So what will Congress look like after next week?

[Maggie]

For those of you who are interested, and now that the election season is winding down, Nate Silver, who has a blog at 538, I always find to be an interesting read. He certainly is not, and does not claim to be, neutral in his observations and is not a pollster himself. But he’s about the most intellectually honest analyst on the Democrat side, which is why I think he is worth taking seriously. So what’s he say about the House?

Overall, the model resolved these changes in favor of Republicans, who added one more seat to their projected total for the second evening in a row. The model’s best guess is that the new Congress will be composed of 203 Democrats and 232 Republicans: a net gain of 53 seats for the G.O.P.

Link

So Silver seems to consider 53 seats the floor for the GOP House pickups. Wow, not to mention the fact that his number has been rising ever so slowly the past few days. As for the Senate, here is some very useful analysis of the differences between the House and Senate races(Link):

It’s looking increasingly likely that Democrats will hold the Senate but not the House, although upsets in either chamber remain possible.

In recent days, I’ve heard a lot of speculation about why this is so. Common answers are that the personalities of the candidates matter more in the Senate (this is possibly true: partisan crossover is about 15 percent in Senate races, versus about 10 percent in the House, which might indicate that voters scrutinize the candidates more carefully), that the G.O.P. has a comparatively weaker set of candidates in the Senate (I think this is actually much more debatable than it seems), or some combination thereof.

These explanations are really missing the boat. Sometimes, the reason for something is so obvious that it becomes easy to miss; this may be one of those times.

The reason that Democrats are most likely to hold the Senate but not the House — the necessary and sufficient reason — is because only one-third of the Senate is up for re-election every two years. If the whole Senate were up for re-election next week, Democrats would lose it and lose it badly.

***

If the entire Senate were up for re-election in this political climate, the Republicans would be favored to earn a filibuster-proof majority, and might even earn a veto-proof majority!....

By comparison, in the House, where everyone is up for re-election every two years, Republicans appear most likely to win something like 53 percent of available seats. The fraction could conceivably approach 60 percent if they have a really terrific night, or it could be a bit below 50 if the Democrats overperform their polls and hold the House. But the Republicans almost without doubt will win a higher fraction of the available Senate seats (and probably also the available governors’ seats, although that could be a lot closer) than they will in the House.

And he is honest enough to point out that there is a candidate quality-control problem on both sides of the aisle:

My hunch is that Shelley Berkely would probably be crushing Ms. Angle in Nevada were she on the ballot in place of Mr. Reid; Lisa Madigan would probably have a clear lead over Mark Kirk in Illinois; there are even states like Arizona — where John McCain’s approval ratings are actually quite poor — in which an absolutely top-tier Democratic nominee might have made a competitive race. And meanwhile, the Republicans have some strong candidates, including both establishment choices like Rob Portman in Ohio and John Hoeven in North Dakota, and antiestablishment ones like Marco Rubio in Florida (a Tea Partier), and probably even Ron Johnson in Wisconsin (another Tea Partier), who has run a really smart campaign, although he’s not quite out of the woods yet against the incumbent, Russ Feingold.

To sum up, there is precious little good news for the Democrats. They are on track to lose the House, scads of Senate seats, and their Senate majority leader. (Even pre-programming some voting machines in Nevada isn’t likely to save Harry Reid. :whistle: ) The notion that the Tea Party has handicapped the GOP is belied by the facts, which Silver’s liberal colleagues would do well (at least for the sake of their intellectual integrity) to stop ignoring.

[WuDrWu]

The main stream media seems hell bent on cherry picking a radical where they can find 'em and doing everything possible to paint the Tea Party into an extremist corner.

The fact of the matter is the VAST majority of the Tea Party members are talking about fiscal responsibility and that's about it.

We just may find out in another 2-6 years that the Tea Party was way out in front on repairing the economic woes that are currently troubling our country. I wonder what the MSM would say then?

[RoyalShock]

If anyone even dare mention eliminating a federal department (Edu, Energy, etc.) or phasing out a federal program (Soc. Sec.), they will get labeled a radical extremist be the left and moderates.

It's standard, textbook political fear-mongering. So far, those are the only tactics that appear to be being used against Angle and O'Donnell.

[Maggie]

Royal is right; but while the attempt to make Angle and O’Donnell out to be loony might work at the margins (if I only watched MSNBC I would get the impression that the Delaware race is the closest and most important in the Country) – it is not going to have an impact nationally. Obama has managed to lose his own standing, take his party down with him, and convince core Democratic constituencies to vote Republican. And it took him only two years.

I had a phone conversation yesterday with a long-time friend who is intelligent, well informed, and a life-long Democrat. In the course of our conversation I asked for his reaction to what the president said to a Latino audience about we’re going to “punish our enemies”, etc. etc. Given how out of sync the president’s words have been, compared with his high-minded campaign rhetoric, I asked my friend, “Help me to decode Obama.” I wanted to hear his perspective as someone who had invested great hopes in the President.

His response was arresting: “He’s ruthless.” My friend proceeded to tell me that Obama should be understood in the context of the Chicago Way. Is he correct? I don’t know. But the exchange was revealing on several levels. First, my friend’s disenchantment with the president is nearly off the charts. He told me he was as disappointed in Obama as he has ever been in a politician, to the point that on Tuesday he’s going to vote for almost a straight Republican ticket. Many more voters will undergo this same reversal of preferences come Tuesday, which is one reason why it will be a brutal night for the Democrats.

Second, Obama’s rhetoric - using the word “enemy” to describe members of the opposition party - has become nearly unhinged. For Obama, and the Democrats have been following along with this notion, there are, it seems, no honest or honorable critics; they are all dishonest, dishonorable, operating in bad faith, and now, apparently, out-and-out enemies. Mr. Obama’s rhetoric is more scorching toward Republicans than it is toward Ahmadinejad or the Dear Leader languishing in North Korea.

This “enemies” quote is simply the latest in a massive and increasingly wearisome smear campaign aimed at Obama’s critics (I am not going to go through the laundry list). As Democrats reach the last stretch of this campaign, invective is almost all they have to offer. And as the magnitude of the impending defeat on Tuesday sinks in, Obama is becoming more brittle, more small-minded, and more mean-spirited.

What makes this stand out all the more, of course, is that Obama is the man whose campaign, at its very core, was the antithesis to these sorts of attacks - and this contrast is not sitting well with people.

The President likes to quote Scripture, when it suits him. His staff should remind him that the Scriptures mention something along the lines of by your fruits ye will be known. That is precisely President Obama’s problem. I have never witnessed anything like this in my life; but maybe Nixon’s meltdown might come close.

[Maggie]

This is worth the read – Nate Silver at 538 give five reasons the GOP could outperform expectations, believe it or not:

1. Downballot and cross-ballot effects. Republicans are poised to win somewhere from 22 to 28 of the 37 United States Senate races on the ballot. There are also 37 races for governor; the picture there is a bit murkier, but Republicans will almost certainly win a clear majority, and could conceivably win as many as about 30.

With a few exceptions, governor and Senate races are higher profile than races for the House. They’re what get people in the door. Once a voter is in her polling place, however, he or she is usually going to vote the rest of the ballot.

Say a Republican-leaning independent turns out in La Crosse, Wis., to vote for Ron Johnson for Senate and Scott Walker for Governor (both candidates are likely to win). She hasn’t thought much about the House race there, which is between the incumbent Democrat Ron Kind and the Republican Dan Kapanke. If a pollster had asked her who she was going to vote for, she would probably say she was undecided.

It’s going to be a lot more natural for her to vote for Mr. Kapanke, however, the Republican, after having voted Republican at the top of the ticket.

Arguably, you can already see some of these effects in the polling. In New Mexico, for instance, the Republican Susana Martinez has run a very strong campaign for governor and seems likely to win. Sunday morning’s Albuquerque Journal poll, in addition to showing Ms. Martinez ahead, also has Republicans gaining ground in key House races in the state’s 1st and 2nd congressional districts. Perhaps these are enthusiastic supporters of Ms. Martinez who are now coming along for the ride on the rest of the ballot.

Likewise, in Iowa, The Des Moines Register poll, in which the Republicans Chuck Grassley and Terry Branstad have a clear lead in the races for Senate and governor, suggests that Republican candidates for the House are also strongly positioned, although they did not break out results for individual districts.

These effects, of course, would be localized ones by definition. They might tend to help Republicans in states like Iowa, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, where they are doing well at the top of the ticket. But it could hurt them in a couple of places like California and New York where the opposite is true.

2. Unlikely voters voted — and they voted Republican! Almost all pollsters apply likely voter models of some kind, which estimate how likely a respondent is to vote based on their degree of interest in the election, their voting history, and in some cases, their knowledge of things like where their polling place is. On average, these models show Republican candidates performing about 6 points ahead of their standing among all registered voters in these surveys.

Most of the people whom the models deem to be “unlikely voters” are Democrats, who appear to be less charged up about this election than Republicans, or who have more scattered voting histories.

But there could also be a group of Republican-leaning voters who are cast aside by these models: specifically, those who identify themselves with the Tea Party. While we’re still struggling to get a handle on exactly what types of voters affiliate themselves with the Tea Party, some group of them are folks who are dissatisfied with “politics as usual” and may until recently have been disengaged from electoral politics entirely. They might not have voted in 2006 or 2008, and perhaps also not in 2004 and 2000; a few might even be people who cast their last ballot for Ross Perot in 1992 or 1996, or who have never voted at all.

These people may also be deemed “unlikely voters” by the models, especially those that emphasize past voting history rather than enthusiasm. But other types of likely voter models make different assumptions: SurveyUSA, for instance, describes voters like these as “uniquely motivated” and makes some accommodation for them; they’ve shown much better results for Republicans this cycle than most other pollsters.

If these “uniquely motivated” Republicans turn out, but Democratic “unlikely voters” do not, Republican gains could be pretty extraordinary — especially for Tea Party-backed candidates.

3. The incumbent rule, or something like it, makes a comeback. The incumbent rule — the notion that undecided voters tend to break against the incumbent — is something that I’ve spent a lot of time debunking. There isn’t really any evidence that it’s been true in recent elections (the period I’ve studied in detail covers 1998 through 2008). Undecided voters in these elections were about as likely to vote for incumbents as challengers.

So, to cite the incumbent rule as a point of fact as wrong. As a theory, however — particularly one that applies to this election and not necessarily to others — perhaps it will turn out to have some legs. Stu Rothenberg, for instance, argues that the incumbent rule is “relevant only for wave elections,” of which this will presumably be one.

I’m still not completely convinced. Among other things, we don’t know that an election is a wave until it actually happens — 1998, for instance, which looked in advance of the election as though it might be a mini-wave for the G.O.P., turned out to completely fizzle. Arguments that this election is a wave, and therefore we can expect such-and-such to happen, tend to put the cart before the horse.

Still, it doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me that in an election in which both Democrats and incumbents are especially unpopular, undecided voters could tend to break against incumbent Democrats — particularly if the reason they were undecided is because they did not know very much about the candidates (something that will apply more to House elections than races for Senate or governor).

Or, forget about whether the Democrat is an incumbent or not — that may be something of a distraction. Undecided voters could simply break against Democrats period, given Democrats’ poor standing on the generic ballot, whether the Democrat is an incumbent, a challenger, or is competing for an open seat. While, technically, this would not be a manifestation of the “incumbent rule” (although it would probably be misinterpreted as such) it would be bad news for Democrats just the same.

4. The Scott Brown effect. Here is a little pet theory of mine. Say that you’re a fairly conservative Republican in Massachusetts. Your senators have been John Kerry and Ted Kennedy for many, many years. Your representative to the House is a Democrat. Your governor is a Democrat. Your state always votes Democrat for President. You feel compelled to vote out of patriotic duty, and you usually do. But deep down, you’re resigned to the fact that your vote won’t really make any difference, and the candidates you want to win never will. And to be honest, you’ve got a little bit of pent-up frustration about this.

Then Scott Brown comes along. He’s a good candidate. The Democrat, Martha Coakley, is a not-so-good candidate. It’s a weird election, a special election, in which turnout could be low — Scott Brown could actually win!

Do you think you’re not going to be — to borrow SurveyUSA’s term — “uniquely motivated” to vote for Scott Brown? And not just that, but also to campaign for Scott Brown, to donate to Scott Brown, and to tell all your friends to vote for Scott Brown, too?

Of course you’re going to be motivated: it might be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to send a Republican to Washington.

I can offer only anecdotal evidence for this, like the performance of Mr. Brown in January, or the performance of Barack Obama in Indiana in 2008, or the performance of some Democrats who won races for the Congress in some ordinarily very Republican-leaning areas in 2006. But if a party nominates a competitive candidate in a place where it hasn’t been competitive in a long while, it might get every last one of its voters to turn out — they’ll just come out of the woodwork. Not only that, but also the other party’s voters might be complacent, and the turnout operations won’t be as sophisticated as they might be in a district where they had to run competitive elections year after year.

If Republicans knock off a few Democrats in some very Democratic-leaning areas, this could be a big part of the reason why.

5. Likely voter models could be calibrated to the 2006 and 2008 elections, which were unusually good for Democrats. In addition to wrongly excluding some Republican “unlikely voters” (see Point No. 2), it’s also conceivable that some likely voter models based on past voting histories are overrating the propensity of Democrats to vote. The reason could be that some of them are based on past voting history, and a common question is whether the voter had participated in the last two elections.

But the last two elections — 2006 and 2008 — were good ones for Democrats, one in which there was little if any “enthusiasm gap,” or it may even have favored Democrats. This is, in fact, quite atypical: Republicans usually do have a turnout advantage, especially in midterm elections. Their demographics are older and whiter, and whites aged 50 and up are the most reliable voters. If likely voter models are benchmarked to 2006 and 2008 patterns, therefore, they could underestimate the turnout gap, giving too much credit to Democrats who voted in 2006 or 2008 but who don’t ordinarily. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics makes a nice version of this argument.

* * *
You might find these arguments extraordinarily persuasive, extraordinarily unconvincing or somewhere in between. I think some are better than others, and I don’t really mean to “endorse” them.

What we know, however, is that polls can sometimes miss pretty badly in either direction. Often, this is attributed to voters having made up (or changed) their minds at the last minute — but it’s more likely that the polls were wrong all along. These are some reasons they could be wrong in a way that underestimates how well Republicans will do. There are also, of course, a lot of reasons they could be underestimating Democrats; we’ll cover these in a separate piece.

5 Reasons Republicans Could Do Even Better Than Expected

[WuDrWu]

:good: First time in my life I actually was ahead of the game. I read that yesterday and found it to be very interesting. The dynamics of the "down the ticket" and how you apply results from New York to those in Minnesota will never cease to intrigue me.

I am almost thinking about taking tomorrow off at this point.

[Maggie]

You are going to lose your street cred reading a NYT blog.

The thing is no one has ever seen anything like the currently electoral environment – so it is hard to predict what the outcome might be – even for experienced pollsters. I was watching some CNN coverage last night, intermittently, (as an aside – the size of their election coverage teams seems a bit unwieldy) and it was obvious that no one there had a clue. They did agree, by and large, that the GOP will take the House (not exactly going out on a limb) and probably fall short in the Senate (again, not exactly out on a limb) but they were really arguing about (in between mentioning the Delaware race :roll: ) was why.

We shall see soon enough and get ready for some massive spin.

[InWuWeTrust]

sorry to say, it really doesn't matter what congress looks like. the people are expecting a miracle turnaround.. and neither party will be able to provide it.

[Maggie]

It certainly does matter what the make-up of Congress will be after this election – it is very important.

But if you are saying that people should temper their expectations about what can be accomplished over the next two years, I would agree with you. There will be no miracles – and if that is the baseline standard set by the “people”, then they will be disappointed.

The GOP should not commit the same mistake that the Democrats did – hubris/nemeses know no party affiliation.

[SB Shock]

You are going to lose your street cred reading a NYT blog.

The thing is no one has ever seen anything like the currently electoral environment – so it is hard to predict what the outcome might be – even for experienced pollsters. I was watching some CNN coverage last night, intermittently, (as an aside – the size of their election coverage teams seems a bit unwieldy) and it was obvious that no one there had a clue. They did agree, by and large, that the GOP will take the House (not exactly going out on a limb) and probably fall short in the Senate (again, not exactly out on a limb) but they were really arguing about (in between mentioning the Delaware race :roll: ) was why.

We shall see soon enough and get ready for some massive spin.

Mate silver is a liberal but he doesn't allow that affect his the credibility of his data analysis. He presents some unique data.

[Maggie]

You are going to lose your street cred reading a NYT blog.

The thing is no one has ever seen anything like the currently electoral environment – so it is hard to predict what the outcome might be – even for experienced pollsters. I was watching some CNN coverage last night, intermittently, (as an aside – the size of their election coverage teams seems a bit unwieldy) and it was obvious that no one there had a clue. They did agree, by and large, that the GOP will take the House (not exactly going out on a limb) and probably fall short in the Senate (again, not exactly out on a limb) but they were really arguing about (in between mentioning the Delaware race :roll: ) was why.

We shall see soon enough and get ready for some massive spin.

Mate silver is a liberal but he doesn't allow that affect his the credibility of his data analysis. He presents some unique data.

I was only teasing Doc.

You are absolutely, right - Silver gets high marks in my book – as I wrote above he is not unbiased, and doesn’t claim to be, but he does strive to be intellectually honest. Therefore, I like his blog and value his opinion – besides it can only serve to make mine better.

[WuDrWu]

I was only teasing Doc.

And I appreciate that.

Therefore, I like his blog and value his opinion – besides it can only serve to make mine better.

My path to a better opinion is pocked with many more potholes and the journey will be far greater in distance, but that too is my goal. I don't seek talking points to win the argument, I seek to better understand the discussion so that I can somehow, perhaps, be engaged in the solution.

[Maggie]

I am just always looking to learn and you can’t do that if you unless you listen to and seriously consider opinions that exist outside your own ideological bubble. Which means you shouldn’t simply ignore bad facts, an outcome that may not jive with your world view or when someone pokes legitimate holes in some beloved theory you dreamed up or agree with - you should not get bent out of shape. What I meant by writing that people like Silver make my arguments “better” is that he may come at an issue from an angle I have not thought of causing me to reconsider what I think about that issue. The problem is the Silvers of the world are rare birds on the Left nowadays – which is a shame.

“Talking points” don’t win arguments and they certainly don’t persuade often – which is sort of the point, right? Besides, I am in enemy - to borrow a word from the President – territory. So I couldn’t get by, in any political discussion, just on talking points even if I wanted to.

As an aside and to be fair, not all “talking points” are equal. Some of them become “talking points” because…well they make a very good point.

[WuDrWu]

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/15084

I don't know the author, but I assume an extremely slanted viewpoint.

Nevertheless, the math of his theory, to me, is akin to some kind of political viagra 24 hours out.

[Maggie]

Any predictions?