Unlikely Voter

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.

There’s something to be said for consistency. And no matter who hires Greenberg Quinlan Rosner to gauge the House outlook for Democrats, bad news seems to come back.

That consistency continues with GQR’s poll of “voters,” both likely and not, for Citizen Opinion, H/T to Liberty Central.

Plug -2.8 into the Swingometer and you’ll see 5 districts swing. Louisiana’s second district was the fifth closest seat won by a Republican in 2008, and that Republican was Joseph Cao. He beat William Jefferson, the now-convicted felon who received bribes and kept the cash hidden in his freezer.

By election day Jefferson had already been caught, and the money had already been found. Why was the election so close? Incumbency matters.

Before we look at some of today’s primary races, here’s Rasmussen’s from a few days back on the Missouri Senate race.

John McCain barely won the state from Barack Obama, and apparently the Senate race is just as close.

Rasmussen Reports came out with its generic ballot today, too. Having already explained in depth how I did Gallup’s, I’ll analyze the consequences of Rasmussen’s numbers in brief.

The new Gallup generic ballot is out. Republicans have jumped to a 49-43 advantage, which National Review Online says is the largest Republican lead in 60 years.

Given the historical accuracy of the Gallup generic ballot in midterm elections, let’s plug this result in to the Swingometer.

In the North Carolina Senate race we already saw that Rasmussen Reports and Public Policy Polling are showing markedly different figures.

It looks like we’re going to see the same contrast in the Colorado Senate race, as Rasmussen showed Republicans doing well while PPP shows Democrats ahead.

Some researchers led by Noah Smith at Carnegie Mellon tried an experiment: Could they predict the results of traditional polling, which has as its core feature a genuine random sample of people, with careful monitoring of Twitter?

Building on the work I did on the House races, let’s see what the latest Cook Political Report ratings suggest for the Senate elections in November.

The Cook Political Report’s House projections are rather conservative. In 2008 only one flip was not marked competitive, and that was Louisiana’s 2nd CD, in which Joseph Cao upset William Jefferson. I naturally give him a pass on that seat.

What do Cook’s 2010 projections say, and what do we learn from them?

We’ve already seen that Republicans are in fair shape in the New Hampshire Senate race, but it appears that the state could also return to its historical norm of sending Republicans to the House, according to the latest from PPP.