Dems to Control House, Forecast Shows

Newswise — Democrats will likely take control of the U.S. House of Representatives but not the Senate following the 2006 mid-term elections, according to a forecasting model developed by political scientists at Indiana State University. Incorporating polling data from early October, and taking into account national and district-level trends as well as the attributes of individual candidates, the model developed by Carl Klarner and Stan Buchanan, projects a 21-seat gain for Democrats. A projection made two weeks ago using the same model and polling data from mid-September showed a spike for Republicans, but the latest forecast is a virtual mirror image of one the two assistant professors of political science made when they first developed the model six months ago. "Now everybody is saying the Democrats will take the House, but the fact of the matter is we made this prediction in late April and people were very skeptical that the Democrats could take control of the House back then," Klarner said.

In making the forecast, Klarner and Buchanan examined past elections since 1972 and considered three factors: whether individual Congressional districts tend to favor a particular party, whether individual candidates are incumbents or have held elected office, and national political trends.

"Our model takes both national-level data and regional, local-level data and runs them together to do the predictions, as opposed to most other models, which use one or the other," said Buchanan, who notes it is unusual for political scientists to make any attempt to forecast elections.

"Our science usually leads us to describe and to explain social phenomenon that we're dealing with, for example voting in elections, but we very rarely do predictions," he said. The model projects a 91.5 percent likelihood Democrats will take over the House by winning 223 seats on Nov. 7, compared with 212 for Republicans. That would mark a return to normalcy in mid-term elections. The party controlling the White House has historically lost seats in Congress during the so-called "off year" elections.

"Since 1846, there have only been three elections where the party of the President did not lose seats, but guess what? Two of those elections have been the last two mid-term elections, so it's not completely trivial to say that there will be a loss of Republican seats in this election," Klarner noted. "Also, the number of swing seats in elections has gone down considerably over time. If there is a pickup of 21 or 22 seats in this election, that will actually be a big change."

House districts most likely to switch from Republican to Democrat, according to the model, are Colorado's 7th district, Iowa's 1st district, Florida's 13th district, Connecticut's 2nd and 4th districts, Ohio's 18th district and Arizona's 8th district.

Indiana's 8th and 9th districts are among the top 50 competitive House races in the nation, but the model projects Republicans will narrowly hold on to those seats. A similar model used to forecast U.S. Senate races projects a gain of only three seats for Democrats, not enough to take control of the Senate, even when independents Bernie Sanders and Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut are counted as Democrats. Senate seats most likely to switch parties are in Tennessee, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Only 15 of the 34 senate seats on this year's ballot are currently held by Republicans. Articles co-authored by Klarner and Buchanan using their original April forecasts appear in the October issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association. The articles are available online at http://www.apsanet.org/section_223.cfm.

A publication quality photo is available athttp://www.indstate.edu/news/photodatabase/downloads/klarner_buchanan_0009.jpg Carl Klarner (left) and Stan Buchanan, assistant professors of political science at Indiana State University, stand in front of a map showing 2006 U.S. Senate races while holding a map of U.S. House districts. The maps are color coded in red for seats currently held by Republicans, blue for Democrats and green for independents.