After looking at recent polling data, fundraising data and some fundamentals — including the higher unpredictability of a special election, Nate Silver concludes that Gomez’s chances for an upset are “slim.”
Although some news accounts had been describing the race as a tossup until recently, Mr. Gomez’s odds of prevailing are remote — probably no more than 10 percent even under optimistic assumptions for his campaign.
And that 10% is largely because this is a special election; in a regular election, the odds would be around 5%, he said. Just another example of why GOTV is so important in this one, even moreso than a general election.
Fundamentals alone “would now project Mr. Markey to win the contest by roughly 12 percentage points,” Silver writes. That same model “would have seen the 2010 race as a tossup by this point in the campaign on the basis of Mr. Brown’s superior fund-raising totals and the national political environment.”
You can read Silver’s full post here.
also weighing in. His take is that Gomez hasn’t moved the needle much. MA voters decided last November that, even if they liked Brown and thought he was suitably moderate, they didn’t want to aid and abet the McConnell GOP in any way. That calculation holds. Any advantage Gomez gets from the special election electorate being differently composed is “more than offset by his not being Scott Brown.”
I tend to agree with both, but we still need to GOTV.