Maybe its me, but it seems more and more that the MSM and political pundits are all starting to jump on the "It's 1994 again" Bandwagon.
For the life of me, I can't understand why any pundit would go out on a limb and start stating as fact that Repubs are going to take over the House? I mean it's only May 17th, the election is still 169 days or 5.63 months out. I mean we just had the running of the Preakness and nobody could that one right, how in the world can they pick Repubs to win the House back?
Over at abcnews.com they have a story that's been above the fold on their political page for the past week titled "Democrats Could 'Absolutely' Lose Majority Control in Congress, Some Strategists Say" with a picture of Carville and Bay Buchanan:
If you listen closely its the Democrat saying in effect all is about lost. However the Repubs is saying over and over again that there is this anti-washington, anti-incumbent mood in the country which bodes well for Repubs?...How is that?
All of the polling I have seen says that yes people are pissed off, but the people who are more pissed off and want their congressperson out are Repubs, not Democrats!
Here is a composite from pollster.com of congressional ballot:
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And the party ID:
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And the Presidential Approval:
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Now assuming that the economy adds about 1 million + jobs in the next 5 months May, June, July, August, and September, this of course assume we won't have numbers for October. Along with the 500k+ jobs the administration has already created in the first 4 months. We could comfortably assume that the economy will look and feel completely different. The Obama administration will have created somewhere between 1.5 million worst case and 2.2 million+ jobs, best case, between now and November 2nd. We won't have jobs numbers for October, but the story should be the improving jobs outlook, despite the fact that there is a chance that the unemployment number could actually go up as people re-enter a robust job market.
So someone please tell me HOW do Repubs take over the House in a climate where the economy is NOT tanking and companies are hiring at an average rate of 250k per month? The answer is simple it does not, in fact the best case scenario would portend the opposite, where the Democrats would hold serve and lose less than 20 seats. If that happens the Republican party would be on suicide watch or as Dana Milbank points out it will become unglued.
Dr Krugman has this from Sunday's New York Times.
When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments — and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.
That’s the message of a recent paper by the economists Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner, who find a striking correlation between economic performance and political extremism in advanced nations: in both America and Europe, periods of low economic growth tend to be associated with a rising vote for right-wing and nationalist political parties. The rise of the Tea Party, in other words, was exactly what we should have expected in the wake of the economic crisis.
So where does our political system go from here? Over the near term, a lot will depend on economic recovery. If the economy continues to add jobs, we can expect some of the air to go out of the Tea Party movement.
The Punditocracy is now jumping on the "this pox afflicts both houses" meme. Whereas what happens to one party is happening to both, using Utah and W Va scenarios, as proof of their theories. However, Moolhan (D-W Va) was a crook who was finally brought down and Bennet (R-UT) was brought down for no other reason than voting for TARP and partnering with Senator Wyden on a HCR proposal that was never going to pass, these are not equal things.
Also, I would assume that no tea-baggers are going to affect the outcome of any Democratic primaries as they will in Kentucky and as they did in Utah. Also, voting in the general elections will be more representative of the country and the polls above, which 5 months from now should look more favorable for Democrats.
So it seems to me that the pundits and MSM are playing their parts, trying to fill up news columns with the latest Republican 1994 wave memes. However, 5+ months out from an election is a century in the context of political time. We will see what next month and the month after brings on the jobs front, as this will be the determinant of the either a wave election or a Republican party that truly becomes unglued and finishes what the tea-party has started.