In case you’re in a great mood — bluebirds chirping on your shoulder, etc. — and were looking for something to completely bum you out, this chart from Nate Silver’s
FiveThirtyEight.com showing the sheer volume of seats that the GOP appears set to pick up on Nov. 2 ought to do the trick.
All those blue squares represent vulnerable Dem House seats that will flip to red if the GOP wins in those districts. The GOP has about 179 seats now. They need at least 218 to take the House, which means they must take at least 39 of the 76 blue squares (or fewer if they retain a couple of the red squares) to get the majority.
Is a turnaround for the Democrats possible? Yes, and here’s why: As unpopular as the Democrats are right now, voters still revile their Republican counterparts in Congress.
For example the CBS poll last week is representative. It found that while approval/disapproval of the Dems was a weak 30 percent /50 percent, the approval/disapproval of Republicans was in the toilet — 20/68.
Much has been made about the generic Congressional polls — the media narrative insists that Republicans are leading, while, in fact, most results show exact ties or one or the other party leading within the margin of error. But the fact that over two-thirds of voters disapprove of the Republicans in Congress means that to describe the GOP’s support as “soft” would be the understatement of the year.
But wait, there’s more. The same poll found, as others have, that a great swathe of Independent voters — 33 percent in the CBS survey — have not yet made up their minds.
In In our two-party, the choice before voters is basically binary. When the party in power falls out of favor, voters usually fall in love with the party out of power. That’s what happened before the GOP won control of Congress in 1994, and it’s what happened when the Democrats took Congress back in 2008.
What is different here is that the voters have not fallen in love with the Republicans. Quite the opposite, in fact. While voters are unhappy with the Dems, the Republicans have not yet made the sale, which means that in many, maybe most, of these House races, voters could still be persuaded to vote for their incumbent representative.
In a post on Saturday titled “Holding Pattern in House Forecast,” Silver said the chart is in a holding pattern right now — although the latest updated bumped up the likelihood of a GOP takeover of the House form 62 percent last week to 65 percent now — while polls are being completed and computed in the districts.
As results from local polls come in, along with other facts, this chart will start change and — if we’re lucky — the blue squares will start to disappear as incumbent Democrats improve their standing with voters back home.
(To track the changes, you’ll want to bookmark Silver’s site at fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com.)
