Senate Forecast - August 10 - Regression towards the mean

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DCW Senate Forecast: 56.1 No change from our previous forecast, but our two most Democratic projections, Electoral-Vote.com and 538.com both moved a little but towards the Republican side, making our spread, over all projections, now 1.5 seats, the smallest since we've been tracking the projections. Also, two seats we've been tracking, NJ and GA, are now unanimously safe. We'll leave them on the chart for now, in case that changes.

The DCW Senate Forecast is an average of the projections of the Democratic held seats in the 2009 Senate. (We count Sanders and Lieberman as Democrats in the Senate Forecast. Feel free to subtract one if you so desire!) A history of the Forecast going back to November 2006 is at bottom and in the left sidebar.

For analysis of the races, be sure to check out the latest installment of Sunday with the Senators.

Be sure to also check out our Presidential Forecast and our House Forecast.

The following seats are unanimous strong and are not shown in the table below (We do show VA as it is a pickup):

Solid Democrat: AR (Pryor), DE (Biden), IA (Harkin). IL (Durbin), MA (Kerry), MI (Levin), MT (Baucus), RI (Reed), SD (Johnson), WV (Rockefeller)
Solid Republican: AL (Sessions), ID (Open), KS (Roberts), MS (Cochrane), NE (Open), OK (Inhofe), SC (Graham), TN (Alexander), TX (Cornyn), WY (Barraso), WY (Enzi)

The sources are sorted by each sources Senate Projection:

DemConWatch Senate Forecast
State	Current	EV .com	Crystal Ball	Cook	538 .com	CQ	Open Left	SSP	Roth	....
Date		8/10.	7/29.	7/31.	8/5.	7/31.	7/29.	8/6.	7/30.
Dem-Strong		15	12	12	16	12	13	13	12
Dem-Lean		2	5	3	1	5	4	4	2
Tossup		1	1	5	0	1	0	0	4
Rep-Lean		2	4	2	2	3	4	4	2
Rep-Strong		15	13	13	16	14	14	14	15
Dem '08 Projection		18	17	17	17	17	17	17	16
Dem '10/'12 Seats		39	39	39	39	39	39	39	39
Dem Senate Projection		57	56	56	56	56	56	56	55
Dem-Gain		6	5	5	5	5	5	5	4
AK (Stevens)	R	D	DL	DL	D	DL	DL	DL	T
CO (Open)	R	DL	DL	T	DL	DL	DL	DL	T
GA (Chambliss)	R	R	R	R	R	R	R	R	R
KY (McConnell)	R	R	R	R	R	R	RL	R	R
LA (Landrieu)	D	DL	DL	DL	D	DL	DL	DL	T
ME (Collins)	R	RL	RL	RL	R	RL	R	R	R
MN (Coleman)	R	RL	RL	T	R	RL	RL	RL	T
MS (Wicker)	R	T	T	T	RL	T	RL	RL	RL
NC (Dole)	R	R	RL	RL	R	R	R	RL	R
NH (Sununu)	R	D	DL	T	D	DL	D	DL	DL
NJ (Lautenberg)	D	D	D	D	D	D	DL	D	D
NM (Open)	R	D	DL	DL	D	DL	D	D	DL
OR (Smith)	R	R	RL	T	RL	RL	RL	RL	RL
VA (Open)	R	D	D	D	D	D	D	D	D

Here are the seats that span 3 categories:

• AK (Stevens) (NEW): Two now at Democratic Strong, Rothenberg still at Tossup
  
• LA (Landrieu): 1 at Dem-Strong, 1 at Tossup
• MN : 538 at Rep-Strong, 2 at tossup
  
• NH (Sununu): Shaheen has opened up a 14 point lead in 2 straight polls, but Sununu has a big money advantage.
• OR (Smith) (NEW): 1 at Rep-Strong, 1 at Tossup
  

The Senate Projection for each source gives Democrats 1.0 seats in a state that is projected solid for the Democrat (or seats that are not up for reelection this cycle), 0.8 seats for a Democrat-Lean, 0.5 seats for a a Tossup, 0.2 seats for a Republican-Lean, and obviously 0 seats for a solid Republican seat or a Republican seat not up for reelection this cycle.