With two weeks to go in the 2010 mid-term elections there are a number of good reasons to believe -- contrary to most conventional wisdom -- that Democrats will still control the House once the smoke clears from the electoral battlefield.
For the last several years Nate Silver, of fivethirtyeight.com, now owned by the New York Times, has become the gold standard for projecting electoral outcomes. For some time, Silver has projected that Democrats would lose control of the House and maintain control of the Senate. Though he quotes an 82% odds that Democrats will continue to control the Senate, he currently gives daunting 73% odds of Republican takeover in the House. He says that the consensus forecast has converged on the loss of 50 Democratic House seats, which would give Republicans enough seats to control the gavel. Not so good, right?
But that's not the end of the story. Silver qualifies his projections with a major caveat. Saturday, he wrote:
However, there is considerable uncertainty in the forecast because of the unusually large number of House seats now in play. A gain of as large as 70-80 seats is not completely out of the question if everything broke right for Republicans. Conversely, if Democrats managed to see a material rebound in their national standing over the final two weeks of the campaign, they could lose as few as 20-30 seats, as relatively few individual districts are certain pickups for Republicans..... In many of the in-play seats the Republican margins that have been used to project a big Republican win are very narrow. Even a subtle shift in the overall political atmosphere over the next two weeks could cause a major shift in outcome.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/two-weeks-out-nine-reason_b_766012.html