I’ll be weighing in again on the midterms early Wednesday. But since this is the season of prediction, prophecy, punditry and prognostication, I thought I would take my cards, which I have grasped here in my hand, and lay them on this virtual table.
The only thing certain is uncertainty – except when we are talking about the experts
I see that the latest New York Times/Siena poll has the following numbers for the Senate race: Alaska: D+2, Iowa: D+1, Michigan: D+11, Ohio: D+5, Maine: D+6, Texas: D+7. Amazing! The people who would respond to a pollster that uttered the name “New York Times” report their preferences in such a way that the Democrats are ahead in not one, not two, but all these tightly contested races.
“Tightly contested?” This poll says that soft-heeled blinky-boy James Talarico is favored by 7 points to beat Trump-endorsed™ Ken Paxton. Seven points! But what about the Michigan race where Abdul El-Sayed is 11 points ahead of Mike Rogers? Game over, what?
Let me call this hand. My cards are on the table. Let’s turn them over. The GOP is going to win all of these races with the possible exception of Ohio. Possible exception, I say.
And what about the House? The average loss by the incumbent party in the House is about 30 seats. In 1994, Clinton lost 54 House seats. In 2010, Obama lost 63. He called that result a “shellacking,” but went on with his pen and his phone to wreak more havoc on the US economy, our mores and traditions. In 2022, many people, including me, predicted a red wave in the midterms. When the Dems lost only 9 seats, the media accounted it a miracle. “How about them Dems?!”
As I write, an average of the relevant polls tells us the Dems are on course to pick up 24-26 seats. I predict that it will be fewer than 20 and might well be 10 or fewer. I would be surprised, but not astonished, if the GOP managed to hold on to the House, which I believe means a loss of fewer than 5 seats. Utopian? Unrealistic? Pie-in-the-firmament thinking? Maybe. We’ll know in a couple of days.
Meanwhile, I think Victor Davis Hanson was right yesterday when he wrote that “The bottom line is that these midterms may not go quite as predicted. And even if they do, this much-predicted blue wave may have far less impact than most think – given the ever-growing powers of a president and his executive branch and the unsavory nature of many of his new would-be opponents.” In other words, the only thing certain is uncertainty – except when we are talking about the experts. The one thing you can count on there is the fatuousness, flaccid self-importance and irrelevance of their expertise.
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