Key House Races - 4 September 2010 Update - Sabato & EP Predict Republican Majority

It was a YET ANOTHER BIG WEEK for our "Experts" with a total of 37 upgrades to the races on the KHR Master List. It was a 37 to ZERO shutout - none of the upgrades favored the Dems. There were major changes from Sabato and Cook, and a few from EP and RCP. CQ Politics and Rothenberg were silent.

BUT THE REALLY BIG NEWS THIS WEEK was: Larry Sabato predicting a 47 seat pickup for the Republicans. Election Projection followed a day later with a projection of a 41 seat pickup. We need 39 seats to retake the House so both Sabato and EP are now predicting a Republican majority next year. That story was big news, at least with FoxNews and Charlie Cook.

We are now listing the Pickup Projections on the Home Page at KHR. At this point we are showing projections by Dick Morris (don't laugh, Morris thinks we will pickup 60 to 80 seats), Sabato, EP, CQP, Rothenberg plus our own KHR projection.

We've updated the format of our polls page which is now referred to as the MOST RECENT POLLS page. The polls are starting to come in, most but not all are favorable to the Republicans and we now have polls for about 90% of the races on our Master List where we have completed the primary cycle.

So please send us links to any poll data that you think we've missed. You can always see our latest 3 polls on the KHR Home Page and, as noted above, we also list the most recent poll for each district on the KHR MOST RECENT POLLS page.

The Master List has been updated to include the winners of all completed primaries The "Race at a Glance" entries on the KHR Home Page have also been updated to include the Louisiana primary. All funding data, polls and "Expert Ratings" have been updated as well. Our normal procedure is to update the financial data and Expert Ratings once a week but to update the poll data as we find it.

Here's the summary of the changes to our Experts' ratings:

There were a total of 37 updates this week to the 93 Congressional races that we believe are truly in play this year.
37 were favorable to the Republicans
None were favorable to the Democrats

Those changes moved our index to -.100 from last weeks -.177. That's a very big jump and reflects the fact that the Republicans won this weeks rating upgrade race by a huge margin. Take a look at our KeyHouseRaces Experts Page to see where the changes in ratings were this week - nothing but RED entries. For the newbies, the -.100 figure means that the average "Expert Rating" for every race on our list is rated a Toss-Up but slightly favoring the Dems. If the index gets into positive territory (where it seems to be heading) then the average rating for all 93 races would be Toss-Up with a Republican tilt.

Note that you can always see the latest changes and the current state of the "Expert" evaluations of all of the races on our Master List and an explanation of our methodology on the KeyHouseRaces Experts Page

We added a new page a couple of weeks ago to show the Master List in a ranked order and there is now a link to this page on the KeyHouseRaces Home Page. The ranking is based on the average Expert Rating of each district by our six "Experts" with the Most likely Republican winners at the top and the most likely Dem winners at the bottom. The fight for control of the House is in the middle of this list where the Toss-Up races meet the Leans Ds. That's the ones we have to win.

You can see the ranked version of the Master List HERE .

September 14: District of Columbia, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin

I recall a special Senate election once (I think in NH) which took place on the same day as the regular election for the vacant seat. The voters actually voted simultaneously for the Democrat in the special election to fill the seat for two months and the Republican to fill it for the regular six-year term. I guess they just wanted to make the Dem feel good.

Looks like we will have to add Wa2 Larsen to the KHR, Both sabato and EP moved from Safe D to Likely D/

Ga 2 up on the Radar as well.

Still Waiting for Ryan Frazier in CO7 to move up.

Wish we could Add IA2 with Marrianette Miller-Meeks and MA-5 with Nikki Tsongas to the Tier2 list! I’m trying to get the Tier 2 list as large as the KHR but I dont think the “experts” are going to help us with this.

Regarding your question on the other thread, I don’t know where Miller stands in terms of cash at this point. He didn’t appear to be a particularly strong fund raiser as of last quarter, but he seems to be doing well regardless, if the SurveyUSA poll from a while back is to be believed. Hopefully he either has enough $ for the run-up, has one heck of a group of volunteers on the ground, or will be getting help from an outside group w/ TV expenditures...

I tells me a lot that they’ve started attacking the Republican Speaker Presumptive the past couple of days. Whether it’s to warn people of how “dangerous” it will be to support Republicans in the election, or to try to reduce him to “damaged goods” before an election they now believe they’ll lose, I don’t know.

I previously did not have a high opinion of Griffith or his chances of defeating Boucher in November,...

I love Griffith a lot. Years ago, I was early to a pro-life meeting at the General Assembly, so I sat in on the last dab of some gun-control meeting, and a man who introduced himself as an armorer was telling the committee that the Social Services dept. was rejecting people as foster parents because they owned guns. Morgan Griffith said,"Are you telling me that people are unacceptable as foster parents because they exercise their Constitutional rights?" And the armorer said, "Yes Sir I am", and Mr. Griffith asked him for more information and he took out his lovely gold pen and began to write. I'd really like to see him in Washington.

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