Projected New Senate:     50 Democrats     49 Republicans     1 tie

Polling data in Excel Battleground states Previous report Next report News Strong Dem (45) Weak Dem (2) Barely Dem (3) Exactly tied (1) Barely GOP (0) Weak GOP (2) Strong GOP (47) No Senate race   Map algorithm explained

Nov. 06	New polls:	AZ CA CT FL MD MI MN MO MT NJ OH PA RI TN UT VA WA
	Pickups:	Missouri Montana Ohio Pennsylvania Rhode Island

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News from the Votemaster

Lots of polls and predictions today for your reading enjoyment. Be sure to come back tomorrow, when I will try to update the site in real time as the results come in.

Traffic is very heavy, so I have moved part of the load to PlanetLab. Unfortunately for complicated technical reasons, some corporate firewalls block PlanetLab. If you get an "Access Forbidden" message, use https://66.147.237.14. but www.electoral-vote.com should work for most people.

Polls of the Day

All 14 polls run on this site are summarized at www.electoral-vote.com/evp2006/Info/previous-polls.html. They are extremely precise--margins of error at or around 1% in all cases due to the large sample size. However, they are not terribly accurate because the samples are not random. If nothing else, this exercise should demonstrate once and for all that margin or error is not everything.

All polls end with a few demographic questions, so I will do that too. Please answer all three questions to give me and you an idea of the readership. It is likely to pass 200,000 visitors today.

Senate Polls

More Senate polls than you can shake a stick at today (unless it is one of those new lightweight carbon fiber sticks). But the bottom line really hasn't changed: Democrats will likely win Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. The real battles are in Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia. Whoever wins 2 out of 3 here controls the Senate. In the other states, the incumbent will win in a landslide.

House Polls

We also have a handful of House polls. Three of them are extremely ominous for the GOP. In FL-22, Clay Shaw (R-FL), a 12-term congressman who got 66% of the vote in 2004, is 9% behind. challenger Ron Klein (D). In NH-02, Charlie Bass (R-NH), a 6-term congressman who got 58% of the vote last time is 5% behind lawyer Paul Hodes (D), who has never held public office. Finally, in my favorite race, NY-20 , in the historic and beautiful Hudson Valley, incumbent four-term congressman John Sweeney (R-NY), who won 66% of the vote in 2004, is trailing a young activist lawyer, Kirsten Gillibrand (D), who defends abused women and children, but has never run for public office before. These are races the incumbent Republicans should have won in landslides. The mere fact that they are competitive is bad news.

Politics

Gutter politics has reached a new low. Automated push polling has been introduced to the get out the vote operation. It is cheap and deadly. If you haven't received one of these, very briefly, it works like this. The computer calls hundreds of thousands of people and plays a message like: Hello, this is the XYZ polling company. Press 1 if you know that candidate A supports conducting medical experiments on innocent healthy babies, else press 2. Then it asks more questions, but the purpose is to slander candidate A, who supports stem cell research, not run a poll. The NYT has the story.

The table below contains the final predictions of the top political analysts in the country, as well as Electoral-vote.com. The order of the numbers is: Democrats-Republicans-Tossups. As you can see, some analysts are bold and brave and give actual predictions, while others try to weasel out of making tough choices. Clearly a Senate prediction of 27-40-33 can't be wrong, but it isn't very ambitious. Final results will come in the next few days, or after the Supreme Court meets, whichever comes first. The electoral-vote.com entry is based on the polls. The Votemaster entry is my personal intuition.

Projected New House*:     239 Democrats     196 Republicans

WWW www.electoral-vote.com