House Projection for November 1
By Neil Stevens on November 1, 2010
This is it. Today’s is my final survey of the Generic Ballots. This is the last time this year I’ll ask Swingometer about the 2010 House elections.
Last week Republicans took their second straight week of a 57 seat projected gain. Will they hit 60? Will they fall below the 1994 benchmark instead?
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 10/31 | LV | 43 | 57 | R+26 |
| Gallup 10/31 | LV | 42 | 58 | R+28 |
| Pew 10/30 | LV | 47 | 53 | R+18 |
| CNN/OR 10/30 | LV | 45 | 55 | R+22 |
| Fox 10/28 | LV | 43 | 57 | R+26 |
| ABC/WaPo 10/28 | LV | 48 | 52 | R+16 |
| Bloomberg 10/26 | LV | 48 | 52 | R+16 |
| CBS/NYT 10/26 | LV | 47 | 53 | R+18 |
| McC/Marist 10/25 | LV | 47 | 53 | R+18 |
The polling is falling into two tiers. You’ve got Gallup/Rasmussen/CNN/Fox all up in the stratosphere for Republicans, what I’m calling the low turnout tier, and the rest projecting a much smaller Republican majority. The low turnout tier Swingometer says projects a 67 seat Republican gain and a 245 R-190 D House majority, while the other, higher turnout polls project a 49 seat Republican gain and a 227 R-208 D majority.
Officially if I average all of them, it’s three weeks in a row at R+57, 235 R-200 D House. But when the polls are stratified, my suspicion is that either one or the other will be right, and it won’t fall somewhere in between.
So officially the methodology says R+57, but I’m going to go ahead and say 70 is my personal, final call. I start at the 67 the Swingometer says, then add a few seats to account for the way it will structurally have problems in a wave, undercounting drastic differences in recruitment and fundraising.