Since FDR was inaugurated in 1933, West Virginia has only elected two Republicans as governor, Cecil Underwood and Arch Moore Jr. Both men served nonconsecutive terms, with Underwood’s coming a staggering forty years apart (1957-1961 and 1997-2001). Only Moore was ever re-elected (in 1972). Combined, they served for twenty years, with Democrats serving the other sixty-one.
Jay Rockefeller’s seat in the Senate has been in Democratic hands for all but eight years since FDR’s 1933 inauguration and was last held by a Republican in 1958, when John D. Hoblitzell, Jr. was appointed as a temporary replacement for Sen. Matthew Neely.
Joe Manchin’s seat in the Senate was held by Robert Byrd for 51 years. Republican Henry Hatfield lost the seat in 1934, and the GOP has only controlled it briefly (November 7, 1956 –
January 3, 1959) since that time.
What this says is that West Virginian’s are simply not in the habit of electing Republicans to state-wide office, especially for high-profile races.
Yes, the state has changed over the last two decades, and it is remarkably hostile to our multiracial president. But, the same day that Obama was elected president, Joe Manchin was reelected as governor with 70% of the vote. Manchin was then elected to serve in the Senate twice, the second time earning over 60% of the vote on a ballot he shared with Obama. West Virginians also elected Democrat Earl Ray Tomblin to replace Manchin as governor that same election day.
I don’t know how much all this history figures, if at all, in Nate Silver’s calculations, but putting 90% odds on the Republicans winning Rockefeller’s seat in November seems quite a bit too bullish for the GOP. They simply have no record of sending their own Republicans to Washington.
The Senate is 50/50 (actually 48 +2), and Joe ‘Nighthorse’ Manchin announces he didn’t leave his party, his party left him….
that’s your prediction?
Yes. Think of the regulatory hostages he could take as the vote that decides the now filibuster-free Senate, on coal, on water quality, etc.
McConnell, his fellow Appalachian, will make him an offer he can’t refuse.
It’s not like he’d be punished four years later for the switch.
McConnell won’t be there by this time next year…
And I am an Adelié penguin.
I see. So your ridiculous prediction is reasonable, but someone else’s reasonable prediction (last polls of the KY race show basically a dead heat between the Turtle and Grimes, with McConnell’s numbers well below the 50% sea level) is ridiculous. Got it.
Also, Louisville is in Kentucky, while Davis is in…uh…California?
Maine. Which is, away from salt water and sailboats, Kentucky with lobsters.
It’s a mid-term election.
I can remember all three times Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe lost their seats on the back of meh polls, a strong challenger, and a popular Democratic president.
You do know when is the last time Maine turned out an incumbent Senator, right?
Right about the last time Kentucky did it?
Predicting a Grimes win is certainly optimistic. But based on the current polling and McConnell’s favorability numbers, it’s not unreasonable.
It’s WAAYY early to be writing McConnell off.
Remember after 2012 Booman admitted he was spinning his analysis to help electoral prospects.
Find me where I said that?
Reality is what we say it is.
.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/11/13/225128/30
This wasn’t a lie, I didn’t say you lied, I said you spun. You pushed the best possible outcome even though the data indicated the election we got. I think your predictions should be treated with caution when they run contra to the data.
I wasn’t spinning my analysis.
That’s not what I said.
What I said was that I was pushing the idea that the whole thing might flip over on Romney, because that was a real possibility. Romney still lost badly, but he made it closer in the end, when it could have gone the other way. After the debate, I dropped the idea that we might really trounce him, because that possibility appeared to have been lost.
unless some disaster befells Caputo
As a longtime reliable Democratic state, perhaps the GOP state party was too weak to quickly capitalize on the voter preference shift that began to emerge in 2000. They’ve now had a dozen years in which to up their game, but how they’re doing can only be read by those on the ground.
o/t: Mitt Romney calls Barack Obama ‘naive’ on Russia and Vladimir Putin. Romney wants another crack at the POTUS pinata.
We all had high hopes for Silver. But he’s shown that he’s more Easterbrook/Freakonomics than good science.
A lot of us noticed in 2008 that Wang at the Princeton Electoral Consortium was more accurate than Silver, and this became evident again in 2012. Silver is good with data, and when he works in a field he understands well, like baseball, he’s very effective (though far from perfect, as fans have learned). When he entered the election field he didn’t understand politics but he was competing mainly with the usual pundits who ignore data altogether, so he was like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. And when he got that platform at NYT everyone noticed him and he seemed like a great guru.
But all the while Sam Wang was quietly using a very simple html website to show much better electoral predictions. Dr Wang isn’t a credentialed expert in politics, although he understand statistics apparently better than Silver, however he appears to have a better knack than Silver for identifying what variables are essential and what can be ignored as noise. And Wang wasn’t as distracted as Silver was with the media demands on his time for both sports and elections.
But the story of 2012, to the media, was the revelation that polls actually have predictive value (apparently pundits and Republicans were shocked) and that fact that Wang made the point better than Silver was completely lost.
Now, however, Silver is moving into areas that aren’t like punditry. Areas that already have a lot of really good and often great numerical analysis built into their conventional wisdom. And apparently Silver really isn’t about providing accurate analysis based on data but instead is about getting page views for providing contrarian viewpoint pieces. So his new site has a journo write on health and, of course, give a contrarian view – and is immediately criticized by those in the field have been doing peer level research for years about all the important points missed.
Worse, another 538 journo does a contrarian piece on Global Warming – possibly the most numerically analyzed topic on earth the last 20 years – and again gets blasted for missing many obvious points.
So Silver is like Freakonomics or Gregg Easterbrook in that he loves to publish contrarian views with enough numbers to make them sound good (if his current gig doesn’t work out I’m sure the Tobacco Science Institute would hire him) but doesn’t much like to crunch the numbers and then find out that conventional wisdom was right. Freakonomics originally was famous for an article that crime rate reductions was related to the abortion rate 18 years previous – a claim that completely collapsed under rigorous statistical analysis (the whole premise was shaky – how many 18-24 year old people in America live in the same city they were born in? – yet that was a key assumption in their analysis). But unlike real scientists they were hit-and-run … dropping any interest in that topic and running to make absurd, unsupported claims that the solution to Global Warming was massive geoengineering – so we pumped huge amounts of Carbon and Methane into our atmosphere and got bad results – and now you are telling us to pump massive amounts of Sulpher into the atmosphere to fix it and hope it doesn’t introduce new problems?
Well, Silver hasn’t gone that far – but any pretense of desire for accuracy of outcome is gone.
He feels obligated to publish too early for the type of analysis that his model excels at. This far before a midterm election is a time during which really no one should be making predictions.
Nate’s methodology is to use conventional forecasting by generic ballot until there is enough of a data set to crank up his own model.
Ignore Nate’s analysis until it comes out of his own Senate model that has massive historical data. And even then take it with a grain of salt where there are shifts in political culture and movemental politics occurring (if any) such as the Moral Monday movement.
If Democrats succeed in winning both houses of Congress, it will not start showing up in polls until very close to election day, if then. For now, expect to see the opinion polls showing GOP taking both houses, which if Dems don’t get their GOTV operations fixed might be the result.
Republicans are very scarce. More in Northern WV where the Moore/Capito (Capito is Arch’s daughter) power center is.
Manchin is following the standard anit-EPA line but is really dropping the ball in the other areas by doing anti-Obama votes on foreign policy, etc…
However, coal jobs grew 2008-2012. Dropped with the fall in natural gas prices, and are now increasing with overseas sales, increased US industrial activity, and rising gas prices.
But you can’t tell people that. They don’t want to credit Obama Admin with anything. Part is racism, part is the activity of the fundamentalist preacher underground with thier “antiChrist” lies.
To keep Rockafeller’s seat Democratic; you need to really hit on Obamacare, it has provided health care to thousands of WV citizens and made a real change in their lives. Beat the Rep candidate over the head with it. “Mrs Jones of Pinch now has care for her diabities, why do you want to take it away from her…” over and over and over again. Plus show employment stats how a growing US economy helps the state.
Hillary would win the state in 2016, but I don’t like her as she will get us in a war to show she is tough.
R