Quote (Voyaging @ Jun 2 2014 03:02pm)
Where did you get these odds from?
If by odds you mean the likely outcome ranges then they are based on the combination of data points mentioned in that post such as presidential approval, the parties' standing in the Generic Congressional Ballot, state polling, candidate quality, fundraising, and the partisan leans of each district/state. You can add all of those things (and more) together to get a decent idea of the state of each race, which helps develop a plausible outcome range if the elections were held with current fundamentals.
Quote (Santara @ Jun 2 2014 02:24pm)
Favored by analysts =/= favored in polls.
McFadden carrying the nomination is better for the GOP than Ortman winning and carrying the fight to a primary, and in that light, everything I've said is perfectly accurate. Doesn't really matter to me either way, I didn't like either, and the candidate I will vote for in November is assuredly not winning: Hannah Nicollet.
But... it's not perfectly accurate. The people who understand elections recognized that McFadden was the likeliest nominee,
and he led in polling too. He just didn't win a straw poll months earlier, and that's fine because those are practically meaningless. You seem to imply that because McFadden became the nominee, that does marginal damage to Franken's reelection prospects because it's true that McFadden is preferable to the GOP than the alternatives. However, because everyone predicted that McFadden would be the nominee anyway, him making it to this point doesn't impact the calculus in any way unless of course his underperformance boosted Franken even more.
I don't really know how many different ways the same factual evidence can be presented:
no one expected Ortman to be the nominee. Everyone expected McFadden: forecasters, analysts, essentially everyone who was not affiliated with the Ortman campaign or who at the very least had some semblance of an understanding of all the different determining factors that were pointing to this outcome for months.
This post was edited by Pollster on Jun 2 2014 02:25pm