection update, as always built with generic ballot polls from Real Clear Politics.

Last week the Republicans fell off from historic gains to a result with a small majority. Let’s see if the trend continues on down or not.

As usual, to run my projection I take the recent generic ballot polls from Real Clear Politics, subtract out the undecideds and third party votes to get a pure two party vote, then compare that with the two party vote of 2008.

From there, I take a weighted average of the swing from 2008 to now in each poll, with Likely Voter polls counting double the weight of Registered Voter polls. That average is then run through the Swingometer to get a projected House composition.

Two party splits
Poll	Filter	D	R	Swing
2008	Actual	56	44	–
Gallup 9/26	RV	50	50	R+12
Rasmussen 9/26	LV	47	53	R+18
CNN/OR 9/23	LV	45	55	R+22
Politico/GWU/BG 9/22	LV	47	53	R+18
Reuters/Ipsos 9/19	RV	51	49	R+10
Fox News 9/16	RV	47	53	R+18
POS 9/16	LV	47	53	R+18
McC/Marist 9/16	RV	49	51	R+14

We’re back to most polls being in a narrow band of 18-22, with registered voter polls from McClatchy and Marist College, Gallup, and Ipsos for Reuters showing up as the odd polls out.

Taking the weighted average I get a mean swing of 17.2. Plugging that swing into the Swingometer gives a projected Republican gain of 49 seats from 2008, giving the GOP a 227-208 House majority. The projection is still below 1994, thanks to three of the four RV polls being much kinder to the Democrats. But again, I said from the start I would work off the polls and the Swingometer, warts and all, and that is what I will continue to do.