Nate Silver's Final 2010 Election Predictions

Above are the final predictions made by Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight about the 2010 id-Term elections for U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives and Governors races.

49 Days Till Election Day: Democrats Likely To Lose Control

Nate Silver, the election predictions guru whose fivethirtyeight.com blog was recently added to The New York Times online site as FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus has put his sights on predicting the outcome of the November 2nd mid-term elections and things do NOT look good for the Democrats 7 weeks out

There's a reasonable chance the Democrats could lose control of the Senate:

Republicans now have approximately a one-in-four chance of winning enough Senate seats in the Nov. 2 elections to claim an outright majority of the chamber, FiveThirtyEight’s latest forecasting model shows.

The bigger problem is the increasingly likelihood they will lose control of the House:

Republicans have a two-in-three chance of claiming a majority of House seats in November, the FiveThirtyEight forecasting model estimates. And their gains could potentially rival or exceed those made in 1994, when they took a net of 54 seats from the Democrats.

In one sense, a strong performance by the Republicans on Nov. 2 is to be expected. The opposition party typically gains seats – on average, about 20 in midterm elections since 1994 – after the other party wins the White House, as the Democrats did in 2008. Nevertheless, both the magnitude of the Republicans’ potential gains, and the rapidity with which the political balance is poised to shift back to them after two cycles in which Democrats won nearly every competitive election, is unusual by recent standards. According to the model, Republicans have about a one-in-three chance of winning at least 54 seats, their total in 1994, and nearly a one-in-four chance of gaining at least 60.

Were the Republicans to achieve an outcome like that, one might need to look to the first half of the previous century for precedent; in 1948, for example, the Democrats added a net of 75 seats in the House, just two years after losing 54.

Today is the last primary day of the 2010 elections, if you live in one of those states, get out and vote!

538 Claims Marriage Equality Support Accelerating

Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com has analyzed the polling on public support for marriage equality and notes that there appears to be an acceleration in the rate at which support for legal recognition for gay and lesbian couples is increasing.

Something to bear in mind is that it's only been fairly recently that gay rights groups -- and other liberals and libertarians -- shifted toward a strategy of explicitly calling for full equity in marriage rights, rather than finding civil unions to be an acceptable compromise. While there is not necessarily zero risk of backlash resulting from things like court decisions -- support for gay marriage slid backward by a couple of points, albeit temporarily, after a Massachusetts' court's ruling in 2003 that same-sex marriage was required by that state's constitution -- it seems that, in general, "having the debate" is helpful to the gay marriage cause, probably because the secular justifications against it are generally quite weak.

In mathematical terms we we would say that the second derivative (the rate of the rate of increase) is positive, but you can just notice that there is an uptick in the blue graph at the end.

But no matter how you analyze it, it shows that the National Organization for Marriage will be out of business soon. Hurray!

Polls Average 58% Support for DADT Repeal

Openly gay Lt. Dan Choi, on duty in the National Guard, this week

As the debate over how and when to get rid of America's anachronistic policy of excluding openly gay men and lesbian from serving in the Armed Forces, lots of polling is being conducted to see how much public opinion has changed from 1993. The answer is, quite a lot.

Nate Silver has analyzed the data and summarizes the results as:

Four organizations -- FOX, Gallup, Quinnipiac, and CNN -- have released polls on Don't Ask Don't Tell since Obama's inauguration. They show an average of 58 percent saying that Don't Ask Don't Tell should be repealed and that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the military, and 35 percent opposed.

The latest poll is from Quinnipiac University and was a nationalsurvey conducted February 2-8, 2010 of 2,617 registered voters for ashockingly low margin of error of +/- 1.9 percentage points.

Some highlights:

Homosexuals should be able to openly serve in the U.S. military, American voters say 57 - 36 percent. Voters also say 66 - 31 percent the current policy of not allowing openly gay men and women to serve is discrimination, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

But by a 54 - 38 percent margin, American voters say gays in the military should face restrictions on exhibiting their sexual orientation on the job, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN- uh-pe-ack) University poll finds.

Voters from military households with an active or reserve member or a veteran in their family split 48 - 47 percent on ending "don't ask; don't tell." Support for repeal is 72 - 23 percent among Democrats and 56 - 37 percent among independent voters. Republicans oppose repeal 53 - 40 percent. Men support repeal 51 - 44 percent; women support it 62 - 29 percent.

On other related questions, American voters say:

82 - 10 percent that the military should stop pursuing disciplinary action against gays who are outed against their will; 65 - 30 percent, including 57 - 38 percent among voters in military families, that ending "don't ask; don't tell" will not be divisive or hurt the ability to fight effectively; 50 - 43 percent that the Pentagon should not provide for domestic partners of gay personnel; Split 45 - 46 percent on whether heterosexual personnel should be required to share quarters with gay personnel.

Interesting, eh? Hat/tips to TalkingPointsMemo and TowleRoad.

Nate Silver Analyzes Maine Polls, Predicts NO ON 1 Win

Today at FiveThirtyEight.com Nate Silver analyzes the latest PPP poll (which shows Question 1 passing and lead to a NO ON 1 FUNDRAISING RED ALERT) but still gives the forces for equality 5:2 odds of prevailing on election day tomorrow.

Maine -- Question 1 -- "Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?" .

The Positions: A 'Yes' vote overturns same-sex marriage, which the state legislature approved in May. A 'No' vote preserves same-sex marriage.

The Polls: As in the other elections this cycle, recent polling shows somewhat contradictory results. A Research 2000 / Daily Kos poll shows Question 1 losing by one point. A Pan Atlantic SMS poll shows the initiative losing by 11 points. But a fresh PPP poll shows it passing by 4 points. The Research 2000 and Pan Atlantic polls showed slight movement toward the 'No' side from their previous surveys, while the PPP poll showed movement toward the 'Yes' side. The only other pollster to have surveyed the race is Democracy Corps, which had shown Question 1 losing by 9 points among both registered and likely voters, although that poll is now five weeks old.

Analysis: All the polls show a very low number of undecideds, so like most close elections, it's a question of turnout. And the pollsters have different opinions about what turnout is liable to be. PPP has people under 45 representing about 38 percent of the electorate, whereas Research 2000 has them at 51 percent of the electorate. PPP's figures are a closer match for Maine's 2006 electorate, when 36 percent of voters were 45 or under.

On the other hand, PPP shows conservatives outnumbering liberals 36-23, whereas those numbers have been about evenly split in exit polling of Maine's elections in 2004, 2006 and 2008. Were the liberal-conservative split to match 2006, for example, when Maine's electorate was 26 percent liberal, 26 percent conservative, and 48 percent moderate, then Question 1 would fail 46-53, according to PPP's internals.

[...]

The Odds: A statistical analysis I conducted last month, which was based on the results from previous gay marriage referenda in other states, gave the Yes on 1 side just an 11 percent chance of prevailing, although the fraction rises to 32 percent after an ad-hoc adjustment for the fact that this is an off-year election. In spite of the PPP poll, I'm not especially persuaded to deviate substantially from those numbers: the polling average still favors the 'No' side, albeit narrowly; the 'No' side seems to have run the superior campaign, and the cellphone issue may be worth a point or two. The tight polling, certainly, should keep everybody on their toes, and gay marriage could quite easily be overturned. But I'd still put the Yes on 1 side as about a 5-to-2 underdog.

Gay Marriage Tipping Point Reached?

Kevin Drum and Joe.My.God both blogged about the above graph from Andrew Gelman at FiveThirtyEight.com in the last few days. The key paragraphs are:

Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips put together a dataset using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights. Here I'm going to talk about their estimates of state-by-state trends in support for gay marriage.

In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s.

In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage--Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.

These are definitely important and interesting observations, but digging deeper, there is even more.

Most other commenters did not also discuss this even more interesting graph, which shows the current percentage of people who, when polled who support marriage for same-sex couples and/or civil unions.

Looking closely at the dark red dots, notice that marriage for same-sex couples is basically only legal in the states where it is above 50 percent. The three states which have marriage (within margin of error) at 50 percent but do not have marriage equality right now are Rhode Island, California and New York.

Clearly, a state to look at closely at in the future is Iowa which legalized marriage equality though a unanimous court decision in April.

Other interesting data to include here would be to indicate the states which have comprehensive non-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation (and gender identity).

Analysis Of Recent Marriage Polling Data

Poll maven Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com put together a list of the public polls released since election day in 2008 and shows that support for state recognition of same-sex couples has shifted dramatically since Proposition 8 passed in November 2008.