Florida primary and OR-01 benchmarks and predictions

DailyKos:

Florida's Republican primary election has turned into a much less interesting one than it looked several weeks ago, with Newt Gingrich unable to sustain much of a bounce from his South Carolina victory and Mitt Romney poised to win by double digits, according to almost all pollsters. With Florida a winner-take-all state (the first we've seen so far), there's no partial credit for Gingrich either... it's all or nothing, and right now he's on track for nothing. Even though the real question is how much Romney wins by, not whether he wins, it's time to roll out our usual series of pre-game county-by-county benchmarks, so you can gauge at home how the candidates are fairing as results trickle in. (Is looking at all those county names bringing back unpleasant flashbacks of the 2000 election?) Most recent polls have put Romney in the low 40s and Romney is projected to hit 44% (according to Nate Silver), which is much better than the 31% Romney got in 2008, losing to John McCain's 36%. Looking in greater detail at the 2008 Florida map, though (click here for the Dave Leip US Election Atlas map: Romney is in green, McCain is in blue, and Huckabee is in orange), Florida may be the first state this year where Romney's 2008 map doesn't give much insight into how he'll do this year. Unlike, say, South Carolina, where Romney this year continued to have strength in the Low Country and do poorly in the evangelical uplands, the areas where Romney did best in 2008 seem more like the areas where Gingrich is going to do the best this year. That's probably because the other two candidates to seriously contest Florida last time were Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, both of whom were positioned to Romney's left at that point. This time, there's nobody to Romney's left (with the end of Jon Huntsman's perplexing vanity campaign), and his legitimate remaining opposition is to his right. So, Romney's areas of strength last time -- the areas around Jacksonville (Duval Co.), the suburbs north of Orlando (Lake and Seminole Cos.), and the southwestern coast (Lee and Collier Cos.) -- are the most conservative parts of the state, save for the Panhandle (like Escambia Co., where I suspect McCain did well last time because he got some sort of Navy veteran bonus). If Gingrich is going to be even vaguely competitive, he's probably going to win these areas (or at least the Panhandle plus Jacksonville and Orlando's suburbs... the wealthy retirees of Lee and Collier Cos. might be more attracted to Romney). Romney, instead, is likely to overperform his trajectory from '08 in the more moderate areas, like the I-4 corridor (Tampa Bay (Pinellas and Hillsborough Cos.) through Orlando proper (Orange Co.) over to the Space Coast (Brevard and Volusia Cos.)), and the Miami metro area (Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Cos.). The Miami area in particular seems fruitful for Romney, with its mix of northeastern retirees and Cuban-Americans (unless Cubans decide they prefer Gingrich's line on immigration, which at least rhetorically has seemed somewhat softer). And luckily for Romney, the I-4 corridor and the Miami area are where the most Republicans are. (H/t to diarist okiedem, who's come to pretty similar conclusions about the Romney map in his diary.) So, rather than pouring a huge amount of 'special sauce' over my model -- or just doing a linear projection for Romney in all counties based on a statewide 44% which would come out totally wrong -- what I'm going to do is just give you raw data for both McCain and Romney in 2008 and you can draw your own conclusions. If anything, I think (with the exception of the Panhandle) the McCain numbers may be a better guideline for Romney's 2012 performance than Romney's 2008 performance, though with McCain hitting only 36% last time, you might want to add 8 or so percent as a correction factor to the McCain numbers to get up to 44% for Romney. (You can look at the full spreadsheet of 2008 results here.

County % of 2008 statewide vote McCain vote share in 2008 Romney vote share in 2008 McCain or Romney?

Statewide 100.0 36 31 M

Miami-Dade 8.0 49 16 M

Pinellas 6.0 38 30 M

Palm Beach 5.4 39 30 M

Hillsborough 5.2 38 30 M

Broward 5.1 41 24 M

Duval 4.8 27 41 R

Orange 4.7 32 32 M

Brevard 4.5 36 31 M

Lee 4.4 33 40 R

Sarasota 3.5 38 32 M

Polk 2.9 35 32 M

Seminole 2.8 31 34 R

Volusia 2.7 35 33 M

Collier 2.7 29 44 R

Pasco 2.7 36 30 M

Marion 2.4 31 33 R

Lake 2.3 32 33 R

Manatee 2.3 35 33 M

Escambia 2.2 36 27 M

But wait, there's more! There's one other big event tonight: the special election in Oregon's 1st district to replace resigned Democratic Rep. David Wu. Democratic ex-state Sen. Suzanne Bonamici looks likely to win against Republican businessman Rob Cornilles, given the polls of the race, Republican downplaying, and most clearly, the party registration associated with the ballots turned in so far in this all vote-by-mail election. (If you assume party-line voting and then allocate the independent ballots equally to each candidate, it pencils out to about a 10-point lead for Bonamici, just in line with the public polling of the race.) With a new rule in place allowing pre-counting of the ballots received before Election Day, we may know very shortly after 8 pm PT who won.

OR-01

Figuring out benchmarks for this race is a lot easier than the Florida primary, because it's a straightforward two-way race (sorry, Libertarian and Pacific Party guys...) with no moving parts, and also because the 2010 House race featured the same Republican participant. So, with that in mind, I'm using the 2010 race (where Wu beat Cornilles by 13) as the baseline, rather than the 2008 presidential race. As you can see, Bonamici only needs to fight to a tie in Washington County, the suburban county west of Portland that contains the bulk of the district's population; the huge Democratic edge in the slice of west Portland that's in OR-01 more than cancels out the Republican advantage in rural Yamhill County.

County % of 2010 congressional vote in-district Wu/Cornilles vote share in 2010 What Bonamici needs to hit 50%

Districtwide 100.0 55/42 50/47

Washington 62.6 53/44 48/49

Multnomah (pt.) 13.3 76/21 71/26

Yamhill 12.3 44/52 39/57

Columbia 6.8 50/45 45/50

Clatsop 5.0 57/40 52/45

So... let's turn this over to you guys. What are your predictions for tonight? Does Gingrich somehow win Florida and prove every existing pollster wrong? Does he at least beat the spread? And what are your predictions for the Oregon special election? Polls in Florida close at 7 pm local time; the vast majority of the state is on Eastern Time but don't forget that Pensacola is on Central Time, so no call will happen until its polls have closed. Ballots must be received in Oregon by 8 pm Pacific.

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