“Toss Up” Races

Radnor recognizes that you want to know which party is likely to control the House and the Senate after the November election. Therefore, we try to eliminate the uncertainty that “toss up” races create. We put them in either the Democratic or the Republican column. We also allocate Independents (such as Senators Lieberman and Sanders) to the party that they caucus with.

When we find a true “toss up” election, we decide based on the following factors:

+ If the incumbent is seeking reelection, we allocate that seat to the incumbent. (This may be a shortcoming in our methodology this year for Democratic incumbents!)

+ If the seat has no incumbent, we take into account the percentage of the vote received by each party’s candidates for all offices in the last four elections. We realize that this is an imperfect method; however, mistakes tend to even out and the number of ”toss up” races decreases as November approaches.

On August 15, we had 29 “toss up” contests. We allocated 16 to the Republican candidate and 13 to the Democrat.