I’ve been asked why the PEC Senate poll snapshot is more favorable to Democrats than forecasts you’ll find elsewhere: NYT’s The Upshot, Washington Post’s The Monkey Cage, ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight, and Daily Kos. All of these organizations show a higher probability of a Republican takeover than today’s PEC snapshot, which favors the Democrats with a 70% probability.

Today I will show that in most cases, added assumptions (i.e. special sauce) have led the media organizations to different win probabilities – which I currently believe are wrong. I’ll then outline the subtle but important implications for a November prediction.

Are you as excited about Amanda Curtis as I am?

It is usually the case that candidates for Senate from the two major parties have been groomed for years by the political establishment and are indebted to powerful, behind-the-scenes players. Or, they are so wealthy as to make their agendas and their loyalties contrary to the needs of ordinary Montanans.

But in Amanda Curtis, we have someone like us. We have a person who draws a normal paycheck, who has taught math to our kids at Helena Middle School and who now teaches at Butte High School. We have someone committed to transparency: she posted YouTube videos each day during her inaugural year of service in the state legislature, in 2013.

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U.S. Sen. Jon Tester is famous for his flat-top and middle of the road politics. Amanda Curtis, Tester's fellow Democrat and would-be colleague from Montana, is known for her nose ring and her unabashedly liberal affiliations.
Although many insiders dismiss her campaign as a long shot, Amanda Curtis is raising money at a prodigious rate and battling assertions that she is too radical for conservative-leaning Montana.
But on many issues, the candidate admits she needs to study up. But time is running out with Election Day a little more than two months away.
Curtis, a Butte math teacher serving her first-term in the Montana state house, has already raised $180,000 in 10 days, according to her campaign, and sees "people coming out of the woodwork" to support her.

HELENA – Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Amanda Curtis has named her campaign manager and also picked up a key endorsement Thursday from a national left-leaning political action committee.

Democracy for America, the Vermont-based PAC founded by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, endorsed Curtis in her five-day-old campaign against Republican Steve Daines for Montana’s U.S. Senate seat. Libertarian Roger Roots also is in the race.

Curtis “is precisely the new, progressive hero Montana Democrats need” to defeat Daines, said Jim Dean, chairman of Democracy for America.

As international and criminal law scholars, human rights defenders, legal experts and individuals who firmly believe in the rule of law and in the necessity for its respect in times of peace and more so in times of war, we feel the intellectual and moral duty to denounce the grave violations, mystification and disrespect of the most basic principles of the laws of armed conflict and of the fundamental human rights of the entire Palestinian population committed during the ongoing Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip. We also condemn the launch of rockets from the Gaza Strip, as every indiscriminate attack against civilians, regardless of the identity of the perpetrators, is not only illegal under international law but also morally intolerable. However, as also implicitly noted by the UN Human Rights Council in its Resolution of the 23rd July 2014, the two parties to the conflict cannot be considered equal, and their actions – once again – appear to be of incomparable magnitude.

Once again it is the unarmed civilian population, the ‘protected persons’ under International humanitarian law (IHL), who is in the eye of the storm. Gaza’s civilian population has been victimized in the name of a falsely construed right to self-defence, in the midst of an escalation of violence provoked in the face of the entire international community. The so-called Operation Protective Edge erupted during an ongoing armed conflict, in the context of a prolonged belligerent occupation that commenced in 1967. In the course of this ongoing conflict thousands of Palestinians have been killed and injured in the Gaza Strip during recurrent and ostensible ‘ceasefire’ periods since 2005, after Israel’s unilateral ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip. The deaths caused by Israel’s provocative actions in the Gaza Strip prior to the latest escalation of hostilities must not be ignored as well.

In its Advisory Opinion in the Nuclear Weapons case, the ICJ stated that the principle of distinction, which requires belligerent States to distinguish between civilian and combatants, is one of the “cardinal principles” of international humanitarian law and one of the “intransgressible principles of international customary law”.

The principle of distinction is codified in Articles 48, 51(2) and 52(2) of the Additional Protocol I of 1977 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, to which no reservations have been made. According to Additional Protocol I, “attacks” refer to “acts of violence against the adversary, whether in offence or in defence” (Article 49). Under both customary international law and treaty law, the prohibition on directing attacks against the civilian population or civilian objects is absolute. There is no discretion available to invoke military necessity as a justification.