In last week’s New York Post, Michael Barone, the conservative pundit, who fewer & fewer gullible people still consider a political analyst, proclaims that the Democrats will lose the Congress this November.
Barone writes:
Democratic spin doctors have set out how their side is going to hold on to a majority in the House. They'll capture four at-risk Republican seats, hold half of the next 30 or so Democratic at-risk seats, and avoid significant losses on target seats lower on the list.
That's one plausible scenario. The shift of opinion away from Democrats, so evident in the polls, could turn out to be illusory. The widely held assumption that Republicans will turn out in greater numbers than Democrats could prove wrong.
Democratic candidates do indeed have a money advantage in many close races, and their campaign committee has more cash than its Republican counterpart.
All that said, this Democratic spin sounds a lot like the Republican spin back in the 2006 cycle. If the numbers don't change too much from 2004, Republicans said then, we can hold on.
Maybe the reason Barone is so down on pundits falling for partisan spin is that he himself recycled that Republican spin in 2006.
Here’s what he wrote less than two weeks before Election Day that year:
http://politics.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/barone/2006/10/24/the-house-elections
My predictions would produce an almost evenly divided House: 219 Democrats, a net gain of 16, and 216 Republicans.
My predictions also suggest, correctly, that I do not see this, at least yet, as a "wave" election. In a "wave" election, the winning party—Democrats in 1974, Republicans in 1994—win about half the districts they seriously contest, while the losing party wins about 10 percent of those they seriously contest (since the Republicans seem to be seriously contesting only five seats, this would give them at best one offsetting gain). If you count all these 45 Republican seats as seriously contested, this would mean that Democrats would gain only 36 percent of them. A "wave" result, which some are forecasting, would give Democrats a net gain of 22 or 23 seats, enough for a 225-210 or 226-209 majority.
One reason I do not see this election as a "wave" is that I think Republicans have a superior turnout program. The samples in most recent polls show a Democratic advantage in party identification—quite different from the 2004 exit poll that showed party identification at 37 percent Republican and 37 percent Democratic. I think there probably has been some shift in party ID since November 2004, but I doubt that it's as great as those polls suggest. In any case, polls are not good at predicting turnout. Some but not all polls show Democrats to be more "interested" or "certain to vote" or "motivated." But responses to those questions have not done a good job at projecting turnout in the past, including November 2004. .
In case you don’t recall, the Democrats actually gained 33 seats that year!