"The stars were in alignment," said Claude E. Pope Jr., chairman of the county Republican Party, which spent more than $60,000 on the election, slightly more than Democrats spent.
So they want to secure areas where there could be clan-based electoral colleges to try and make an indirect election slightly more direct.
This year, with the elections slightly more than five weeks away, Russia has yet to invite the observers.
Minority voters have edged up as a share of the state population, while the number of working-class whites shrinks — making a state Democrats have carried in six consecutive presidential elections slightly more friendly to the party.
"For years we have been talking about the armed groups that are working under the name of the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense that have direct connections with some leaders in the government," said Maysoon al-Damluji, a spokeswoman for Iraqiya, the secular political bloc that finished first in Iraq's March 7 elections, slightly ahead of Mr. Maliki's State of Law bloc.
But the economists were at least able also to assess the records of coalition governments, which might be assumed, by and large, to be in a weaker initial position than single-party governments.Coalitions don't seem to be much weaker: they last 4.12 years on average, compared with 4.2 years for single-party governments, although they do lose elections slightly more often.
They win re-election slightly more often than state lawmakers, according to a study from Ohio State University's law school.
Provisional results, which were announced more than a week later, indicated that Condé won the election with slightly more than 52 percent of the vote.
That is about 10 times what the average Senate candidate spends in an election, and slightly more than all the money held in the Republican Party's statewide campaign accounts.
After narrowly winning the election, Brownback slightly changed course.
Voter turnout on Sunday, the first of the two-day elections, was slightly lower than the previous general elections five years ago.
