5 Reasons Democrats Could Beat the Polls and Hold the House
By NATE SILVER
It was hard to pinpoint exactly when in the night things started to go wrong. But at some point, a trash can was knocked over in John Boehner’s office in the Rayburn House Office Building. A half-hour later on the other side of town, a hole was punched in the wall at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters.
Republicans didn’t really have much reason to be upset. They were going to pick up somewhere between 29 and 34 House seats from Democrats, pending the outcome of a recount or two and the receipt of mail ballots in some Western states. They gained five Senate seats from Democrats, and won the governorships in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida, among many other states. It had been a wave election, indeed — but a wave about on the magnitude of 2006, rather than 1994.
For most of the evening, Republicans had still seemed quite likely to pick up the House, perhaps by some margin. Exit polls that (erroneously, it turned out) suggested a nine-point generic ballot win for the party colored the early coverage. So, when Baron Hill, the vulnerable Democrat in Indiana’s 9th district, held onto win his seat by a surprisingly robust 9-point margin, it was mostly ignored. Instead, coverage was focused on the dozen or so Democratic incumbents who lost their races early in the evening — some of them expectedly so (like Alan Grayson and John M. Spratt Jr.), but others of which (like Gerry Connolly of Virginia and Chellie Pingree of Maine) were more surprising.
In states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, however, Democrats held up surprisingly well. Mary Jo Kilroy, who had been all but written off, held her seat in Columbus, as did a trio of Democrats, Christopher Carney, Bryan Lentz and Patrick J. Murphy, in Pennsylvania. Ted Strickland won the gubernatorial race in Ohio, and Joe Manchin III was elected to the Senate in neighboring West Virginia (by double digits, in fact). Joe Sestak appeared to have upset Pat Toomey in the Senate race Pennsylvania, although the Associated Press had yet to call the race because of alleged irregularities in Philadelphia.
New York was another problematic state for Republicans: their gubernatorial nominee, Carl P. Paladino, was defeated by almost 40 points, and of the six or seven House seats they had hoped to win there, they had instead picked up just one, while another — the upstate 20th district — remained too close to call.
Still, the gains came steadily, if not quite steadily enough. Michael Bennet lost his Senate race in Colorado — taking Representatives John Salazar and Betsy Markey with him — even as more vulnerable-seeming Democrats, like Alexi Giannoulias of Illinois and Harry Reid of Nevada, held on. The Dakota Democrats, Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota and Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin of South Dakota, were both defeated, converting 148,000 square miles of territory from blue to red.
But Republican gains not only stalled out but reversed themselves by the time that the West Coast began to report its results. Not only had vulnerable Democrats like Jim Costa and Kurt Schrader held on, but Democrats had defeated two Republican incumbents — Dan Lungren of the California 3rd district and Dave Reichert of the Washington 8th — while also narrowly winning the Arizona 3rd district, where the G.O.P. nominee Ben Quayle had proven too difficult a sell. Overall on the night, Democrats won 8 seats formerly held by Republicans, about twice what most analysts had expected.
The Senate race in Alaska, meanwhile, as some had feared, appeared headed toward a prolonged legal battle concerning Lisa Murkowski’s write-in votes. But the plaintiff would Scott McAdams, a Democrat, and not Joe Miller, a Republican.
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A scenario like this one is possible tomorrow — not particularly likely, but possible, just as a 77-seat Republican gain is possible. It’s probably a somewhat greater possibility than people realize. Here are five reasons Democrats could outperform their polls and beat consensus expectations.
1. The cellphone effect. This one is pretty simple, really: a lot of American adults (now about one-quarter of them) have ditched their landlines and rely exclusively on their mobile phones, and a lot of pollsters don’t call mobile phones. Cellphone-only voters tend to be younger, more urban, and less white — all Democratic demographics — and a study by Pew Research suggests that the failure to include them might bias the polls by about 4 points against Democrats, even after demographic weighting is applied.
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