Hopefully I'm not sounding like too much of a broken record (since it's something I've said
before), but Election Day is likely to be anti-climactic, in terms of still not knowing which party controls the Senate. Part of that is because Alaska takes a long time to count its votes, and many of the Democratic-friendly votes have to be brought in by remote villages accessible only by plane; in 2008, Ted Stevens actually led at the end of Election Day, and it took 15 more days before Stevens conceded to Mark Begich.
Part of that is because several other races, like Iowa and Colorado, are on track for a possible photo-finish (most polls in Iowa cluster around a one-point margin for either candidate; in Colorado, the margins tend to be wider, but different pollsters still see different candidates on top); that could mean a prolonged recount or other legal jostling. And part of that is because if Greg Orman wins in Kansas (or less likely, Larry Pressler wins in South Dakota), we'll have to sit through their prima-donna agonizing over which party they'll caucus with. Orman has said he'll caucus with the majority, which gives us some certainty, but that decision may not come until we know, based on all the other races, who has the majority.
But most of that is because there are two states that allow for the possibility of overtime — Louisiana and Georgia — and for whatever coincidental reasons, both of their Senate races are close enough that they're on track to go into overtime. Louisiana's quirkiness is well-known; their November election is actually a "jungle primary" involving all candidates from all parties, where, if one candidate doesn't hit 50 percent on the first try, the top two fight again in a December runoff. That happens frequently enough in Louisiana that campaigns often take it for granted and build that contingency into their plans.
Georgia, however, has a conventional party primary, but the general election in Georgia still requires a runoff if none of the major parties' nominees top 50 percent in November. That rarely happens (for instance, if nobody runs in a race other than the Democratic and Republican nominees, there's no chance of it happening), so it's a little known piece of trivia. But, with a Libertarian candidate in the Senate race too, it's likely to happen this year ... and the Georgia runoff is set for January 6, 2015, after the Senate session begins on January 3, which would leave us briefly with an unoccupied seat. Which means we could see a bizarre scenario of the Republicans being in charge of a 50-49 Senate for one week, and then, if she wins the runoff, the addition of Michelle Nunn (and Joe Biden's tie-breaking vote) reverting control to the Democrats. (It'd be reminiscent of January 2001, where the Democrats briefly controlled the 50-50 Senate before Inauguration Day, as Al Gore, not Dick Cheney, still had the tie-breaking vote.)
We'll discuss how we're accounting for these possibilities, over the fold:
With a Louisiana runoff almost assured, and the likelihood of a Georgia runoff also mounting, we've expanded our calculations slightly. If you click through to our
Senate and
gubernatorial permanent Outlook pages, you'll notice we've added new information in the right-hand column below the totem pole talking about the Louisiana and Georgia situations. (We've had information about the Kansas Senate situation for a while now; for instance, as of today, Greg Orman has a 62 percent chance of winning his race, but only a 35 percent chance of winning and then caucusing with the Democrats. There's a 12 percent chance that the Senate is otherwise 49 D/50 R and Orman gets to decide control of the Senate.)
The Louisiana runoff is nearly a sure thing. Based on polls of the full Mary Landrieu/Bill Cassidy/Rob Maness field, we calculate a 95 percent likelihood of a December runoff. The remaining 5 percent is the possibility of Landrieu topping 50 in November and winning outright; there's effectively no chance of Cassidy doing so, since the tea-partying Maness is running to his right, and basically all of his votes are coming out of Cassidy's share. (We still have low odds of Landrieu winning the runoff, based on the polls that are purely Landrieu vs. Cassidy; with Maness votes gravitating toward Cassidy, Cassidy has led in most two-way polls. Her 17 percent odds of winning, as seen in the totem pole, is a cumulative total of the simulations where she wins in November, and where she wins in the runoff.)
The Georgia runoff isn't as likely; we calculate the odds of it happening at only 60 percent, since the Libertarian candidate, Amanda Swafford, is only drawing around 4 percent of the vote and there's enough polling uncertainty that either Nunn or Republican opponent David Perdue could conceivably top 50 percent in November. We calculate Nunn's odds of winning outright as 27 percent, and Perdue's odds as 13 percent. (That's thanks to Nunn having taken a small lead in our trendlines, after leading the two most recent polls of the race, from SurveyUSA and GAPundit.com.)
Nunn's overall odds still don't look too good; they're also 27 percent. That's because our model allows for a Nunn win only in November; any trip to a runoff counts as a loss, because Georgia Democrats are batting zero in runoffs, at least at the statewide level. The most recent one that you probably remember is 2008, where Jim Martin lost to Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss while holding him barely under 50 percent in the Senate race in November, but then lost by a much wider margin in the runoff. Even more important, though, was the now-mostly-forgotten 1992 Senate election, where Democratic incumbent Wyche Fowler finished first in November, but then lost the runoff to GOPer Paul Coverdell.
Now, maybe this is the year that breaks the mold. Chambliss was never considered that endangered, and Coverdell seemed to come out of the general election with momentum. On the other hand, Perdue may be this year's winner of the Akin/Mourdock Memorial self-destruction award; he pretty consistently led in the polls from securing the GOP nomination until several weeks ago, when new revelations about his outsourcing past — and attempts to dig himself out of the hole that just made things worse — shook up the race. If anyone's limping into November, it's Perdue. However, the question isn't so much whether Perdue will still be disliked in January, but one of turnout ... in other words, whether all the Democrats who turn out in November will bother to turn out again in early January, something they didn't do in 1992 or 2008.
Senate control wasn't at stake in 1992 or 2008, though; if it's still on the line in January, it seems like there'll be more than enough political advertising to make sure everyone knows the importance of the election, not to mention the fact that every GOTV operative in the nation will descend on the Peach State. In addition, it's likely to not be the only thing on the ballot; it's probable that there will also be a gubernatorial runoff in December at the same time, which would also draw some interest. There's a Libertarian present in the similarly-close race between Democrat Jason Carter and Republican incumbent Nathan Deal. In fact, our trendlines currently have Carter and Deal completely tied at 47.5 each; we give Carter and Deal each a 17 percent of winning outright in November, and a 66 percent chance of that race going to a runoff as well.
Nunn's improving odds in Georgia are what boost the Democrats' odds in the Senate overall; their odds of holding the Senate are back up to 34 percent, from 29 percent last Thursday, though the median number of seats controlled held steady at 48. The two most notable Senate polls of the weekend, by contrast, didn't really do anything much to help Democratic odds; they were both in Colorado, and both gave Dem incumbent Mark Udall 3-point leads, better news after a string of polls in previous weeks had him trailing Cory Gardner. However, these were both Democratic internal polls (one from Benenson and the other from Mellman), so they both penciled out to effectively-tied polls, which didn't budge the averages much. Udall's odds only went up from 28 percent last Thursday to 30 percent now.
There was a little slippage in the gubernatorial races; Democratic odds of gaining gubernatorial seats fell from 65 percent last Thursday to 59 percent today, with the median number of seats falling from 23 back to 22 (which would be only a one-seat gain). That's almost entirely because of one poll: Rasmussen Reports weighed in in Connecticut and gave Republican challenger Tom Foley a 50-43 lead, a marked contrast with PPP having seen Dem incumbent Dan Malloy leading by 8 and Quinnipiac finding a 43-43 tie. That pushed Malloy's odds down from 58 percent to 28 percent.
There were also small declines for Pat Quinn in Illinois and Martha Coakley in Massachusetts after they posted narrow deficits in recent polls (from Southern Illinois Univ. and Rasmussen, respectively). They're both above water based on overall averages, though, with Quinn's odds falling from 79 percent to 69 percent and Coakley's odds falling from 68 percent to 55 percent.