Nate Silver on NY-26

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Wednesday May 25, 2011 · 8:05 AM PDT

2011/05/25 · 08:05

Still, a seat that would ordinarily be won by Republicans by about 12 points, but was instead won by the Democrats by 6 points, is a pretty big deviation from the norm. Odds are, like in the special election in Massachusetts last year, that some part of this had to do with factors that could carry over to the national level, while some other part had to do with circumstances specific to the district.

538

In addition, the Republican (Corwin) underperformed in Republican areas per TPM.

Democrat Kathy Hochul lead 48-43 with over 83% of the votes counted and her victory looks to be a strong one -- the Associated Press called the race within an hour of the polls closing. Corwin underperformed in key GOP counties while Hochul's margins in Democratic areas were in line with the party's high water mark in the district from 2006, a wave year that swept the Republicans out of the majority in the House and Senate.

TPM

Now, while I am no Nate Silver (numbers tremble at the mention of my name, but they grovel in abject terror at the mention of his), I did a little number crunching based on the Siena College poll and estimated the effect of Medicare as being about 7% of the vote.

Given Nate's estimate that Hochul outperformed by 18 points, and my guesstimate that Medicare accounts for 7 points of that, there are 11 points left to explain. The Tea Party candidate, Jack Davis, accounts for part of that, per Nate.

Nor is it likely that Ms. Corwin would in fact have won all of Mr. Davis’s votes. He ran in the district as a Democrat in 2006, and polls suggested that his voters leaned Republican by roughly a 2-1 margin, but not more than that. If you had split his vote 2-1 in favor of Ms. Corwin, the results would have been Ms. Hochul 51 percent, and Ms. Corwin 48 percent

That is, of Mr. Davis's 9 points, allocate 6 to Corwin, and 3 to Hochul, for a net gain of 3. There was also a Green Party candidate who got 1% of the vote; that presumably came from Hochul's total. That still leaves 8 points to explain, and those can probably be attributed to Kathy Hochul running a good campaign while Jane Corwin ran a poor one. In particular, Corwin sent a high-ranking staffer to track Davis, and they got into a shoving match.

This table shows the effect of various factors as I understand them.

Case	Hochul %	Corwin %
Expected	44	56
3rd Party	40	50
Candidate strength	44	46
Medicare issue	47.5	42.5

In other words, everything had to break right to pull this off. Which leads to Nate's musing on the macro implications of the two "wild cards" he sees happening this year:
1) The GOP budget
2) Osama bin Laden

As a consequence of those two wild cards, Nate concludes:

Coupled with what is arguably a troubling start for the Republicans in the presidential campaign — a couple of electable candidates aren’t running, while there are signs now that Sarah Palin may — the past six months have played out in a way that is toward the lower end of what the G.O.P. might reasonably have expected in November 2010.
That doesn’t mean there are any guarantees. Far from it: I don’t know that Mr. Obama is much more likely than a 2-to-1 favorite to retain the White House, nor that Democrats better than even money to take back the House. But both sets of odds have improved, in my view, from where I would have pegged them a few months ago.

And there you have it, folks. That's not dismal odds, but given the breakdown in the Senate class of 2012 is something like 23(D) to 10(R), we need all the help we can get. The GOP has told us that given the House, the Senate, and the White House, they will enact the Ryan budget - and a budget can't be filibustered.

50-50 in the House, probably 50-50 in the Senate, and the two events are correlated, so it's not a 25% chance that the GOP gets all of Congress - probably closer to 40%.

That 2-1 for Obama, then, is our firewall. Re-electing Obama is the easiest way to prevent the New Deal from being scrapped.

Poll
369 votes Show Results
What should a Democrat's response be to NY-26?

Point, and laugh

Send a thank you note to Paul Ryan

Send a thank you note to Kathy Hochul

Send a thank you note to Jane Corwin

Happy Dance

Realize that Death Vouchers are a useful club for beating Republicans

All of the above

Meh

Pie

369 votes Vote Now!
What should a Democrat's response be to NY-26?

Point, and laugh

4%

13 votes

Send a thank you note to Paul Ryan

36 votes

Send a thank you note to Kathy Hochul

7%

25 votes

Send a thank you note to Jane Corwin

0%

1 vote

Happy Dance

1%

4 votes

Realize that Death Vouchers are a useful club for beating Republicans

74 votes

All of the above

213 votes

Meh

0%

0 votes

Pie

1%

3 votes

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Nate Silver on NY-26

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