Further adventures in quantifying collective wisdom.
Quite a bit of movement all across the board in the House races this week and with only a single exception (FL 16), nearly all in the Democratic direction. All six of the celebrity handicappers I've been tracking have readjusted their rankings at least once in the past week, resulting in a total of 11 districts changing columns in my meta-analysis.
Beginning with the dark side, Mark Foley's FL 16 fell back into the Toss-up column from Leans Dem this week, presumably on the strength of the successful court appeal on hanging signs in the polling places. But moving up to take its place, IA 1, OH 18 and PA 10 have edged into Lean Democratic territory from last week's Toss-Ups list. OH 1 was the single race to move from Leans Repub to the Toss-up list this week but a startling five districts -- AZ 1, CA 4, CA 50, CO 5 and FL 8 -- moved from Republican Favored to the Leans Repub column. And bringing up the rear, NE 3 moves from Safe Repub to Republican Favored. (Reminds me a little of baseball.)
(continued...)
On the Democratic side of the aisle, SD (AL), UT 2, and WA 2 seem to have disappeared off the radars of everyone except Cook and CQ, so it's off to the Safe Dem column for those three -- a race has to be ranked at least marginally competitive by at least three of the six sources to make my cut. Also on the Dem side, TX 17 moves to Democrat Favored from Leans Dem and IA 3 moves from Toss-up back to Leans Democratic. That leaves GA 12 as the only Dem-held seat currently residing in the toss-up column, and only by a nose.
With those changes, the new totals come in at:
Democratic Safe (190D) + Favored (8D, 1R) + Lean (4D, 8R) = 211
Republican Safe (169R) + Favored (17R) + Lean (16R) = 202
Toss-Ups (1D, 21R) = 22
And here are the new meta-lists. Bigger numbers should be better for democrats in all cases (if the collected wisdom of the pundits proves out) with 3.5 being a pure toss-up.
Republican Held MetaToss-ups (Score 3.0 to 4.4)
CT 02: Simmons, 3.5
CT 04: Shays, 3.8
CT 05: Johnson, 3.0
FL 13: Open (Harris), 3.7
FL 16: Open (Foley), 4.4
FL 22: Clay Shaw, 3.6
IL 06: Open (Hyde), 3.5
IN 09: Sodrel, 3.9
KY 04: Davis, 3.1
MN 06: Open (Kennedy), 3.5
NC 11: Taylor, 4.0
NM 01: Wilson, 3.9
NY 24: Open (Boehlert), 4.4
NY 26: Reynolds, 4.1
OH 01: Chabot, 3.0
OH 15: Pryce, 4.1
PA 06: Gerlach, 4.0
PA 08: Fitzpatrick, 3.2
VA 02: Drake, 3.2
WA 08: Reichert, 3.5
WI 08: Open (Green), 3.4
Likely Looking Dem Pick-Ups (Score 4.5 or better)
AZ 08: Open (Kolbe), 5.5
CO 07: Open (Beauprez), 5.2
IA 01: Open (Nussle), 4.5
IN 02: Chocola, 4.6
IN 08: Hostettler, 5.1
OH 18: Open (Ney), 4.5
PA 07: Weldon, 4.9
PA 10: Sherwood, 4.6
TX 22: Open (DeLay), 4.9
Democratic Watch List (Score <5)
GA 08: Marshal, 4.6
GA12: Barrow, 4.4*
IA 03: Boswell, 4.8
IL 08: Bean, 4.6
* Included in the toss-ups total above.
Methodology:
Current House race ratings from CQ, the Cook, Rothenberg and Evans Novak political reports and Larry Sabato's Cryatal Ball were recast as numeric values where:
0=Safe Republican
1=Republican Favored
2=Leans Republican
3=Toss-Up/Tilt Republican
3.5=Unleaned Toss-Up
4=Toss-Up/Tilt Democratic
5=Leans Democratic
6=Democrat Favored
7=Safe Democratic
Evans-Novak's (four) categories are mapped to 2-5 on this scale. Rankings from the National Journal's list of Top 60 seats most likely to change parties were interpolated onto a harmonized scale where 1=6 and 60=1 (reversed for the Democratic Watch List so that higher scores are always better for Democrats). Scores from all sources for each race were then averaged to arrive at a single-number aggregate race rating.
Sources:
http://www.cqpolitics.com/...
http://www.cookpolitical.com/...
http://rothenbergpoliticalreport.blogspot.com/...
http://www.humanevents.com/...
http://nationaljournal.com/...
http://www.centerforpolitics.org/...