For all the depressing context - not only in the real world, but even on the rec list - I am rather optimistic about the dem's chances to retain a majority in the house.
Of course, the President has been on fire since Labor Day. The democratic majority in congress manages to pass substantial progressive legislation. Elizabeth Warren has been picked, if not nominated, and that was a clear positive signal towards liberals. On the other hand the Tea Party candidates are at best making fools of themselves, at worst frightening away moderate republican voters. (Feel free to exchange 'best' and 'worst' in the previous sentence). All that is good, but its effect is hard to fathom, and the people may not be very receptive due to the huge unemployment problem and the economical situation more generally.
Still I have reason to believe the effect exists and might well make all the difference in November.
More below the fold.
I'm optimistic because of the polls. What are you raving about? The polls are disastrous!
Please consider Nate Silver's piece entitled House Forecast Update: Embracing the Uncertainty:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes...
Nate isn't too optimistic about the house dem majority's prospects. Right now (or rather, as of sept 17) he computes that the GOP will have 223.4 seats on average when they need only 218 to control the house.
But consider his estimate of the week before that : 225.3.
In other words they 'lost' about 2 seats in 1 week, but that's not my point.
The point is about the generic ballot. Nate Silver explains in the above piece that this drop in 2 seats corresponds with a change in the generic ballot advantage; when they were at 225,3, Nate estimates the GOP had an advantage of 8%, and he considers that the subsequent loss of 2 virtual seats was associated with a decrease of 0.5% in their generic ballot advantage.
So my point is that the output in terms of number of seats is very strongly dependent on the generic ballot gap; if we extrapolate lineary,
a 1% gain in the generic ballot means a gain of about 4 seats.
Now consider also that the majority in the House is at 218. In other words, the dems are deemed to be about 7 seats away from the majority.
In other words again, following this line of reasoning, the dems are less than 2% away from the majority.
Of course one must also consider the fact that the generic ballot is
not a very reliable predictor, and more precisely that as we get nearer the elections, it becomes less and less predictive and local polling become more and more predictive. Still it is an objective indication and at the moment, it is the best we have.
Now consider the way the generic ballot has been evolving on pollster:
http://www.pollster.com/...
(sorry, I don't know how to embed these properly). If like me you suspect
Rassmussen of manipulating opinion, you can ask pollster to discard Rass's polls, the result will be even more spectacular).
Since the beginning of september, the generic ballot gap is diminishing extremely fast, it looks like it's closing. And indeed several recent polls give the dems an advantage. So my guess is that right now, the gap is no longer at 7.5, and probably more like 4 or 5 if not less.
In other words I think we have objective evidence that the President's and the majority's efforts are working.
Of course things can still change between now and November... but if things carry on this way, there is absolutely no reason for a democrat to be defeatist.
Let's not be over optimistic though, we're talking about probabilities here. Right now Nate estimates that the dems have 1/3 chances of retaining the house majority. If, as I think, the generic ballot gap closes by 2%, they will have 1/2 chance of retaining it. If it reduces further, they might end up with 2/3. Again, no certainty here, but certainly a change in the narrative - and that helps.