Predicting 2014 Senate Elections Way Early

This article will cover my initial predictions on the outcome of the 2014 Senate General Elections.

I am piggybacking off of the recent landslide of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/02/us/politics/senate-races-to-watch-in-2014.html?ref=us&_r=0">New York Times research found here. I'm going to re-slice their own numbers in three ways to come up with a somewhat robust, but very early and rough, prediction.

1 - Assuming Likely Scenarios With Even Flips

Let's assume that everyone NYT calls likely or solid D goes D and same for Republicans. There are also 12 races the NYT says could flip. Let's assume that half of the flips go D and half go R. The result would be 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans in the Senate, or a gain of 4 Republican seats.

2 - Assuming Likely Scenarios With Complex Flips

Let's assume the supposedly likely scenarios are true. Let's make flips more complicated. Although there are 12 total possible flips, 10 of the flips would go from D to R and only 2 would go from R to D. Furthermore, if a seat 'could flip' it is better to alot it a 50% chance of flipping than to assume that it will flip. Under these assumptions the result would be 52 Democrats and 48 Republicans in the Senate, or a gain of 3 Republican seats.

3 - Composing a Realistic Range

Let's take the complex flips analysis, but instead of assigning a 50% chance to flip, let's come up with a range. We could have a 0% flip to 100% flip range, but realistically SOMETHING is going to flip, and probably not everything. Instead, let's assume at least 1 race will flip and at most 11 races will flip. In fact, I am even going to narrow the range a bit. With a minimum 2 flip and max 10 flip range, rounding to the nearest seat, the result would range from a gain of 2 seats to a gain of 9 seats.

In Conclusion

Republicans are definitely going to win this Fall in the sense that they will pick up seats, but it is unlikely that they will win in the sense that they will have a majority in the Senate. At the same time, although unlikely, there is a small possibility that Republicans can come away with a majority in the Senate. Mathematically, the predictions are as follows:

Overall, I expect Republicans to pick up 3-4 seats.

Republicans could have 47 - 54 seats, but I realistically expect 48-49.

Democrats could have 46 - 53 seats, but I realistically expect 51-52.