I'm almost sure the President will win reelection. It looks like Harry Reid will remain Majority Leader in the Senate. The biggest question remaining less certain is whether the GOP can hold onto control of the House of Representatives and maintain their ability to obstruct progress for another two years.
The smart money says they will. Huffington Post predicts a post election Republican majority of 230. That's a net loss of 12 GOP seats, but enough to hold their majority. The much esteemed Charlie Cook and Stu Rothenberg are even less sanguine about the chances of Nancy Pelosi taking the Speaker's Gavel in the next Congress.
But what if these pundits are wrong? Come out into the tall grass and we will give that some more thought.
To start, consider the first two things I mentioned -- confidence in the outcome of the Presidential race and confidence on holding the Senate. Why such confidence? It is because an abundance of recent polls from reputable organizations have taken sufficient samples over time to establish meaningful trend lines and statistically predict these outcomes unless something intervenes to reverse the trends.
For a bit of contrast go to Talking Point Memo Poll Tracker where you can find not only the big race polls described above, but also all of the down ballot polling, state by state, for the Congressional races. For most of the House races, there is no reported poll at all. For many others, only a one or two polls, often quite old, often by different pollsters. Meaningful trend lines are largely unavailable. I find no reason to draw any conclusions about control of the next Congress based upon the limited and uninformative polling available.
The pundits who predict continued GOP control of the House don't really claim any support in polling. Their focus is on structural factors like incumbency, regional factors, gerrymandering and history. Here is how one of them put it according to coverage by the McClatchy organization.
Democrats need to gain 25 seats this year to regain control of the House of Representatives from the Republicans. The prospects are dim.
Even a strong showing by President Barack Obama would be unlikely to swing the House to the Democrats and return the majority they lost two years ago. Redistricting, in effect in most places for the first time since the 2010 census, is helping Republicans. So are problems faced by Democratic moderates in conservative and Southern states.
Then there’s history. The last time a previously elected president seeking re-election saw his party pick up more than 25 seats was in 1892, according to research from the Rothenberg Political Report – and that president, Benjamin Harrison, lost.
“It’s possible, but not likely" Democrats will get a majority, said Nathan Gonzales, a political analyst at nonpartisan Rothenberg.
Even the pundits concede that the GOP could lose control of Congress. Thirty-five days remain until the final vote, with voting to various degrees already beginning early in more and more locations as time goes by. Thirty-five days is an eternity in an election. No political party in American history has gone into a Presidential election year with its brand as tarnished as the modern GOP brand. Even in 1976 when the GOP had to run in the wake of Nixon's disgrace, his stain came more or less from just one person and didn't so much put a stench on the entire party. This year, the GOP is tarnished by their own ideas. They needed a Presidential ticket and down ballot candidates that would burnish their brand, but, instead, they got Romney, Ryan, Aikin and the rest of their lot of 14th Century thinkers.
Coat tails are a mysterious feature of Presidential politics usually more conspicuous by absence than otherwise. If Barack Obama turns out to have coat tails in abundance, the pundits' predictions of who controls the next House will be -- How did Chris Christie put it in another context? -- turned upside down.