David Rothschild, Yahoo! News

    Economist

  • Democrats will control 53-54 seats in the Senate, not including Maine independent Angus King

    Update, Wednesday Nov. 7, 1:50 p.m.: Earlier today, Nevada was called for the Republicans and Montana for the Democrats, leaving only North Dakota unresolved. We give it a 90 percent chance of going Democratic. This means we expect the Democrats to have 54 seats in the next Senate, plus the likely addition of independent Angus [...]

  • The Signal’s election night scoreboard: Obama wins

    Throughout the night, the Signal will be providing updates to our predictions for the presidency and Senate. This is not a real-time tally of results—Yahoo News has that covered—but rather a frequently updated set of our predictions, based on returns, exit polls and prediction markets. Update, 11:22 p.m.: Obama is not longer virtually certain to [...]

  • The Signal guide to watching election results

    As liftoff approaches Tuesday evening, the Signal will be focusing (like everyone else) on a small handful of states whose outcomes are not certain or nearly certain well before polls close. Here's a viewer's guide: The no-drama states There are 37 states, plus Washington, D.C., who we consider certain for one candidate or another. President [...]

  • Romney camp hoping for a systematic polling bias in Ohio

    In the last two days, six new polls of Ohio voters have been released, five of which favor President Barack Obama, by leads of 6 points, 4 points, 4 points, 3 points and 2 points. The last reports a tie, from right-leaning Rasmussen, which gave former Gov. Mitt Romney a 2-point advantage last week. Obama [...]

  • All eyes on—where else?—Ohio

    Since the final presidential debate, 15 polls have surveyed voter opinion in Ohio, the state that is more likely than any other to determine the election. President Barack Obama leads former Gov. Mitt Romney in 13 of them. The candidates tied in one, and Romney leads in one. Those last two polls were both conducted [...]

  • National polls are meaningless at this stage in the election

    One would think that Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, every sufficiently wealthy news organization and anyone else interested in conducting a poll would be familiar with the basics of the American electoral system. Why they all insist on continuing to waste precious ink on national polls, then, is completely mystifying. Gallup's latest poll of registered voters reports [...]

  • Happy first birthday, 2012 presidential campaign

    If this election is starting to feel interminable, Sunday was an incredible anniversary: Oct. 28, 2012, was the one-year anniversary of the filing date for the New Hampshire primary. I do not want to sell the election season short. The official campaign began a year ago, but the unofficial campaign began well before that. This [...]

  • Senate race in Indiana now leaning Democratic after Mourdock’s abortion comment

    The Republican Party has historically leveraged the subject of abortion far more effectively than Democrats. This year, it could cost them control of the Senate. The Senate has been up for grabs since the beginning of the cycle. Democrats currently control 53 seats, including the two independents in their caucus, but are defending 23 seats [...]

  • The election is over! (Results embargoed two weeks)

    Monday night was the final set piece of the 2012 election—the last scheduled event in which a significant national audience will tune in to develop or refine their impressions of the candidates. Barring any more secret tapes or raids on high-value terrorists, the remainder of the election is largely outside the candidates' control. Instant polls [...]

  • Romney could win the popular vote and lose the election

    For Democrats still stinging from the 2000 election—that is to say, any Democrat born before about 1985—2012 could be the year of retribution. There is a distinct possibility that former Gov. Mitt Romney could win the popular vote and still lose the election to President Barack Obama. In roughly 45 clinical trials, American democracy has [...]

  • Obama still on defense against Romney after second debate—right where he wants to be

    Woody Allen is often quoted as saying that "80 percent of success is showing up." Hackneyed though this expression has become, it applies quite accurately to the election as it stands today. President Barack Obama showed up at the debate on Tuesday night and stabled his teetering campaign. Given the wide consensus that Obama did [...]

  • The Senate is the Democrats’ to lose as five more states shift

    The six-year terms in the Senate produce a curious electoral quirk: The party that controls the chamber going into the election is not necessarily the one in the best position to control it coming out of the election, even in a neutral political environment. This is because the 33 or 34 seats up for election [...]

  • Who won the vice presidential debate? Doesn’t matter.

    Both campaigns declared victory in last night's debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan, with Democrats focusing on Biden's passion and Republicans focusing on Biden's aggression. Neither acknowledged that it is a futile point. Immediate polls from CBS, NBC, and Xbox Live all reported that a majority of undecided voters believed Biden won, and the [...]

  • Romney chips away at Obama’s lead, but electoral math still favors president

    Last week's debate between President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney has inflicted severe turmoil on Obama's standing in the polls, breathing new life and energy into Romney's bid. If the United States elected its presidents by popular vote, the way sane electoral systems operate, Obama's odds of re-election would have plummeted in tandem. Unfortunately [...]

  • Debates don’t move polls. Debate winners do.

    Mitt Romney won the first debate; virtual every snap poll and snap pundit agrees on this point. As the 90-minute debate wore on, the Republican challenger's odds of unseating President Barack Obama rose about 5 percentage points to 31 percent in the Signal's election model, driven by gamblers who dumped the president's stock during and [...]

  • Academics love models, but their window of opportunity has passed

    In case the new issue of PS: Political Science & Politics is still on your junk mail table, here's a primer on the journal's recent publication of 13 distinct predictions of the 2012 election: Five academics predict an Obama victory, five predict a Romney victory and three say it's too close to call. And here's [...]

  • Even before debates, electoral map appears largely written in stone

    Many see potential for Wednesday's presidential debate to be a deciding moment in the 2012 election. From the Signal's perch here on Forecasting Mountain, we don't see a whole lot left to be decided. Since we posted our first forecast of the state-by-state presidential election on Feb. 16, 2012, six months before the Republican Party [...]

  • The downside of outside spending: Candidates are hard to shop for

    Mitt Romney's campaign understands that almost every reasonable scenario for victory includes winning Ohio, Virginia and Florida—a troika that, along with all the states safely in the Republican column, would award the challenger 266 electoral votes, four shy of the magic number. Campaign spending figures published by National Journal verify this in no uncertain terms. [...]

  • Democrats likely to retain Senate as four critical races shift in their favor

    After weeks in which the fate of the Senate simmered at nearly even odds of flipping for Republicans or remaining in Democrats' control, the outlook has shifted dramatically in the Democrats' favor. The incumbent party now has an 80 percent chance of retaining its majority, according to the Signal's prediction model. The break is largely [...]

  • Can Romney still win? Of course—just not the way things are going

    This is not where the Romney campaign wanted to be three weeks after Tampa. The bounce in the polls that President Barack Obama netted coming out of the Democratic National Convention might have vanished by now, as those postconvention bumps tend to do, if not for the bad press that has pelted Republican challenger Mitt [...]