A month out the FiveThirtyEight guy does a lot of talking about how factors OTHER than the polls could be signaling a possible upset win for Democratic Beto O’Rourke in the Texas US Senate race…
So when I build election forecasts for FiveThirtyEight, I’m usually not surprised by the outcomes they spit out — unless they’re so surprising (a Republican winning Washington, D.C.?) that they reflect a coding error I need to fix. But there are exceptions, and one of them came in the U.S. Senate race in Texas between Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke. I was pretty sure that once we introduced non-polling factors into the model — what we call the “fundamentals” — they’d shift our forecast toward Cruz, just as they did for Marsha Blackburn, the Republican candidate in Tennessee. That’s not what happened, however. Instead, although Cruz is narrowly ahead in the pollsright now, the fundamentals slightly helped O’Rourke. Our model thinks that Texas “should” be a competitive race and believes the close polling there is no fluke.
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Some factors hurting Cruz have nothing to do with Cruz himself, but rather with the state of Texas. Historically, the incumbency advantage is larger in small, idiosyncratic states and smaller in larger, more diverse ones. This is why Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono’s incumbency advantage in Hawaii is much larger than Cruz’s in Texas or Sen. Bill Nelson’s in Florida, for example. In addition, Congress’s overall approval rating is low, which hurts incumbents in all states and all parties.
Still, Texas is a red state — redder in statewide elections than in presidential ones, in fact — and Cruz won by a fairly healthy (although by no means overwhelming) margin in 2012. That ought to be enough to offset a blue national environment as measured by the generic congressional ballot. If you add up the first four indicators in the table — incumbency, state partisanship, Cruz’s previous margin of victory and the generic ballot — they’d project him to win by about 9 percentage points.4
It’s the other factors that push the race toward toss-up status, however. When a challenger has previously held an elected office, they tend to perform better with each level higher that office is. To run for Senate, O’Rourke is giving up his seat in the U.S. House, which is a higher office than had been held by Cruz’s 2012 opponent, Paul Sadler, a former state representative. Strong incumbents tend to deter strong challengers from entering the race, but Cruz wasn’t able to do so this time. Cruz also has a very conservative voting record, one that is perhaps “too conservative” even for Texas. The model actually penalizes O’Rourke slightly for his DUI scandal, but because the scandal has been public knowledge for a long time, the model discounts its importance.
Note…
Of course this allows Silver to have things BOTH ways in the Texas race…
The polls and his guess above….
Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke is apologizing for once criticizing a Broadway musical with actresses “whose only qualifications seem to be their phenomenally large breasts and tight buttocks.”
In 1991, the 19-year-old O’Rourke reviewed the Broadway musical “The Will Rogers Follies” for the Columbia Daily Spectator, the university’s student newspaper. Writing under the byline Robert O’Rourke, he panned the performance as “one of the most glaring examples of the sickening excesses and moral degradations of our culture.”
He went on to bemoan the bevy of “perma-smile actresses whose only qualifications seem to be their phenomenally large breasts and tight buttocks.”
More…