I just ran into this over at Salon. The article is entitled 'Not so fast: Why Democrats might hold the House'.
The gist of the argument is this: rather than looking at polls or professional prognosticators, follow the money.
One of us (Bonica) had the idea of using the wealth of information stored inside FEC contribution records to predict election outcomes. Inspired by our colleague Professor Sanford Gordon’s approach of using the past success (.pdf) of political experts to forecast election results, Bonica decided to treat the hundreds of thousands of donors who had given in previous election cycles as de facto expert raters by looking at the percentage of funds given to winning candidates in previous election cycles.
...
The bottom line: The model favors Democrats' retaining their majority with a loss of between 19 to 40 seats.
[Emphasis added. DM]
Interesting, if accurate. Lest you dismiss it out of hand:
Despite the handicap of excluding all information from polls, InTrade, expert raters, and other data sources used to forecast elections, the model's predictions of election outcomes have been remarkably accurate. In fact, the out-of-sample predictions for House races outperform the polls over the last four congressional elections (details for past elections are available on Bonica’s blog).
Anyway, I have nothing in the way of original thoughts to add to this, but I thought others here might be interested to see it. It's not just that it's cause for hope, but that it's cause for hope for a new reason.
[UPDATED. 4:45 pm EDT.]
In more than four years here, this is my first time on the Wreck List. Thanks! Woohoo!
[UPDATE II. 5:02 pm EDT.]
Jesus passes Preposterous in the poll. That's the spirit! (Though I checked the middle option, myself.)