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The Midterm Crystal Ball

I note with some interest, Nate Silver [1];

The Senate map is really tough for Democrats, with 26 Democratic seats in play next year (including a newly opened seat in Minnesota after Al Franken announced his intention to retire) as compared to just eight Republican ones. Moreover, five of the Democratic-held seats — the ones in West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Indiana — are in states that President Trump won by 18 percentage points or more.

Add to those numbers the idea that the Democrats usually don’t do so well in off term elections… The S JW crowd, and the voters who tend to be recipients of governmental largesse (usually, one in the same) and so on generally don’t show up unless it’s a presidential election.

Add all this up, and I do believe we can easily write off the Democrat party’s chances of taking the senate in the midterms regardless of what happens between now and then.

The house, meanwhile seems a bit more difficult to predict. Silver seems to feel that the Democrats could conceivably take 35 seats. But that seems to me a stretch. Possibly 20 would be more likely and that assumes that the situation with the Democrat Party is a whole remains stable… Which is at best a pipe dream, particularly if that memo we’ve been hearing so much about becomes public.

And as regards to that, I am one of the people that have sent memoranda to the White House urging the President to read that document during his State of the Union Address.