September 4th Race Ratings Update –
President:
Last week was the republican national convention. Normally you’d expect the republican candidate to get somewhat of a bounce in support after this event, but the Romney bounce looks to be very muted. That is, in every world except in the world of Scott Rasmussen, whom I’ve basically disregarded at this point in the campaign due to his outrageous party ID weights and other obvious flaws. The Ipsos and Gallup national trackers are still showing Barack Obama in the lead. Infuriatingly, we have yet to see any non-tracker, non-internet national polls since the RNC, so I don’t have a great sample size to go off of. Suffice it to say that Obama’s average lead of about 1-3% nationally is largely unchanged from the previous week.
This has led to a pretty boring week as far as the map is concerned. The only change is in Florida, where the latest poll from PPP has Obama ahead 48-47 (that’s the only poll there from within the last week). This state has been on a knife’s edge for months now and probably will be for quite a while. For the moment, it goes to Toss Up/Tilt D. By comparison, the only state in the Toss Up/Tilt R column right now is North Carolina, where a combination of polls by PPP, SurveyUSA, and Elon College have Romney ahead by a 48-46 count. Wisconsin remains a really close one as well, but it remains to be seen whether or not it is a temporary Ryan bounce. For what its worth, neither campaign is doing much advertising there yet, so if Wisconsin really is a toss-up, why is Romney not going hard for it?
Basically the whole Romney strategy at this point is not trying to force a wedge by trying to claim one state or two, but in a combined 3-5% national swing that would force all the states in the Tilt Obama category into his column. But if this past week's convention is any indication, he has a lot of work to do. If anything, the polls will probably shift toward Obama this week as the Democratic National Convention gets underway in Charlotte this evening.
The Map:
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Safe D – 142 EV – VT, MA, RI, NY, DE, DC, MD, IL, CA, HI
Likely D – 49 EV – ME, CT, NJ, NM, OR, WA
Lean D – 56 EV – NH, PA, MI, MN, NV
Toss Up/Tilt D – 85 EV – FL, VA, OH, WI, IA, CO,
Toss Up/Tilt R – 15 EV – NC
Lean R – 32 EV – IN, MO, AZ
Likely R – 39 EV – SC, GA, TN, MT
Safe R – 120 EV – WV, KY, AL, MS, AR, LA, TX, OK, KS, NE, SD, ND, WY, ID, UT, AK
Total Obama – 332 EV
Total Romney – 206 EV
Moves since August 27 update:
Florida – moves from Toss Up/Tilt R to Toss Up/Tilt D
Senate:
The race for control of the Senate continues to heat up, mostly because the competitive map continues to expand. Following last week’s implosion by Todd Akin in Missouri, we thought the Republicans were in bad shape. But they got a bit of good news from an unexpected locale. Two polls last week, one from Rassmussen, one from Quinnipiac, put WWE CEO Linda McMahon ahead of democratic representative Chris Murphy. A third poll showed Murphy with a bit more of a lead, but the polling aggregate is very tight at the moment. This is a state that Obama will probably carry by a wide margin, but clearly McMahon’s vast resources and recent ad blitz are having an impact. The race moves all the way from Likely D to Toss Up/Tilt D. There hasn’t been a lot of polling elsewhere in the past week, and what we have seen has been largely in line with the current ratings.
I'm fairly certain at this point that Maine is lost for the Republicans, and that Nebraska is lost for the Democrats, so those two cancel each other out. Wisconsin right now is leaning toward the GOP with Tommy Thompson leading Tammy Baldwin by mid-single digits. Then there's Montana, where Denny Rehberg holds a razor thin plurality lead over John Tester in the aggregate. We haven't seen a lot of polling out of Montana, and hopefully PPP or some other pollsters besides Scotty Ras will get into the field there soon.
Outside of Maine, the closest Republican-held seat to flipping is Nevada, where Dean Heller holds a miniscule polling lead over Shelly Berkley. However, that has to be taken with a huge grain of salt because of pollsters' constant Republican bias in the silver state, which was on display in both the 2008 presidential election and the 2010 Senate contest between Sharron Angle and Harry Reid. The lesson to be learned there is that if the polls become tied, Heller's in trouble.
The Map:
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Total Democratic Pickups – 1 – Maine
Total Republican Pickups – 3 – Nebraska, Montana, Wisconsin
National Swing – Republicans +2
New Senate Breakdown – 51 Democrats, 49 Republicans
Safe D – 10 seats – ME, VT, RI, NY, PA, MD, WV, MN, CA, WA
Likely D – 2 seats – NJ, MI
Lean D – 4 seats – FL, OH, MO, NM
Toss Up/Tilt D – 3 seats – CT, VA, ND
Toss Up/Tilt R – 4 seats – MA, IN, MT, NV
Lean R – 2 seats – WI, AZ
Likely R – 1 seat – NE
Safe R – 5 seats – TN, MS, TX, WY, UT
Moves since August 27 update:
Connecticut – moves from Likely D to Toss Up/Tilt D
The House of Representatives:
We’re starting to see more polling in individual House districts now. Hopefully this pace will pick up as we head toward Election Day. This was a fairly solid week for the democrats, as we saw quite a few polls commissioned by not only campaigns, but from dem-aligned third parties like Majority PAC. The most noteworthy of these polls came in CT-5, CA-3, and especially FL-26, where democrat Joe Garcia shows a healthy lead over embattled republican representative David Rivera. Interestingly enough, we’re not seeing a lot of pushback from the republican side at this point, so either they are holding their cards close to the vest, or they aren’t seeing good numbers themselves in the districts in question.
We had 7 districts change ratings this week, all 7 of them in democrats’ favor. Two districts moved from the republican column to the democratic column, WI-7 and FL-26. This leaves the national swing at D+14, meaning that Team Blue would have to pick up 11 more seats to take control of the House majority. The good news for Team Red is that as of now, assuming they don't lose any seats in the Likely R or Lean R columns, Team Blue would have to sweep the Toss Up column completely in order to take the House. The odds of that are basically nil, so to realistically have a shot, the Democrats will have to expand the map and put more seats into the Toss Up column.
Projected New House – Republicans 228, Democrats 207
National Swing – Democrats +14
The Equal Area Map:
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