Right Wing Nut House

Somebody better take that glass of kool aid away from Dean Barnett before he does irreperable damage to the synapses of his brain:

So what’s it all mean? In the tied races, the Republican will win. In the close races, the Republican will win. It adds up to Republicans running the table in the Senate. That’s right – running the table. Montana, Virginia, Missouri, Tennessee, New Jersey, Rhode Island (whoopee), and Maryland will all send or re-send Republicans to the Senate. But wait, there’s more! Michigan will send Sheriff Michael Bouchard to the Senate. And in Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum is in striking distance.

In the House, the same holds true. Republican Joe Negron will take Foley’s seat. New Mexico’s Heather Wilson will return to Congress. So, too, will Connecticut’s Chris Shays. We’ll lose a handful of seats for the individual failures of certain Congressmen (hello, Curt Weldon), but we will retain control of the House.

Okay, I’m officially out on the limb. But I’m comfortable here. The paradigm has shifted. People like Stu Rothenberg are like old generals re-fighting the last war; they’re re-analyzing the last election without realizing that certain key facts on the ground have changed.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Dean Barnett. He’s witty, smart, shrewd, and usually level headed in his analysis. That’s why his pre-election departure from planet earth should be considered cause for alarm - or more likely the product of blogging in close proximity to the most relentlessly optimistic man I have ever seen.

Hugh Hewitt has never lost faith that Tuesday will not see the end of the Republican majority in Congress. That kind of enthusiasm is necessary and vital in any political movement. One might point to it as the major difference between left and right, liberals and conservatives. Especially since they’ve been out of power, there has been little in the way of optimism from the left - even about their own party. Instead, the Democrats have been doing a slow burn for a decade with constant recriminations against one faction or another. The Clintonian Democratic Leadership Council has come in for some scathing criticism for trying to be “Republican lite” in their policy prescriptions - despite the fact that they proved to be the most politically successful Democrats in a generation.

But Dean and Hugh - while I believe wildly off base in their predictions for Tuesday - are two good reasons why the Republicans will not be left out in the political wilderness for long. Positive people will succeed a helluva lot more often than the contrarians, the curmudgeons, the sourpusses, the angry, bitter, relentlessly negative partisans who make up much of the leadership of the Democratic party.

As for throwing some cold water on Dean’s victory party, a couple of quick observations are in order.

A week ago, I couldn’t have imagined that Burns (MT), Steele (MD), Corker (TN), and Allen (VA) would be victorious on Tuesday. Now it appears a distinct possibility. Corker and Steele appear to have tremendous momentum while Kerry’s gaffe may very well have doomed Tester in Montana and McCaskill in Missouri. I am convinced we won’t know the results of the Allen-Webb cage match until at least Wednesday and probably beyond that but given the redness of Virginia, the incumbent may very well squeak by.

But Rhode Island? New Jersey? I think that we’ll find that the GOTV machines in both parties will be working in tip top condition. And, like the redness of Virginia helping Allen, I think the very blue states of New Jersey and Rhode Island will give Menendez and Whitehouse a GOTV edge so that you can bank their wins on Tuesday night.

Along with almost certain losses by Santorum in PA and DeWine in OH, that would mean a net loss for the GOP in the Senate of 3 seats -a testament to the power of incumbency rather than any victory for conservative principles or acknowledgement of Republican competency in running the legislative branch.

In fact, that will be the hallmark of this election even if, as expected, the Democrats take control in the House. The only overarching issue that seems to be on voters minds is Iraq. The left will try to spin their victory as an anti-war mandate when in fact, what the American people want is someone to define victory in a rational way. Americans don’t like to lose wars. But since the Democrats failed to offer any kind of coherent message on Iraq - except that the war has been badly botched - they’ll settle for a party that will force the President to change course.

But where Dean and Hugh and the other Republican Rebeccas of Sunnybrook Farms allow their enthusiasm to get the better of them is in believing that 1) the polls are a crock; and 2) the GOP GOTV machine will carry them through to victory.

I have no doubt the polls are skewed toward Democrats; in some cases badly. But polls are scientific endeavors and to dismiss their findings so cavalierly flies in the face of rationality. Many of the concerns expressed by Dean in his article are addressed in the statistical model used by the pollster. That’s why polls are much, much more than simply counting noses.

As for the GOP’s GOTV edge, this excellent article in The Hill magazine shows why Republicans who are hanging their hopes on turnout may end up being hugely disappointed:

How likely is a 20 percent increase in turnout based on a GOTV effort? The best serious academic estimate is that all the GOTV work in the presidential campaign of 2004 increased turnout not by 20 percent, but by about 3 percent.

Experiments on turnout by Alan Gerber and Donald Green suggest that the most effective means of increasing turnout raise it by less than 10 percent — and that’s for people who get canvassed in person. None of this is to suggest that GOTV efforts are not valuable. When 2000 or 200 votes decide an election there is no question that GOTV efforts can make all the difference in the world. But again, that is simply not the case that is being argued by GOP operatives.

Can’t micro-targeting help them achieve spectacular successes? Anyone who has ever modeled data knows there is much more salesmanship than science in Republican claims about these efforts. Our firm and others on the Democratic side have been using these models for half a dozen years or more and we know they can make our efforts much more efficient; expand our GOTV and persuasion universes; and provide message guidance. So when races are otherwise marginal, the lift models provide can make all the difference between winning and losing. But no model is going to turn what would otherwise be a 5-point loss into a victory.

There are about 20 Republican incumbents or open Republican held seats where candidates are losing by 5 points or more according to RealClear Politics. Blumenthal’s Pollster.Com has even more GOP seats at risk. If, as Mellman suggests in the article, GOTV efforts will only affect many of these races at the margins, it seems virtually certain that the combination of scandal and voter dissatisfaction will mean a Democratic takeover the House.

My own estimate (more on my methodology on Monday) is that the GOP will lose between 18-23 seats. The low end of that estimate is if the GOP can pull out some tough races here in the Midwest, specifically in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. But no amount of enthusiasm will help the GOP in the wild blue states of the northeast. In fact, New York and Connecticut are shaping up to be GOP disaster areas on Tuesday night with Pennsyvania not far behind. It’s hard to see how GOTV efforts will have much of an effect in many of those races.

So I would say to Dean, Hugh, and the rest of you who have been so up-beat and enthusiastic, no matter what happens on Tuesday, your attitude will almost certainly mean that the GOP wil retake the House in 2008 - all things considered. By then the American people will have tired of the never ending witch hunts carried out by Democrats in Congress against a Republican Administration and perhaps, a chastened and reformed GOP will give the voters a reason to trust them again.

UPDATE

Don’t miss AJ Strata’s superior piece on the elections. Nice round up and some good points about predictions.