A Really Good Night

A recent PublicPolicyPolling survey for the League of Conservation Voters in Arizona showed Jeff Flake (R) leading Richard Carmona (D) just 44-43 for the state's open-seat Senate race. That's a Republican-held seat, i.e. a Democratic pick-up opportunity. That poll makes a good occasion to start thinking about, in light of the apparently-pretty-decent Democratic convention bounce, what a very good night for Democrats might look like on Election Day. By "very good night" I basically mean for things to get a little better over the next couple of months than they even quite seem now. Obviously Obama would be winning, probably with around 350 electoral votes. The more interesting thing is gaming out the Senate and trying to estimate the House.

One can get a good handle on the Senate state of play by using the nearly-month-old FiveThirtyEight subjective forecast of all the Senate races. We observe 10 "safe Democratic" race (DE, MN, NY, RI, VT, MD, CA, PA, WA, and WV), along with just 5 "safe Republican" ones (TX, UT, MS, TN, WY). Now, obviously on a good Democratic night we'll be winning the "likely Democratic" races, NJ, CT, MI, and HI, and also the "leans Democratic" ones, OH and NM. Angus King will also pick up his race in Maine, and caucus with the Democrats for another pick-up. Then there are 11 races rated between "toss-up" and "likely Republican," with the Arizona race falling into that latter-most category. Of those 11, 7 are held by Democrats right now, and 4 by Republicans. Note, however, that those are all the Republicans' pick-up opportunities, while Democrats have already picked up the Angus King seat. So Democrats need just 6 of those 11 races to hold their position, and just 3 of them to hold the Senate, including Biden and King. Even conceding Nebraska, then, we've got 10 races each of which looks perfectly winnable on its own terms. On a really good Democratic night, we might win 8 of them, and pick up a couple of seats. If we were to treat the Arizona race as Republican +1, and assume that that's representative of the national climate in general, then we might win 9 races.

Building on our Senate majority, in other words, seems distinctly possible, and that really wasn't expected earlier in this cycle. And I've got to believe that if we manage to elect more Democrats than this class elected in 2006, we'll also take back the House of Representatives. Now, I'd like to see a whole bunch of polling from these competitive races in the aftermath of the convention, to get a sense of whether all of these knife-edge battles seem to have shifted the Democrats' way. But the Arizona poll looks really good to me (and, note, it doesn't even have ridiculously favorable Presidential numbers, with Obama trailing by 9 points), and if the rest of the country is like this right now, it's starting to feel like November 6th could very easily be a really good night.