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Will the Republican Party enjoy a wave election in 2014? Here are some metrics that can help you determine the answer as you follow the returns Tuesday night.

The GOP has the upper hand in this midterm election cycle because it's the sixth year of a presidency and a pretty unpopular one at that. Historically, parties that don't control the White House tend to chalk up a lot of gains in midterm elections such as this one.

Still, when measuring the extent of a wave election, it's important to keep a few things in mind. First, a party's electoral success in one realm say, congressional races might be undercut by failures elsewhere, such as in the governorships. And second, the true strength of a wave is measured less by victories in places where the surging party is already strong, but more by victories in states that are either competitive or that actually lean toward the opposing party.

The following 10 factors are designed to measure how broad a potential Republican wave turns out to be on a national scale not just in U.S. Senate and House races, but in governorships, state legislative chambers, state attorney general races, ballot measures and state Supreme Court races.

We've included a rating system to gauge how well each party did once the results are tallied. The questions are designed to gauge aspects of the election deeper than just the surface results. Are Republicans winning in Democratic-leaning areas rather than in solidly Republican areas only? Does a party win both national and state-level races in the same state, or do voters split their ballots?

After settling on 10 key questions, we set a baseline for what's "expected" based on current analysis by electoral handicappers and established a sliding scale that awards more credit to a party for exceeding the conventional wisdom once the ballots are finally counted. After the election, we'll add these all together and see how strong the wave ended up being. Fire up those calculators; here we go:

1. How many reasonably competitive Senate seats does the GOP win in states won by President Barack Obama in 2012?

Races are: Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, New Hampshire, Virginia.

0: Weak night for Republicans; 1: medium night for Republicans; 2: strong night for Republicans; 3: very strong night for Republicans; 4 or more: extremely strong night for Republicans.

2. By how many cumulative percentage points do GOP Senate candidates in competitive races exceed Mitt Romney's 2012 percentage in that state?

See the rest here:
Perspective: A scorecard for election night