Alternate headline: “Eeyorish blogger finally feels like he can breathe again.”
Republicans usually score higher with likely voters. But the election is still more than seven weeks away. Counting only likely voters at this point “screens out Democratic groups that you know are going to be there at the end,” says the GOP consultant. “There are unions and African-Americans who typically get their information late, from leadership or the pulpit.”…
As they look at the polls, some Republicans remember the painful near-death experience of 1998. In that year of scandal and partisan warfare, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted the GOP would pick up as many as 40 seats in midterm voting. That’s what some of the likely-voter surveys seemed to indicate. But when election day came around, the GOP lost five seats, clinging to power by the barest of margins. A few days later, Gingrich, the architect of the party’s smashing 1994 victory, resigned…
Some of the talk downplaying the GOP lead may be counterspin to ensure Republicans don’t become overconfident. “We don’t want to cause our voters to get lax and think we’ve got it,” says the member of the election team. But Republicans are also genuinely concerned about peaking too soon. “The notion of a wave that is already large and is going to build the next six or seven weeks into a massive Republican triumph is not, I think, accurate,” says Weber.
Part of what they’re doing here, of course, is managing expectations. So assured is a big GOP wave that the media will spin anything short of 1994 numbers as a disappointment to some greater or lesser extent. Why help them by predicting a 60-seat pick-up — even if it is, in fact, possible? Still, I think the strategists are on the level here in arguing that a really, really big gain is unlikely. Ed and I made our official predictions for Townhall magazine a few days ago, and while I won’t give his away (except to say that, unsurprisingly, it’s considerably more optimistic than mine), I maxed out at about 42 or 43 seats in the House. That’s enough to take back control — even I’m not that eeyorish — but I keep coming back to polls like this. As disgusted as the public is with the state of the economy and The One’s agenda, how do you gain 60 seats when your party’s approval rating is 32 percent? In spite of everything, the GOP still scores a point lower than Democrats. Surely that’s going to preserve a few vulnerable yet entrenched Democratic incumbents in tight races. Maybe not enough to save the House for them, but enough to keep this from being a complete wipeout. Plus, the Clinton vets are right about differences between this year and ’94. The Dems see this wave coming from a mile away and can act to limit the damage by doing triage on hopeless races. Says Paul Begala, “Now, you can survive a tsunami. … And here’s how: you build an ark.” That’s all they’re trying to do now — build an ark and simply survive.
Speaking of which, Nate Silver’s out with a new statistical analysis showing the GOP with a 67 percent chance of taking back the House and an overall gain, on average, of 45 seats. If that happens, it can and will be spun as a modest disappointment, but who cares? Boehner will be crying all the way to the Speaker’s chair. Eeyorish exit quotation from Haley Barbour: “A month is a light year in politics. And with today’s news cycle, or news cycles every day, the time changes so much faster than it ever has before.” Police those dreams!
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