Control of the Senate might not be settled on November 5

[Mister Mets]

A fun detail about the 2014 Senate elections: Georgia and Louisiana offer General Election runoffs if no candidate gets fifty percent of the vote.

Louisiana may be the most likely state to have a runoff since they have a jungle primary system (although Bill Cassidy's most prominent Republican challenger dropped out.)

Georgia is a close enough election, with two first-time candidates who might make serious gaffes. You might have a situation in which the libertarian gets enough votes to keep Perdue, or Nunn, from getting an outright majority first time around. In the Virginia gubernatorial election, Terry McAulliffe got 47.5% to Ken Cuccinelli's 45.2%, which would send a race in Georgia to a runoff.

Imagine if Republicans gain four or five Senate seats, but Georgia and Louisiana go to runoff. This would mean that control of the Senate comes down to two elections in later months.

Just an interesting possibility.

[Mister Mets]

Republicans are always favored in runoffs simply due to turnout dropoff, however, if these races had national attention, I wonder if the Dems could possibly make it close. Obviously, the DSCC needs to plan to keep their organizational structure in LA and GA in place beyond the November 5th, but they will also need to figure out new ways of turning out youth and minorities for the runoffs. Does anyone know how they handled the '08 GA runoff?

The Georgia '08 runoff is a good precedent, since that was an important election. It would have given Democrats a supermajority. There was a significant dropoff in voters, although it was also a presidential election year.

Chambliss got 49.8% in the General, to Democrat Jim Martin's 46.8%.
Chambliss went on to win the runoff 57.4% to 42.6%.

Turnout declined from 3,752,577 to 2,137,956   .

The risk with turnout is that strategies that get young voters and African American voters excited might send old white people to the polls as well, but in the other direction.

If Louisiana and Georgia went to runoffs in November with Republicans picking up 5-6 other seats (IE- West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota, Iowa, Arkansas and maybe Colorado), you'd probably have a situation in which Republicans are given a strong chance of winning both elections, which would create an interesting political environment. There would be high stakes, but a clear favorite.