by Tony Petrangelo

Oct 17, 2012, 7:00 AM

Minnesota Legislative Race Ratings – Senate Edition

With three weeks to go till election day, it’s about time for me to do some Legislative Race Ratings!

You can just scroll down to the bottom now and check out what I’ve rated your pet race and then come back up here and read this preamble, which I suspect will be at least a few hundred words. Or not. Your choice.

This is my second time doing race ratings of Minnesota legislative elections, the first time being in 2010. Here are links to my Senate ratings and House ratings from that cycle. I used a Safe/Tilt/Toss-up ratings scale and prior to the election I rated the Senate seats as 31 total DFL seats (Safe+Tilt), 19 total GOP seats and 17 Toss-ups.

The GOP won all 19 seats I had them winning. They also won every single race I had listed as a toss-up. They also won a race I had listed as Tilt DFL, the Don Betzold – Pam Wolf race. Clearly 2010 was a wave year for the GOP.

That said, I don’t think my ratings did particularly bad especially since there was no sort of adjustment incorporated to account for the broader political context of the election.

As with my previous foray into race ratings I’ve kept this years version to an entirely numbers based exercise. Meaning at no point is a race rating the way it is because I made a subjective judgement about the quality of a candidate.

In fact, the only measures of candidate quality, and they may or may not actually be measures of candidate quality, that are considered in these ratings are fundraising and incumbency.

Based on the research I’ve done on past legislative elections in Minnesota the quantitative aspects that have shown to have the most predictive value, each to varying degrees, are a districts partisan fundamentals, fundraising and incumbency.

It’s clear that the broader political context in which an election takes place is a key element as well. But since publicly available generic legislative ballot polls have been virtually non existent in Minnesota until this cycle, I have no way of knowing to what degree these have actually effected past elections.

This year seems to be rather neutral though, with no apparent wave coming from either side, so that’s probably less of an issue than it turned out to be in 2010.

To arrive at these ratings I take those three factors for which I have an idea how they have effected elections in the past and boil them down into a metric or adjustment and add them all together. The result of that is a number that fits into the Safe – Likely – Lean – Toss-up spectrum.

No doubt there are cases to be made that candidate x is working y times harder than candidate z, so they are totally going to win. That candidate w is so bad and so despised by their constituents that they are sure to lose. None of those things can be easily quantified though, and the approach I’m utilizing is one based entirely on things which can be.

With that out of the way, we can move onto the actual Race Ratings (if you haven’t already). The table below totals the Ratings, which are found even further below, into their respective categories sorted by party. The All category adds all the Safe/Likely/Lean races from each party together.

I’ve said before that both chambers looked like coin flips this year. That’s also what the Senate Race Ratings say. The generic legislative ballot though, as I pointed out earlier this week points to the DFL recapturing the chamber.

If the DFL’s current 7% advantage in the average of the polls holds, and they win 7% more of the legislative votes on election day, the DFL would be expected to end up with a 41-26 Senate majority. That would mean a virtual sweep of the Toss-up races.

Presented here, in it’s very own table, are those 19 Toss-up races referenced in the above table:

Those 19 races will decide who controls the Minnesota Senate next year. It’s certainly possible that one or more of the races listed as Lean or Likely or even Safe could flip, but it won’t be many of them.

Here than, is the complete list.