Projected New Senate: 50 Democrats 49 Republicans 1 tie

	Strong Dem (43)
	Weak Dem (6)
	Barely Dem (1)
	Exactly tied (1)
	Barely GOP (1)
	Weak GOP (1)
	Strong GOP (47)
	No Senate race
	Map algorithm explained

Oct. 15	New polls:	MD MN VA
	Pickups:	Missouri Montana Ohio Pennsylvania Rhode Island

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News from the Votemaster

Senate Polls

Three Senate polls today, of which the most interesting is the ongoing statistical tie in Virginia between incumbent Sen. George Allen (R-VA) and former Reagan Navy Secretary Jim Webb. Allen leads 49% to 47%.

State	Democrat	Republican	Date	Len	Dem	GOP	Ind	Pollster
Maryland	Ben Cardin	Michael Steele	Oct 12	1	50%	43%		Rasmussen
Minnesota	Amy Klobuchar	Mark Kennedy	Oct 11	6	55%	34%		Star Tribune
Virginia	Jim Webb	George Allen	Oct 12	3	47%	49%		Washington Post

House Polls

A reader sent me this quote from a candidate for Secretary of State in Colorado: 'You work for years putting yourself in a position to run, you do your primary, you call people, you walk door to door, and then, finally, depending on the sex life of some Congressman from Florida, you win or lose the election.'

How does this work in practice? Research 2000 conducted a poll in FL-16 (Foley's district) Wednesday through Friday of last week and found Tim Mahoney (D) ahead of replacement candidate Joe Negron (R) 48% to 41%. I find this somewhat surprising given how Republican the district is. It looks like voters are blaming Negron for something he had nothing to do with. Maybe this event is the Republican equivalent of independents refusing to vote for Al Gore in 2000 because they didn't like Bill Clinton's personal life.

Research 2000 also asked the voters if they thought the Republican leadership was trying to cover up the Foley scandal and 89% of the Democrats, 74% of the independents and 18% of the Republicans said yes. This is kind of a measure how bitterly divided the country has become. In this case, Republicans are willing to believe Hastert's claim that he knew nothing about this until last month despite Rep. Tom Reynolds and others saying publicly that they told him about the problem long ago.

Cong. Distr.	Democrat	Republican	Date	Len	Dem	GOP	Ind	Pollster
FL-16	Tim Mahoney	Joe Negron	Oct 13	3	48%	41%		Research 2000

Politics

With the announcement by the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, that the army is working out plans to maintain current troop levels in Iraq until 2010, the war there has been reinjected into the midterm elections.

Many polls have shown that the voters are not happy with the large number of American soldiers who have been killed and seriously injured in Iraq. To provide some actual data, I have taken the monthly count of the American soldiers killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003 and plotted it against time to observe any trends. Here is the graph.

Then I plotted the cumulative deaths since the war began and projected the data out until 2010. Here is that plot and a linear projection out to 2010.

Projected New House*: 226 Democrats 205 Republicans 4 Ties

* Where no independent polls exist, the 2004 election results have been used. See complete House polls.

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