House Update

Charles Cook - Democrats faltering - Kavanaugh hearings to blame 

The most dramatic change over the last six weeks in the midterm election picture is clearly in the Senate, but the House situation has subtly changed as well.

Not long ago, the most likely outcome for the Senate was either no net change at all, or a shift of one seat, so the Senate would remain under GOP control, with the majority holding 50-52 seats. Today, a Republican net gain of a seat or two seems most likely, moving the GOP up to either 52 or 53 seats, though a gain of three seats or no net change are entirely possible.

In the House, Democrats remain heavily favored to capture a majority; the change is that their chances of blowing the House wide open with a gain of 40-50 seats or more have diminished.

Today, Democrats seem more in line to score a net gain of between 20 and 40 seats. Democrats need a pickup of 23 seats, so a continued Republican majority is possible, just fairly unlikely. A 30-seat gain is at the center of that bell curve of probabilities.

One question that keeps coming back up is whether those who led the out-of-control demonstrations on Capitol Hill against the Kavanaugh nomination have any understanding of how much damage they did to Democrats and the party’s chances of winning a majority in the Senate. My guess is they don’t. But Senate Democrats probably do.

Now for some people, Charlie Cook is the gold standard of prognosticators. Nate Silver may have more calculations, spreadsheets, graphs, and formulas, but Cook has been doing this for a long time. I tend to go with the fact that neither Cook or Silver has been extremely accurate over the past few election cycle, so I take both of them with a grain of salt. The one commonality is that both Cook and Silver have been consistently overstating Democratic electoral success over the past few election cycles.

So all that being said, Charlie Cook is pushing back his projected Democratic gains down to around 30 seats, is at odds with Nate Silver, who has actually been "increasing" his projected amount of Democratic gains. He currently projects +39 for the Democrats, while increasing their odds to 84%  from the 74% that he showed just a couple of weeks ago.

Cook is seeing the Democrats faltering in the house over the past two or three weeks.
Silver is seeing them expanding their advantage and consolidating their chances.

Now if you look at the much more generic RCP numbers (which are basically stripped down polling averages), they show the Democrats poised to gain between 10-42 seats, with the bell curve middle being set right around a 26 seat gain. Their true middle ground would provide the Democrats with a 221 -214 congressional advantage.

So top line numbers: 
(23 seat gain required for the Democrats to retake the house)

• Nate Silver - Dem + 39
• Charlie Cook - Dem +30
• Real Clear Politics - Dem +26

Personally I see that there are three very real possibilities. 

One possibility would be that all of these races are actually as close as everyone believes. This would suggest that we would be looking at a lot of close calls, recounts, and small victories one way or the other. If this turns out to be the case, then the chances of the Democrats retaking the house is pretty high. Not Nate Silver high, but I would say it would be around a seventy percent chance, with the Democrats picking up between 20-30 seats

The second would be that the recent surge in Republican support drifts just enough to push most of these closer races to the more energized Democrats. This would make a Democratic advantage a foregone conclusion, and the very real possibility of a true wave, where the Democrats all but sweep the toss up seats, and approach that 39 seat gain that Silver is seeing.

The last possibility is that the polling is suspect and is seeing something that simply isn't there. Many pollsters are factoring in the conventional wisdom of increased Democratic turnout (as has been displayed in several special elections) as well as some depressed Republican turnout (as has also been displayed in several special elections). But if the 2018 midterms provide something more similar to a normal midterm turnout than a special election turnout, then many of these close races (that normally wouldn't be close) are not actually going to be close. At that point, we may well be looking at a modest Democratic gain of between 10-20 seats. Not enough to take control.