Monday, November 1, 2010

CD8: Nate Says Odds Are in Giffords' Favor

Posted By on Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 4:53 PM

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Sure, Nate Silver is off on the East Coast somewhere, crunching numbers for every congressional race, so there's plenty of reason to think that he could be way off on this one. But he keeps boosting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' odds of victory tomorrow, although he sees a tight race.

Here on the ground, it sure seems like a toss-up to us—and we reckon that much still depends on who gets out to vote tomorrow.

BTW, we wouldn't be surprised if we were still counting votes into the weekend.

More of Nate's thoughts on what we're likely to see tomorrow here, including this potential nightmare scenario for the Democrats:

Dawn breaks over New York City on Wednesday, Nov. 3. Democrats catching the early train to work are thinking about adding a little whiskey to their morning coffee. Because the headlines they are reading are truly terrible.

Not only did Republicans take over the House, but they also did so going away — winning a net of 78 seats from Democrats. Seven seats in New York State changed hands; so did six in Pennsylvania, five in Ohio and four in North Carolina. Party luminaries like Jim Oberstar and Raul Grijalva were defeated. Barney Frank and Dennis Kucinich survived, but they did so by just 2 points apiece, and their elections weren’t called until 1 a.m. Democrats picked up just one Republican-held seat — the open seat in Delaware — but Joseph Cao somehow survived in his very Democratic-leaning district in New Orleans. Virtually every race deemed to be a tossup broke to the Republican.