Genius statistics guru Nate Silver analyzes the numbers for a possible Castle write-in bid.
I tried to model the three-way race and came up with the following: Mr. Coons with 37 percent of the vote, Mr. Castle with 34 percent, and Ms. O’Donnell with 29 percent.
That, obviously, would imply a winnable race for Mr. Castle — although it assumes that he is fairly serious about his write-in bid. Mr. Castle is 71 years old and has not faced too many competitive elections in recent years, and he took his time to enter the Senate race last year after considering retiring from politics entirely, so this is far from a sure thing.
One dynamic that may be more favorable to Mr. Castle is that it seems conceivable he could win with as little as 35 percent of the vote. It seems probable to me that Ms. O’Donnell’s support is going to hover in the area of 30 percent — not a lot higher, not a lot lower — which was about the percentage of voters who had a favorable impression of her in the Public Policy Polling survey. That would leave Mr. Castle and Mr. Coons to fight over the remaining 70 percent of the electorate, making half that total — 35 percent — the magic number.
Yes, I’m patting myself on the back for getting a similar number for Coons but I think Castle’s number is still overestimated. Plus there’s still 1-2% for 3rd party candidates. Based on this analysis, I think Castle doesn’t take the plunge. He’d have to fight HARD and he’d have to walk a pretty fine line to keep his R-I-D coalition together. It’s certainly a much different race than the one he was planning to run. It’s definitely no coronation. One thing it does do, however, is change the race from Lean D to Toss Up.
What do you think? Does Castle take the plunge?