Crimson847 wrote:Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:If they win by 9 points, I think that'd be more than enough to take the House, though not by a landslide. They only need in the realm of 20-something seats, iirc.
If.
Generic ballot polls have a margin of error of about
+/- 5 percentage points according to 538. So an advantage of 9 percent really means if the election were held today, we can be highly confident that Democrats would win the popular vote by a margin between 4 and 14 percent. Meanwhile, the GOP's various districting advantages mean that Democrats need to win the popular vote by at least 6-7 percent to be confident of winning the House, so a margin of 4-5 percent would probably mean the GOP holding on by the skin of its teeth.
In other words, 9 percent on the generic ballot makes the Democrats highly likely to win the House, but it means there are still some plausible scenarios where they fall short. That's the reason why the decline since December is significant--when the Democrats had a 12-point advantage, that meant high confidence of a result between 7 and 17 percent, and
any result in that range would mean the Democrats take the House. So at that point folks like us could more or less take it easy, and now not so much.
I should also point out that turnout in Alabama and this race were about at the levels you'd expect from a typical midterm--if not on the Republican side, and that's why results have been so lopsided. I don't really know what more the GOP can do.
Well, I'd certainly suggest
praying to every God ever conceived of that there isn't a recession before November, or the GOP's House caucus will be emptier than a NAMBLA daycare center.
Oh, I guess I misread your point, I thought you assumed a 9 point victory.
And yeah, if there's a recession before November, that'll probably be enough for the GOP to lose 130 seats in the House, eight seats in the Senate, and their will to live.
Even then, I don't know how much economy the GOP has to run on, in that sense. The economy's improved markedly if you're cashing out your 401k/IRA tomorrow, are trading on Wall Street, are filthy rich, or are getting a bonus at the end of the year (which is far less better than upping wages), but otherwise things are probably the same for you as they were pre-Trump. I read a lot of reporting from Pennsylvania about how the GOP realized that the tax plan wasn't really selling, and it's probably because it was a drop in the bucket for a lot of people (Certainly was for me).
It always frustrates me listening to reporters and journalists talk endlessly about how the GOP has a selling point that the economy is kicking ass when really, it's just the DOW that's kicking ass, which it was already before Trump. Sure, the economy suddenly looked a million times better to GOP voters when a Republican was in charge (Seriously, partisan opinions on the economy changed almost overnight), but the GOP already had those voters and I don't know that they've done enough on the economy to convince people who may be moderate or independent. I guess what I'm saying is I wonder if the Midwest is going to be quite the bastion Republicans thought it was.
cmsellers wrote:Whoever wins the runoff, it looks like the nominee will be a fairly orthodox liberal Democrat who doesn't compromise on any issues. And while Doug Jones was that and won, Roger Williams is not Roy Moore.
I don't know that I'd say Doug Jones was that. Sure, he was out of sync on abortion, but he's also a pretty Joe Manchin type in the way that he votes. I think it's more like...he's culturally liberal but quiet about it, and open to compromise.