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As Election Day nears, more of the House election picture comes into focus. While our overall view of the level of Republican gains remains unchanged at +47 seats, we are changing the ratings of many key races as the list of endangered seats, and their relative degrees of vulnerability, becomes clear. This week we are changing the ratings of 21 House races, all in the direction of the GOP, including 10 seats formerly listed as Toss-Ups that are now leaning into the Republican column. Toss-Up to Leans Republican (10 races) AZ-01 (Kirkpatrick-D): When an incumbent releases a month-old internal poll...

House Ratings Changes Isaac Wood, House Race Editor September 30th, 2010 As Election Day nears, more of the House election picture comes into focus. While our overall view of the level of Republican gains remains unchanged at +47 seats, we are changing the ratings of many key races as the list of endangered seats, and their relative degrees of vulnerability, becomes clear. This week we are changing the ratings of 21 House races, all in the direction of the GOP, including 10 seats formerly listed as Toss-Ups that are now leaning into the Republican column. Toss-Up to Leans Republican (10...

This weeks news: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...

The Democrats’ self-proclaimed “Recovery Summer” has become a term of derision. Republicans have a good chance to win the House by picking up as many as 47 seats, net. If anything, we have been conservative in estimating the probable GOP House gains. In the Senate, we now believe the GOP will do a bit better than our long-time prediction of +7 seats. Republicans have an outside shot at winning full control (+10), but are more likely to end up with +8 (or maybe +9, at which point it will be interesting to see how senators such as Joseph Lieberman of...

Here is a video preview of the primary elections that take place today in 12 states. The GOP Primary in Nevada, and the Democrat runoff in Arkansas take center stage, along with California’s GOP primary. Larry Sabato says Sharron Angle is likely to be the GOP Nominee in Nevada. He also said Harry Reid is “in deep trouble,” not polling anywhere near the 50% that incumbents should be polling at a minimum, and will have a tough time winning in November. Democrat Sen. Blanche Lincoln looks likely to lose the runoff to Bill Halter in Arkansas.

This week we employ the other method, statistical regression analysis that uses variables such as the president’s Gallup Poll rating and the basic facts of the election. The author is Prof. Alan Abramowitz of Emory University, a frequent contributor to the Crystal Ball and one of the nation’s most distinguished political scientists. Prof. Abramowitz’s model for the 2010 House midterm election has been perhaps the most accurate of all political science models in projecting past midterm elections. As Prof. Abramowitz explains, the key variables in the 2010 election are the simple realities that (1) it is the midterm election of...

With Republican Bob McDonnell holding a wide lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds in the Virginia race for governor, the former state attorney general could be at the fore of a GOP takeover on Election Day. (snip) Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told Fox News he expects McDonnell to win big -- and usher other Republicans into office along the way. "McDonnell is not only going to win -- he's going to win by a landslide. He's going to pull his entire ticket to victory," he said, predicting GOP gains in the House of Delegates...

Here is video of a Fox News report tonight by James Rosen on Radical Obama "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones. The report details all the major evidence of his radicalism that has surfaced over the last couple of weeks. Significantly, toward the end of the report, University of Virginia Political Science Professor Larry Sabato said the "vetting process" clearly broke down with "Mr. Jones." Sabato went on to say: "If a Bush official had made anything comparable to what Mr. Jones has said and done, no doubt there would have been a national hurrah (fuss) of magnificent proportions."This means the...

Something truly astonishing appeared in a Washington Post column on July 25, 2009 (click here to view). It was written by Frank Mankiewicz, former press secretary to Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) and the man who is perhaps most widely remembered for announcing RFK's death in June 1968. Mankiewicz was also the political director of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern's losing 1972 campaign. The column contained a two-fold revelation about the just-deceased Walter Cronkite, the longtime CBS News anchorman. Here are the disclosures, in Mankiewicz' own words:

The whisper of September has turned to a roar in October: Barack Obama may be on the verge of a landslide victory. A year ago, no one on the planet could have conceived of such a thing. After all, Democrats have elected just two American presidents since 1968, moderate white Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both by modest popular vote margins. In 2008 Democrats took a daring leap of faith and chose a far more liberal nominee who is the first African-American standard-bearer - no minor matter in a nation that is just 11% black and has been plagued...

Joseph Biden's Plagiarism; Michael Dukakis's 'Attack Video' – 1988 Feeding Frenzy Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr., a U.S. senator from Delaware, was driven from the nomination battle after delivering, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock. A barrage of subsidiary revelations by the press also contributed to Biden's withdrawal: a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years; the senator's boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event; and the discovery of other quotations in Biden's speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain can help his chances by vowing to serve only one term — a recognition of his relatively advanced age and a promise that his time in the White House wouldn't be tainted by the politics of seeking a second term. That's according to Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics and a professor whose "Crystal Ball" Internet site bills itself as "the Web's most accurate political analysis."

BY modern American standards it was a very minor crisis, but a bizarre hostage-taking episode at one of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign offices in New Hampshire on Friday offered the former first lady an unexpected opportunity to display her leadership qualities. Clinton was far from the scene and never at risk from a mentally unstable man who eventually surrendered to police after holding three campaign workers hostage. Yet her calm demeanour and authoritative response to a potentially ugly drama was yesterday earning her widespread praise. Clinton followed the incident from her home in Washington, then flew to New Hampshire to...

The presidential candidates are offering prescriptions for everything from Iraq to healthcare, but listen closely. Their fixes are situational and incremental. Meanwhile, the underlying structural problems in American politics and government are systemic and prevent us from solving our most intractable challenges. If we really want to make progress and achieve greater fairness as a society, it is time for elemental change. And we should start by looking at the Constitution, with the goal of holding a new Constitutional Convention. Sound radical? If so, then the founders were radicals. They would be amazed and disappointed that after 220 years, the...

Every election, I seem to recall Sabato and Dick Morris being wrong at some point. Although Morris goes back and forth so much it's hard to tell. Is there any website that tracks the accuracy of pundit predictions. I'm particularly interested in a historical look at Sabato's so-called "crystal ball."

With one day to go, the situation is still very fluid. This weekend, we had a potentially pro-GOP event, the sentencing of Saddam Hussein, and a potentially pro-Democratic event, the unveiling of Rev. Ted Haggard's family values hypocrisy. The Crystal Ball's initial guess was that both news headlines, while attention-grabbing, would have only a marginal impact on the vote (and it's also worth noting that a record percentage of voters will have voted early this year, softening any impact of the last-minute headlines). Yet something is happening. Both the Washington Post/ABC News poll and the new Pew survey show a...

Larry Sabato has made his official list of Senate predictions on Newsmax. He pick Webb over Allen in Virginia. Does anyone know Sabatos' record of accuracy?

www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball Crystal Ball 2006: THE PREDICTIONSCampaigns Clamor for Last-Minute Midterm "Mo"Larry J. Sabato and David WassermanU.Va. Center for PoliticsNovember 2, 2006 Just how Democratic a year is 2006? Five days out, let's rephrase the question this way: when's the last time a major political party has failed to capture a single House seat, Senate seat, or governorship of the opposing party in a federal election year? We bet it's never happened before, and it certainly hasn't happened in the post-World War II era. After all, even when a party suffers miserable net losses, it usually picks up at least several...

Dick Wadhams is the next Republican maestro of cutthroat campaigning. Can Democrats figure out how to stop him? This spring, former combat Marine, one-time Reagan Navy secretary, and first-time candidate James Webb surprised political experts by entering the Democratic Senate primary in Virginia at the last minute--and winning. Three days later, Webb shocked Washington again by pulling within five points of the heavy-spending incumbent, Republican George Allen, despite a cash crunch that had kept Webb off the air for weeks. Legendary Virginia pundit Larry Sabato gave an ominous reading of the situation: The state's voters didn't yet know much about...

He's a professor. He's a pundit. Now some critics are accusing him of being a provocateur. Larry Sabato, the Norfolk-bred political scientist who is among the most widely quoted academics in America, dropped a very large pebble into the already roiled pond of Virginia politics this week when he joined the debate over U.S. Sen. George Allen's racial attitudes. The resulting ripples have been spreading far and wide all week. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, made national news Monday when he alleged on the MSNBC television show "Hardball" that Allen, a Republican, used...