Election 2010

I had originally planned to do a post detailing my predictions for the upcoming elections. Unfortunately, my time management skills suck, and I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to deal with a bad router. So my nice detailed post with race-by-race predictions for the Senate went down the tubes. However, since I just voted and the results are just starting to trickle in (and I'm not in a place where I can watch election results coverage anyway), I figured I'd post my general predictions. 

In analyzing the elections, I'm making a few assumptions that go against the conventional wisdom. The polls seem to indicate the Democrats will end up with 51-52 seats in the Senate, a loss of 7-8, while the Republicans will take over the Senate with around 230 seats, a Democratic loss of around 50 seats. However, there are a few problems with the polls. First, Rasmussen tends to do more polls than anyone else, and he has a pronounced house effect. Second, there's some evidence that even old reliable Gallup has put its thumb on the scale. Third, this may be the first election in which the exclusion of cell phones and the use of robo-polls may be misleading, as there's a pronounced robo-poll house effect
for the first time.

In light of these uncertainties, I assume that the Democrats will do better than people are thinking. That doesn't mean they won't lose seats. It's hard not to lose seats as the party in power in a stagnant, jobless recovery.

Senate:  Conventional wisdom says the Democrats will barely hold on to a majority in the Senate. I think they'll keep their majority with a decent margin of 54-55 seats, a loss of only 4-5. That doesn't mean everything's going to be rosy for the Dems on this side of Congress. I fully expect Harry Reid to lose in Nevada. I assume that Dems will win most races that have been considered close, but Harry Reid is a known and not very well-liked quantity in Nevada. True, there are multiple ways to vote against Harry Reid. However, there are also multiple ways to vote against Sharron Angle, and followers of the party in power are more likely to cast meaningless protest votes.

House: Unlike the pollsters and pundits, I expect control of the House to be closely contested. The Republicans will pick up quite a few seats, both because of economic discontentment and the fact that Republicans controlled redistricting in most states after the last census in 2000 (a factor that never enters into Senate races). Though I think the Democrats might have a fighting chance of holding the majority, I believe the most likely outcome is a narrow Republican majority somewhere in the 220s, a wave but not the kind of wave they've been hyping. I further predict the first act of the new Republican majority will be to form the Select Committee on Dead Horse Flogging to investigate whether the defunct ACORN rigged the election to keep the Reps from gaining 70 seats.

Governors: I have less to go on in these races than in the Senate contests because I never got the chance to go over the polling trends in individual races. I have no idea how many governors nationwide will be Republican or Democratic after today. I do have a strange feeling Ted Strickland will actually pull out his race over John Kasich. Strickland's been showing a sharp upward trend in the polls over the last few weeks, and Ohio's been seeing more economic "green shoots" than other states (though unemployment still remains over 10% statewide).

The Ohio Primary

Today, I voted in a primary election for the first time since my senior year in high school (1988--yes, I proudly voted for Dukakis). This isn't because I'm politically unaware. I've voted in every even-year general election since then. The problem is that the odd years usually feature obscure races and issues. They're so obscure, in fact, that I'm lucky to even know what's on the ballot in those years. It turns out that the same holds true for primary elections in even-numbered non-presidential years.

Actually, the most notable thing about the ballot was how few contested races were on it. It was six computer screens long, and most of the races featured one candidate running unopposed or no candidate at all (presumably races the party had conceded to Republicans). In the major contested race, for U.S. senator, I voted for Jennifer Brunner, mostly because Lee Fisher strikes me as incompetent. The biggest thing I remember about the local primary coverage is this non-sequitur from the Dayton Daily News

Despite Fisher’s efforts, DHL pulled out of Wilmington and jilted 8,000 workers. Fisher calls it “the greatest tragedy of this recession.”

The central message in Fisher’s campaign is jobs. His TV ad says it, his campaign literature says it, and Fisher says it in nearly every campaign appearance as he touts his two years as state development director and his continuing work on economic development for Ohio.

That's right, this guy is soliciting donations as the jobs candidate by highlighting a huge failure to save jobs. Since there's no competence advantage for Fisher, I figured I might as well vote for the person who seems to have her heart in the right place. Not that it did any good. It looks like Fisher has won by around 54%-46%. In any case, I still have to vote for Fisher in the Fall to keep W's former OMB director out of the Senate.

I also voted in favor of renewing the Third Frontier program. Not only is investing in technology good for the economy, but it could also be good for my own career prospects as an aspiring technical writer. Selfishness and altruism actually converge in this case, so it was an easy decision.

Finally, I voted in favor of relocating the Columbus casino approved in the gambling initiative last Fall. I was tempted to vote against it and leave them stuck with the old location just to teach politicians a lesson about writing such detailed proposals into the state constitution, but I thought better of it.