Reply #10: Gallup Generic Ballot poll was bad, here is Nates brief note on polls

[BootinUp]

Taking the results that have been reported so far on a Congressional district by Congressional district basis, and extrapolating out results for those that haven’t finished counting, we project that Republicans will receive about 42.7 million total votes for the U.S. House, and Democrats 37.2 million, out of about 82.5 million cast.
That would translate into 51.8 percent of the vote for Republicans, and 45.1 percent for Democrats, or a difference of about 6.7 points.

A few interesting notes:
– Turnout was fairly good, but will not be exceptionally high. Total votes cast in the House in 2006, for example, numbered about 81 million.

– The average of generic ballot polls did a very good job of predicting the Republican margin in the House popular vote. We had the average at 6.9 points heading into the election. The much-discussed Gallup poll — which showed Republicans winning the generic ballot by 15 points, was quite poor.

– Republicans, however, did somewhat better than you might expect based on having won the national house ballot by 6-7 points. There are various formulas that attempt to translate the generic ballot or the House popular vote into a seat count without worrying about how things work out at a district-by-district level. Those formulas would generally translate a 6-7 point popular vote win into something like a 50 or 55 seat gain for Republicans. Instead, it looks like Republicans will net something on the order of 65 seats. The Republican vote was evidently concentrated in a way that was quite efficient.