Consider these assessments of two 2012 Senate races, from Roll Call’s election preview published about a month before Election Day last year: Nebraska: “The Senate race, once expected to be one of the top races of the cycle, has slipped away from Democrats ever since state Sen. Deb Fischer surprised...
Dick Durbin (D-IL) is that rarest of Democrats these days -- a senator who apparently contemplates but passes on retirement. While the Senate majority whip, who will turn 70 a couple weeks after Election Day 2014, is gearing up to run for a fourth term, four other Democrats have announced...
Make no mistake -- this year’s Senate elections are being waged on Republican turf. But that’s not uncommon. A third of all Senate seats are on the ballot every other November, which means that two-thirds of the Senate remains the same even after a federal election (special elections prompted by...
If there are two adjectives that best describe the respective target lists of Democrats and Republicans in the House this cycle, it’s “potential” for the donkeys and “predictable” for the elephants. For Democrats, the House map offers a number of potentially enticing targets, many of whom are unaccustomed to serious...
Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-WV) decision to retire is a positive development for Republicans. But whether they can capitalize on it, and their other opportunities, is an open question. There are 35 Senate elections coming up in November 2014 -- 33 regularly scheduled and two specials (Hawaii and a second seat...
Ticket-splitters are getting rarer and rarer, at least based on the dwindling number of congressional districts where different parties won the presidential vote and the House seat. And that potentially reduces the number of targets for both sides as we examine 2014’s House playing field. It appears that only about...
While there will be major shifts in the House delegations of many states on Election Day, and while more than a handful of incumbents appear likely to lose, the total change in each party’s net total of House seats will probably not be large. That means it’s good to be...
Partisan control of the individual states’ congressional delegations is a largely meaningless statistic -- until, one of these days, it isn’t. In the event of a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, the president of the United States would be selected by the U.S. House. In a rather archaic tradition,...
While other gubernatorial races may get closer as Election Day nears, right now the top gubernatorial tilts in the country are in two small but politically active states: New Hampshire and Montana. After winning their respective primaries on Sept. 11, ex-state Sen. Maggie Hassan (D) and lawyer Ovide Lamontagne (R),...
After shuffling many of our House ratings, it’s pretty obvious that the race for the House remains locked in a battle of trench warfare, with little obvious movement on either side. Given that the Republicans start from a position of great strength -- Democrats need to net 25 seats to...
For the second straight week, the Crystal Ball is moving a toss-up Senate race to the Republican column. Now that ex-Gov. Tommy Thompson has captured the Republican nomination in Wisconsin -- winning with 34% of the vote in a crowded, four-way field -- we are installing him as a slight...
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) got the opponent she wanted. But she still enters the general election season as an underdog. Now that the Missouri Senate primary is complete, we are downgrading the incumbent Democrat’s chances from toss-up to leans Republican. Tuesday night’s surprise Republican primary winner, Rep. Todd Akin, has...
In sports betting parlance, an "over/under" is a bet on whether there will be more or less of a given statistic in a certain game. So, in a football game, say the over/under is 50; gamblers would bet whether the total points scored would be more or less than 50....
Ohio, the great maker of presidents, remains vitally important in presidential elections because it is one of the biggest of the 10-15 truly competitive states in the Electoral College. But it does not pack the electoral punch it once did. On one hand, the Buckeye State does have the seventh-most...
The Supreme Court’s narrow decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act means that the country’s partisan battle over health care essentially remains unchanged. Conservatives hoped that the Supreme Court would throw them a lifeline by invalidating the law, which would have allowed the right to celebrate the end of Obamacare...
