House Projection for October 18

By on October 18, 2010

It’s crunch time. The lines are being drawn, the late, final strategies are forming, and voting is underway in many places (my own ballot is filled out and ready to mail). Last week all the polls fell into a fairly narrow band and gave Republicans historic gains.

So let’s see if that’s sustained, or if the Democrats are closing it up late.

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 –
Rasmussen 10/17 LV 45 55 R+22
Gallup High 10/17 LV 44 56 R+24
Gallup Low 10/17 LV 41 59 R+30
Fox 10/13 LV 45 55 R+22
Reuters/Ipsos 10/11 LV 48 52 R+16
Bloomberg 10/10 LV 51 49 R+10
CNN/OR 10/7 LV 46 54 R+20
CBS 10/5 LV 45 55 R+22
Democracy Corps 10/4 LV 47 53 R+18

Bloomberg replaces Newsweek as our current whipping boy, with it projecting Democrats to win out in the national popular vote, though with fewer seats than before. Even by a little, that “mere” 10 point swing should bring down the overall average.

All are Likely Voter polls this time, so no weighting is needed, and the mean swing is 20.4. Giving that figure to Swingometer returns a 57 seat Republican gain over 2008, and a 235 R-200 D House majority.

Down slightly from last week, though not by much, it’s still a huge change the entire map marked with the bright pink signifying Republican gains. If this holds there will be strong emotions come election night.

PS I know people will ask, so: The Gallup Low turnout projection converts to an 88 seat Republican gain over 2008 in Swingometer.