Danation: Election Predictions — Am I a Genius, or Is This Stuff Just Easy?
Image by Mike Licht via Flickr.
The answer to the headline’s question is, of course, both. But Let me give you some numbers to illustrate what I’m saying. Back in July, I predicted that the races for state House, state Senate and U.S. House in Florida would break down as follows:
State House: 76 Republicans, 43 Democrats, 1 Tossup
State Senate: 25 Republicans, 14 Democrats, 1 Tossup
U.S. House: 15 Republicans, 11 Democrats, 1 Tossup
I tried as hard as possible to have no tossups, but I allowed myself just one in each category. And now, here are the final results from Tuesday:
State House: 76 Republicans, 44 Democrats
State Senate: 26 Republicans, 14 Democrats
U.S. House: 17 Republicans, 10 Democrats
Looking at those numbers, and realizing that I only got one race wrong out of 187, you’d have to think I’m some sort of savant about this stuff. I’m like the Nate Silver of Florida. Rainman without the social ineptitude.
And you would be right.
But that doesn’t mean no one else could have predicted this outcome. While I should probably just end this post with the previous paragraph and not be a magician who gives away his tricks, that annoying journalistic part of me always overrules the showman. The truth of the matter is that several of these races featured unopposed candidates, several more had only a primary, and even in those that featured a candidate from each party, some results were patently obvious — it doesn’t take a brain trust to figure out that all of the state House and Senate seats in the panhandle will go Republican, or that the Democrats will sweep most of Broward County. After accounting for all of those races, you’ve already correctly predicted the outcomes of all of them but for a couple dozen. Next, you take a look at the fundraising numbers and you’ll discover that, in many cases, even if you’re not quite sure how the district will break down demographically, you can see what the party thinks, as one candidate will have raised almost nothing. You rule out those races, close as some of them may be, and what you’re left with is, out of 187 races, no more than a dozen or so.
There were some surprises for me though. Below are the upsets.
State House
District 29: Firefighter Mike Clelland appears to have beaten Republican incumbent, and would-be House Speaker, Chris Dorworth. I say “appears to” because just 123 votes separate them out of 73,831 cast, necessitating a recount.
District 30: Karen Castor Dentel, sister of U.S. House Rep. Kathy Castor, beat incumbent Republican Scott Plakon pretty handily.
District 65: Carl “Z” Zimmerman beat incumbent Republican Peter Nehr after losing to him last time around.
District 112: Jose Javier Rodriguez, running in his very first political campaign, beat near-legendary Republican Alex Diaz de la Portilla by a convincing 7 points.
State Senate
District 8: Not so much an upset, but I am surprised at how not-close this race was, in which Republican Dorothy Hukill beat Democrat Frank Bruno by 14 points.
U.S. House
Nothing here that you would really call an upset, though as in state Senate District 8, I was surprised at the wide margin in District 13, where incumbent Republican Bill Young coasted to victory over Jessica Ehrlich. Also, I thought the closest race would be over in District 16. I expected incumbent Republican Vern Buchanan to win, but I thought it would be by a handful of votes, not 8 points. Instead, the closest election was in District 18, wherein Allen West went down to defeat, a phrase that never stops being fun to write.
Allen West went down to defeat.
Allen West went down to defeat.
Allen West went down to defeat.
There were a couple other races that were way closer than I thought they’d be, though they still panned out the way I thought they would. District 24 is a good example, wherein Democrat Milissa Holland lost to Republican Travis Hutson by just 1,831 votes cast out of 79,650. District 42 was really close too, but the first Republican in that race, Mike Horner, got caught up in a prostitution scandal, so it’s not surprising that his replacement barely eked by. Here in South Florida, there was a surprisingly close race in District 114, where Ross Hancock lost to developers’ best friend Erik Fresen by 1,403 votes out of 60,281 votes cast.
But for all those close races, the end result was more or less as I figured it. More important than that, the end result is about the same as it was — both houses of the state Legislature feature almost exactly the same party makeup as they did before Tuesday. The last legislative bodies in Florida broke down like this:
State House: 76 Republicans, 44 Democrats
State Senate: 26 Republicans, 13 Democrats
U.S. House: 19 Republicans, 6 Democrats
Because of population growth, we gained a couple of seats in the state Senate and U.S. House. But as you can see from the numbers at the beginning of this post compared to the ones above, the partisan makeup of our legislators is almost exactly the same as it was before. The Democrats gained some ground in the U.S. House, but that’s all.
With apologies to The Who, I’ll end this the same way I ended my presidential election wrap up: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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