Navel gazing about November

Navel gazing about November

by digby

Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium thinks the Democrats are going to hold the Senate:


In most cases, added assumptions (i.e. special sauce) have led the media organizations to different win probabilities — which I currently believe are wrong....The major media organizations (NYT, WaPo, 538)...all use prior conditions like incumbency, candidate experience, funding, and the generic Congressional ballot to influence their win probabilities — and opinion polls.

....Longtime readers of PEC will not be surprised to know that I think the media organizations are making a mistake. It is nearly Labor Day. By now, we have tons of polling data. Even the stalest poll is a more direct measurement of opinion than an indirect fundamentals-based measure. I demonstrated this point in 2012, when I used polls only to forecast the Presidency and all close Senate races. That year I made no errors in Senate seats, including Montana (Jon Tester) and North Dakota (Heidi Heitkamp), which FiveThirtyEight got wrong.

Kevin Drum wrote about thisand said that all his instincts say this is wrong and that the Republicans are going to take over. I have to say my instincts are saying the opposite. I'd guess the Democrats will lose a couple of seats overall (and might pick at least one up in Georgia or Kentucky) but will keep control.

But here's why my instincts might be off: I don't care that much. It's almost inevitable that if the Democrats lose the Senate they will get it back in 2 years when a ton of seats are up that favor them. I don't see that the GOP taking over will alter the status quo much. I recognize that a lot of people are nervous about Obama caving to GOP demands, but honestly, they're so nuts at this point that I really doubt it. It's not as if they're going to craft elegant, sophisticated legislation that's designed to entice Obama to walk the tightrope that's holding the Democratic coalition together. They are juvenile bomb throwers who will make it easy for Obama to just say no.

And if anyone's worried about Supreme Court Justices, let's just recognize that it's highly unlikely Obama will get to appoint any more of them --- and if he does, it's unlikely they'll be confirmed. If one of the Justices retires in the next two years I'm fairly sure they'll keep the seat vacant until the next president takes office.

Obviously, I don't think it will be a good thing for Republicans to win the Senate. But I'm not fretting about it. They've already shown they are perfectly capable of obstructing the Democratic agenda from one House of congress. A Senate majority is just gilding the lily.


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