Last fall, the GOP scored a historic 63 seat gain in the House (picking up 66 Democratic seats while losing 3 Republican seats). We had predicted this political earthquake as far back as the upset victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts a year ago, using a set of criteria called the “Obama plunge” (explained in […]
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RSS feed for this sectionSome thoughts about redistricting
Yesterday, the Census released information detailing how the House of Representatives is to be apportioned between the states. To no one’s surprise, Louisiana is slated to lose one of its its seven House districts, due to lower than normal population growth that has been occurring since the 1980s.
2010 Midterm results: Part 6(C) – Another way of looking at U.S. House races
Now that the last House race (a Democratic held seat in New York that narrowly stayed in the Democratic column) has been settled, the House will now have 242 Republicans and 193 Democrats, which means that the GOP gained a net of 63 seats. We would like to revisit the issue of the Democrats’ hopes […]
2010 Midterm results: Part 6(B) – 2012 Presidential Race
In our prior posting about the House races, we briefly analyzed the 2012 Presidential race through the lens of the electoral behavior of each state during midterm elections. We noted that “….At a minimum, the states which voted for McCain in 2008 are very unlikely to switch to Obama in 2012. States in the interior […]
2010 Midterm results: Part 6 – U.S. House races
From the Republicans’ perspective, the “crown jewel” of the 2010 midterm elections was the recapture, by a significant margin, of the U.S. House of Representatives. This house of Congress has been under Democratic control since 2007, and since 1955 has been Democratic controlled for 44 of the last 56 years. Few pundits, however, have bothered to delve into […]
2010 Midterm results: Part 4 – Louisiana Senate race
The seemingly eternal Senate race that started in the summer of 2009 between David Vitter and Charlie Melancon has finally ended, and the verdict of the voters was clear: anything that smacked of President Obama and/or his Democratic policies was soundly rejected in most parts of state. While Senator Vitter always maintained double digit leads […]
2010 Midterm results: Part 3 – Louisiana Congressional races
In the previous two articles in the series, we looked at the Senate and Governor’s races across the nation. We would like to shift gears in this article to focus on the Louisiana Congressional races.
2010 Midterm results: Part 2 – Governor’s races
In our previous article about the Senate, we noted that GOP gains were respectable, but were hardly overwhelming, since there were multiple missed opportunities, in addition to the fact that many Senate races were held in unfavorable terrain. These and other factors prevented the GOP from recapturing the Senate – for now.
2010 Midterm results: Part 1 – Senate races
Now that the will of the voters has been expressed in the 2010 midterm elections, how are we to interpret the results ? We will answer this question in the next seven posts, which will cover not only the elections just concluded, but will look into the near term (i.e., 2011 and 2012) future.
A postmortem on Congressional turnover
Back in June, we had discussed Congressional turnover from a historical perspective. Now that all but 10 Congressional races have been decided, we would like to revisit that discussion.