Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Midterm blowout and managing expectations

image The normally left-leaning legacy media is all atwitter this week about the potential for a blowout in next Tuesday’s midterm election.  From The Hill, a breathtaking forecast based on a poll it sponsored of 17,000 likely voters in 42 Districts rated as tossups.  The call: fifty plus seats and an all but certain ousting of Democrats from the House of Representatives. But Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog from the New York Times paints a dim picture of GOP chances to take the Senate as well. Taken together, if these forecasts hold up then the 2010 election would fall somewhere south of the 1994 Glorious Revolution, when the GOP took 54 seats in the House and six in the Senate, giving them control of both houses of Congress.

But wait… If the GOP takes more than six seats in the Senate and picks up 54+ in the House, wouldn’t that be somewhere north of 1994?  Yes, in that the math of the 2010 election would exceed that of 1994.  But no, in that one of the two houses would still be under Democrat control (albeit with a near powerless majority).

My own forecast is that the Republicans take somewhere between 60 and 65 seats in the House and seven Senate races (Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, North Dakota, Wisconsin and either Colorado or West Virginia).  That would result in GOP control of about 240. In the Senate, that would translate into a razor thin 52-48 majority for the Democrats.  On a very bright note, the 2012 election shapes up extremely well for Republicans to take the Senate outright two years hence.

And, what remains a very bright spot is that in Nevada, Silver has upped Sharron Angle’s chances of knocking off Harry Reid.  Late last week, he gave her about a two-in-three chance of ousting the sitting Senate Majority Leader.  This week, her chances have increased to three-in-four.

Six days out, it’s important to keep two things in mind: One—This will be a historic election by any standards and it will stand as a repudiation of the left-wing social agenda of this President.  Two—it’s only the first step in a long process of taking the country back to the center-right philosophy that is the harmony of the majority.  There’s still a lot of work to be done.

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