Unlikely Voter

October marches on, and so does the House generic ballot polling. Last week Republicans were on the rebound and this week every single generic is showing Republicans back on top, as has not been the case lately.

So let’s see what the damage is.

With the House update done, it’s time to move on to the new Senate update. Last week the pace of Republican gains were still stuck as the party was pushed way back into six seat territory, and the chance of a majority change teetered at 1%. Will that chance fall off the map entirely? Let’s find out.

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.

With the House update done, it’s time to move on to the new Senate update. Last week the pace of Republican gains were halted entirely as the party gave back the half seat it gained the week before. The chance of a Republican majority also dropped back to 4%. With the events of the last week I expect that to go down even further, but let’s see how much it sends up to be.

It’s Monday, so it’s time to head over to Real Clear Politics and round up the most recent Generic Ballot polls to come up with a new projection of the House.

Last week’s said Republicans +58. Let’s see where we are now.

With Christine O’Donnell’s victory tonight in the Republican Senate Primary, my last Senate projection’s hedge of a 50% Republican victory chance is obsolete. O’Donnell is the winner, and now I’m looking at how that number would look with the straight up matchup of her against Democrat Chris Coons.

My plan had been to push out projections every Monday until election day but Labor Day brought out the laziness in me, so we do this week’s on Tuesday. Last time, my third projection showed the second straight gradual gain for Republicans. Let’s see if the trend continues.

As I hinted yesterday, it is now time to update my House projection. My last comprehensive review gave Republicans 52 seats over 2008, but let’s see how far the Swingometer needles move this time, as even I have been surprised by how far some of these new Generic Ballots have shifted toward Republicans.

I’ve had my ups and downs with Gallup (one might say the relationship is like the plot of the Gallup generic ballot itself!), but since they’ve been solidly running registered voter surveys again, the numbers have looked reasonable.

But now they’re shocking us from the other direction by showing the Republicans having their largest ever lead in the generic ballot survey, showing a larger edge than even today’s Rasmussen’s GOP +6 (notwithstanding the alleged House Effect of the latter).

As we approach election day I will be updating my Senate projection more frequently. So while I went two months before pushing out my last update, this time I’ve only gone slightly over two weeks.

As if the big Swingometer update wasn’t enough, I’m not done projecting the House today. Taking a cue from Patrick Ishmael I’m going to simulate today the elections based not just the latest seat-by-seat Cook Political Report ratings, but also on those of Congressional Quarterly’s, the Swing State Project’s, and Larry Sabato’s.

Swingometer right now says R+52 from 2008. Ishmael right now also says R+52, though from right now and not from 2008. I expect these popular analysts still to be too cautious to project a big Republican win, but let’s find out.

Now that the unpleasantness of the Research 2000 polling is fading from memory, and the Public Policy Polling deal is churning out results, it looks like Daily Kos is again trying to be a hub of political polling. The republishing of the Chris Bowers Senate projections would seem to be part of that.

His methodology has some strong points that I could be in favor of, so I thought I’d give it an in depth look and compare his latest numbers with my own Senate projection based on polling.

It’s now been nearly two months since I made a projection of the US Senate elections. Since then we’ve had a number of primaries, television ads, polls, and other developments, so let’s see where we stand now.