Wensday morning one of our Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) party’s most closely guarded secrets was blown- The September campaign finance reports came out giving us a neat list of the 16 districts that had seen over $10,000 in “outside group” spending by the state DFL. That list of favored races included none here in CD7, and after a couple hours my anger had dropped to the point I covered the story in my Sassy Democrat blog. The Cliff’s notes version is that the state DFL targeted every GOP state house member sitting in a seat as republican as R+1.35, and 3 of the 12 GOP held districts further red as far as R+4. Of the 16 targeted seats, 10 were won by Hillary… Talk about setting a low bar! But you’ve got to recognize the “wisdom” of the state DFL- Pick a bunch of easy opponents and it’s easy to look like winners on election night.
Pretty likely these picks were made via the “DFL Index” with a few filtered out because they’d ticked off somebody in the leadership or whatever. The secret “DFL index” is out too, thanks to DFLer Tony Petrangelo who’s reverse engineered and posted it here. Yup, looks like that’s how the state DFL decides which races to blow it’s millions on. Compare that to 538’s explanation of how they make their predictions. 538 starts with a more sophisticated calculation of the “index”, then includes polling, past results going back decades, fundraising, incumbency, and generic ballot polling. After all that as of 6:07 pm today they rate CD7 as a win for DFLer Colin Peterson by a 2.8% margin with their “light” polls only forecast, by a 10.4% margin when they add the “fundamentals” for their “classic” forecast, and by a 12.8% blowout when expert’s ratings are added to produce the “deluxe” forecast. Yup, 538’s predictions produced by a program with 8000 lines of code produce a variance of 9% between their predictions that fluctuates as they update them every few hours… And the state DFL thinks they can target races just by the results of a couple elections two and four years ago?
That’s why we don’t take “indexes” too seriously here in R+12 CD7, given that DFLer Colin Peterson has won the district 14 times straight! Across the Red River 538 favors Democratic Non-Partisan League Senator Heidi Heitkamp to narrowly win in R+17 North Dakota, in R+14 South Dakota democrat gov candidate Billie Sutton is neck and neck in the polls, and in northwest Iowa’s R+11 CD4 democrat J.D. Scholten has out fund raised GOP incumbent Steve King and has pulled within single digits in the polls. The DFL index has little predictive value to target races by… And that’s why here in CD7, every race is a targeted race!
Sassy Democrat 