Election Morning Analysis

When all's said and done, Democrats have done better in the Senate than expected, at this point favored to win 53 total seats with their two caucusing independents, and worse in the House, where they are expected at this point to lose about 65 total seats. 

My predictions held up well! That's another piece of good news for this fledgling blogger. In the House, I predicted that Dems would lose between 30 and 80 seats. I also noted in my forecast that since Renee Ellmers DID win in NC-02, knocking off Bob Etheridge, you could expect greater than 54 seats gained in the House by Republicans. And Heath Shuler held out against his opponent in NC-11, as did Price in NC-04, which indicated that Republicans were not destined for an overwhelming victory, and were likely to stay under 70 seats won. This isn't good news for Democrats, and the likely makeup of the new House will be something like 245(R)-190(D). For perspective, this is a huge turn-over, largest in a century. Also for perspective, before this election the House was apportioned like this: 180(R)-255(D). So for all practical purposes the Democrats and Republicans switched places.

In the Senate, all of the races I called turned out as expected. The four races I did not call ended up being the closest of the evening: Washington, Colorado, Illinois, and Nevada. Well there are actually two exceptions to that point. First, as I hinted at in my Senate forecast, Angle's(R) numbers in Nevada were being overstated by polls. Still, I don't think anyone predicted Harry Reid would win so handily, and we'll be wondering for awhile exactly why that occurred in defiance of the +2 or +3 point victory polls were predicting for Angle. Illinois leaned toward Kirk, as expected and Washington looks good for Dems right now, also as expected. In the last week, Colorado seemed to be leaning toward Buck in the polls, but I felt dubious about predicting that he would win, since the Governor's race was likely to depress Republican turnout. It has been suggested by various pundits that Nevada, and perhaps Colorado (not yet, but looking promising) Democratic victories would point to a successful turnout of the Latino populations in those areas. Perhaps that's true.

Overall Dems will end up with 52 or 53 seats in the Senate, it's looking like. This is 1 seat greater than I thought, but then again, that's how coin-flips manifest themselves. I also admittedly gave myself some wiggle room with disclaimers, but overall it was a good night for forecasting.

The biggest surprise for me besides Nevada was the Senate race in Pennsylvania. Democrats had long thought this battle was promising for them, with a strong voter contact and turnout operation, but I never really thought Joe Sestak(D) had a chance in this one. The eventual margin of Toomey(R) +2 is much narrower than most polls were showing, and frankly much narrower than I expected, considering how confident I was that Pennsylvania would go the other way. Everyone seems to be talking about Nevada, but I hope to be able to answer the question of why Sestak performed so well soon in the future.

And in Alaska, we shall soon see if Murkowski can pull it out in the end. Defying the write-in stigma.

John Boehner will be the new Speaker of the House. This will set up an interesting dynamic between him, Reid, and Obama. But for now it'll be interesting to see what Democrats do with the Lame Duck Session.