Two Weeks Out -- Nine Reasons Why Democrats Will Keep Control of the House

[Joanne98]

With two weeks to go in the 2010 mid-term elections there are a number of good reasons to believe -- contrary to most conventional wisdom -- that Democrats will still control the House once the smoke clears from the electoral battlefield.

For the last several years Nate Silver, of fivethirtyeight.com, now owned by the New York Times, has become the gold standard for projecting electoral outcomes. For some time, Silver has projected that Democrats would lose control of the House and maintain control of the Senate. Though he quotes an 82% odds that Democrats will continue to control the Senate, he currently gives daunting 73% odds of Republican takeover in the House. He says that the consensus forecast has converged on the loss of 50 Democratic House seats, which would give Republicans enough seats to control the gavel. Not so good, right?

But that's not the end of the story. Silver qualifies his projections with a major caveat. Saturday, he wrote:

However, there is considerable uncertainty in the forecast because of the unusually large number of House seats now in play. A gain of as large as 70-80 seats is not completely out of the question if everything broke right for Republicans. Conversely, if Democrats managed to see a material rebound in their national standing over the final two weeks of the campaign, they could lose as few as 20-30 seats, as relatively few individual districts are certain pickups for Republicans..... In many of the in-play seats the Republican margins that have been used to project a big Republican win are very narrow. Even a subtle shift in the overall political atmosphere over the next two weeks could cause a major shift in outcome.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/two-weeks-out-nine-reason_b_766012.html

[Parker CA]

1. Kick and Rec. Sounds like Nate is doing some serious hedging based on his data. If we VOTE we will

maintain both the House and the Senate.

[LiberalFighter]

3. Anyone that would say that Republicans would win all the races

should be locked away in a looney ward. Each election is different and there are 435 House elections. I believe that there are even some elections that are not going to go Republican even though they are in heavily Republican areas.

[Parker CA]

4. I agree. It's going to be a very interesting election night. I'm optimistic that we'll hold. nt

[bluestateguy]

2. This guy must not be a regular at the Georgetown cocktail parties

He's messing with the cozy Washington consensus.

[BrklynLiberal]

5. ..please....please...please ...please ....I DREAD waking up Nov3 and finding that the repukes are in

control of ANYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!

I did not think I could be more nervous about the future than I was before pres shit-for-brains stole the election again, but I am getting pretty nervous now, thinking about what the repukes can and will do, if they are in control. Look what they have done when they do not even have a majority!!!!!!!

Hopefully, retaining the Dem majorities will give Congress and the White House some backbone for the rest of this administration.

This is an excellent point:

1). The Pew Research Center released a study last week showing that most of the major polls being used this year poll only voters with landlines -- not cell phones. It notes that the increasing reliance of many Americans -- particularly young people -- on cell phones as their only telephone introduces an increasing pro-Republican bias into many polls.

Brings to mind:

[Kdillard]

6. Fingers crossed that he is right.