State of the Race Update III: Six Days to Go!
Nov. 2, 2006 -- When I last checked in about the state of the race -- about ten days ago -- things looked pretty good for the Democrats. Now they look even better.
Take the generic congressional contest, for example. In the nine polls finished since 10/20 that are listed on PollingReport.com, the Democrats' average lead is 14 points. That's huge by historical standards. Democrats haven't seen these kind of leads this late in an off-year election campaign, since the elections of 1974 and 1982, when they gained 43 and 26 seats respectively.Of course, the generic congressional contest does not tell you directly about how the myriad individual races will turn out (we'll get to the race by race data in a moment) so some caution is advised in assessing just what this gaudy lead is likely to mean for the Democrats on election day. But here's some food for thought. Three political scientists, Joseph Bafumi, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, have recently released a paper that forecasts the level of seat shifts from the generic congressional vote question, using model-based computer simulations of the 435 individual House contests.
The gruesome methodological details may be found in the paper, but the bottom line is that their simulations predict a 32 seat pickup for the Democrats. As we shall see when we get to the race by race data, this is not such a crazy prediction.
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