The Home Stretch Begins

We're past Labor Day, the designated kickoff date for the general election campaign, and it's time to revive my heralded and much beloved number-crunching posts as the races ratchet into high gear.

But first, here are a couple of bonus links. The first to another of Jim Geraghty's citations of the chronic, stubborn pro-Donk polling bias, this time from the 2004 campaign on both the congrssional and presidential level. Please bear this in mind as the next two months unfold.

Also remember candid comments from unnamed Dem consultants, of which one can understand why they don't attach their names to them:

With polling numbers in the Maryland Senate Democrat primary now showing that relative outsider, former congressman and former head of the NAACP Kweisi Mfume is leading Representative Ben Cardin in some polls above the margin of error, national Democrats are growing progressively pessimistic that they will make serious gains in the November elections.

[Enemy] media outlets have been attempting over the past few weeks to slowly let the air out of a balloon they themselves filled with their abundant hot air about Democratic momentum moving toward a potential retaking of both houses of Congress.

"We probably started that drumbeat too early and we're losing a lot of that momentum," says a Democratic political strategist. "You could blame a lot of things, Howard Dean, and some of our more established candidates, but I would blame the Lieberman/Lamont race and the blogosphere. Things just move too fast nowadays."

The Connecticut Democrat Senate primary put a national spotlight on the inner-workings of the Democrat Party and they weren't pretty. Voters saw a far-left wing of the party with remarkable sway over a mainstream majority with little interest in a fight. "More important, in most primaries, is that 10-15% of undecided voters have already vented about Iraq," says another Democrat consultant. "The problem is, those voters wanted to express their dissatisfaction with Iraq, but they also want a solution. Pulling out isn't the solution many of them want. They aren't going to be voting for an anti-war candidate. I think my party has overshot its position."

The pattern repeats itself yet again: The left-wing echo chamber convinces its inmates of their own galloping triumphalism; they start counting their chickens before they hatch (or, in this case, their seats before they're won); public candidacies for majority leadership slots and committee chairs are prematurely proclaimed; they celebrate unwon victories too soon, putting on display once more their raving, treacherous extremism just as the public is starting to pay attention (i.e. the Lamont lament); and now the polling numbers, biased as they are, are moving in the GOP's direction.

Here's how I currently see things, first on the Senate side (pickups italicized):

LIKELY GOP: Kyl (AZ), Ensign (NV), Corker (TN)

LEANING GOP: Kean, Jr. (NJ), Allen (VA)

TOSSUPS: Lieberman-Lamont (CT), Talent-McCaskill (MO), Burns-Tester (MT), Chafee/Laffey-Whitehouse (RI)

LEANING DEM: Cardin/Mfume (MD), Stabenow (MI), Klobuchar (MN), Brown (OH), Casey (PA), Cantwell (WA)

LIKELY DEM: Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Hillary! (NY), Sanders (VT), Byrd (WV)

Looking at current trends across this board, the worst-case scenario would have Burns and Chafee going down, yielding a three-seat Donk pickup but leaving the GOP still in the majority by a 52-48 margin. The optimistic picture would see Burns and Chafee surviving, Michael Steele winning in Maryland, and the GOP getting a split between DeWine and Santorum, producing a one-seat GOP pickup and a slightly enlarged 56-44 edge.

Split that difference - which I did by using the rule of thumb that "ties go to the champion" - and you get a net one-seat Republican loss and a 54-46 upper chamber for the 110th Congress.

Getting into this much detail on the House side is more than I have time for - who do I look like, Jay Cost? - but based upon Congressional Quarterly analyses, and "forcing" their twelve tossups according to whether Bush or Kerry carried each tossup district in 2004, I get a net GOP loss of five seats and a 227-208 Republican advantage.

I learned a decade ago, and have been proclaiming ever since, that I will never again let wishful thinking contaminate my own political analysis. I will go strictly by the numbers. And the numbers, as the horses leave the gate in earnest, do not show the stuff of Donk wet dreams.

If at some point they do, rest assured I'll letcha know.