The Final Call

Mere hours - okay, minutes - before the day I've been arduously awaiting for two full years, I find myself in the thoroughly unaccustomed position of being, yes, an Eeyore in a pack of Pollyannas.

Quinn Hillyer:

In the House, by the time the new House is officially seated in January, the GOP will hold 246 seats. In the Senate, the GOP will hold 51. [His emphasis]

That's a gain of sixty-seven House seats and ten, count 'em, TEN Senate seats.

W. James Antle:

That's a net pickup of nine, for a 50-50 split with Joe Biden's tie-breaking vote allowing Democrats to organize the Senate. Several of these races will be too close to call on election night (some might even be the subject of litigation). Consequently, I am also predicting that Republican campaigns in California, West Virginia, Connecticut, and Delaware will fall short. At the end of the night, the Republicans will have a majority in the House, picking up sixty seats, and will also have most state governorships.

Jim "Cautious" Geraghty is forecasting a seventy seat House pickup and an eight seat advance in the Senate. Last week Jay Cost was prognosticating sixty and eight; today he's citing models, based on today's final Gallup likely voter generic survey, indicating a seventy-six seat House blitzkrieg. He didn't mention an equivalent Senate number, but it's hard to see how the upper chamber wouldn't flip over as well in such a mammoth wave.

And then there's my strange bedfellow:

Looking at that Gallup poll last night and then Rasmussen’s this afternoon, I felt like Schwarzenegger at the end of Predator when the creature finally takes off its mask. Just staring at it, thinking … “What de hell ahh you?”...

I can’t quite buy it, almost for congenital reasons: Until I see a sixty+ gain with my own two eyes (“What de hell ahh you?”) my assumption is that it can’t and won’t happen. Too many reasons to think that the Dems can at least limit the damage: The GOP’s brand is still unpopular, Obama’s been begging young and minority voters for months to turn out, and the Dems have spent boatloads of money on ads. They’ll still get crushed, but I think it’ll be more like fifty-four seats in the House than seventy+.

It may confound you to learn that I don't buy any of AP's pessimism planks:

1) I don't buy the "GOP brand is still in the waste extractor" conventional wisdom. I never have, really, but it seems to have set in cement, impervious to events and a rising tide of Republican redemption. There's no question but what 'Pubbies will be on probation with this second chance only four years after having rumbled, bumbled, and fumbled it away; they'll have to re-prove themselves worthy of it by how vigorously and cannily (and if) they go to war with Red Barry over the next two years. But the page has long since turned on this "Republicans are indellibly unpopular" nonsense. As I predicted in '06, the Democrats absconded with the very same reasons why voters threw out the GOP and blew them up like Rick Moranis did his kids.

2) Barack Obama is a one-trick pony on its way to the glue factory. A spent force. A dessicated husk. All that begging will avail him nothing except to make himself look even more pathetic than he had already. The spell is over, the fad has passed, and the youts of Obamerika have moved on to the next vapid craze.

3) Money helps, but it can't buy back two years' worth of undisguised Marxist authoritarianism.

No, my friends, my bow to realism is inspired by one factor and one factor only: voter fraud. The Democrats steal elections with metronomic regularity anymore. It's a well-oiled machine: if the Dem in any race is behind by fewer than a thousand votes on Election Night, the Republican is gonna get screwed. Doesn't matter which state, either. We've seen it attempted in Florida (2000), perfected in Washington (2004), and it's been an epidemic ever since - all those razor-thin 2006 Senate victories, Al F'ing Franken last time, the special election in NY20 a year and a half ago. The Donks defraud their way within striking distance and their fixers and partisan judges do the rest.

The problem is how to quantify it. Post-election is easy, as summarized above. Pre-election is a different matter, as I am not aware of any metric for quantifying the systematic impace of voter fraud across the country.

For my purposes, I kind of backed into the calculation by arbitrarily assuming a one-sixth Donkward movement amongst undecideds in terms of which way they "break". The general rule of thumb is that undecides break, on average, two to one against the incumbent, so for a Republican incumbent s/he would only get 1/6 of undecideds to get to the full hundred percent, whereas a Democrat incumbent would evenly split them. For open seat races, I start with fifty-fifty, so the fraud factor would mean a 2-1 break of undecideds to the Democrat.

With that in mind, here are my final predictions, both gross and fraud-adjusted:

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Current alignment: Democrat 256, Republican 179

Predicted GOP gain: Sixty-six seats (gross) minus six stolen through voter fraud = sixty seats (net)

112th Congress: Republican 239, Democrat 196

SENATE (incumbents in CAPS)

ALABAMA: SHELBY 60.0%, Barnes 40.0% (GOP hold)

ALASKA: Miller 36.3%, MURKOWSKI 34.0%, McAdams 29.7% (GOP hold)

ARIZONA: McCAIN 54.7%, Glassman 45.3% (GOP hold)

ARKANSAS: Boozman 60.4%, LINCOLN 39.6% (GOP pickup)

CALIFORNIA: BOXER 50.5%, Fiorina 49.5% (Democrat hold)

COLORADO: Buck 52.1%, BENNET 47.9% (GOP pickup)

CONNECTICUT: Blumenthal 53.7%, McMahon 46.3% (Democrat hold)

DELAWARE: Coons 59.8%, O'Donnell 40.2% (Democrat hold - would have been a GOP pickup w/ Mike Castle)

FLORIDA: Rubio 50.0%, Crist 30.5%, Meek 19.5% (GOP hold)

GEORGIA: ISAKSON 59.4%, Thurmond 40.6% (GOP hold)

HAWAII: INOUYE 57.0%, Cavasso 43.0% (Democrat hold)

IDAHO: CRAPO 66.7%, Sullivan 33.3% (GOP hold)

ILLINOIS: Giannoulias 50.1%, Kirk 49.9% (Democrat hold via voter fraud)

INDIANA: Coats 56.7%, Ellsworth 43.3% (GOP pickup)

IOWA: GRASSLEY 56.3%, Conlin 43.7% (GOP hold)

KANSAS: Moran 69.3%, Johnston 30.7% (GOP hold)

KENTUCKY: Paul 54.3%, Conway 45.7% (GOP hold)

LOUISIANA: VITTER 54.2%, Meloncon 45.8% (GOP hold)

MARYLAND: MILKULSKI 58.7%, Wargotz 41.3% (Democrat hold)

MISSOURI: Blunt 53.2%, Carnahan 46.8% (GOP hold)

NEVADA: Angle 51.9%, REID 48.1% (GOP pickup)

NEW HAMPSHIRE: Ayotte 57.0%, Hodes 43.0% (GOP hold)

NEW YORK: GILLIBRAND 61.5%, DioGuardi 38.5% (Democrat hold - would have been a GOP pickup if George Pataki had run)

NEW YORK: SCHUMER (next (joy) Senate Majority Leader) 65.8%, Townsend 34.2% (Democrat hold)

NORTH CAROLINA: BURR 51.1%, Marshall 48.9% (GOP hold)

NORTH DAKOTA: Hoeven 73.0%, Potter 27.0% (GOP pickup)

OHIO: Portman 58.0%, Fisher 42.0% (GOP hold)

OKLAHOMA: COBURN 68.5%, Rogers 31.5% (GOP hold)

OREGON: WYDEN 59.8%, Huffman 40.2% (Democrat hold)

PENNSYLVANIA: Toomey 51.3%, Sestak 48.7% (GOP pickup)

SOUTH CAROLINA: DeMINT 66.0%, Greene 34.0% (GOP hold)

UTAH: Lee 54.7%, Granato 45.3% (GOP hold)

VERMONT: LEAHY 69.7%, Britton 30.3% (Democrat hold)

WASHINGTON: MURRAY 50.5%, Rossi 49.5% (Democrat hold)

WEST VIRGINIA: Manchin 52.7%, Raese 47.3% (Democrat hold)

WISCONSIN: Johnson 53.6%, FEINGOLD 46.4% (GOP pickup)

Net GOP gain: seven seats

112th Congress: Democrat 52, Republican 48.

That isn't pessimistic - seriously, it'll have been sixty-four years since the last such House gain and sixteen since Republicans gained that many Senate seats; we're so used to bandying about these numbers that it's easy to forget their audacious magnitude. But as a function of expectations, it won't be the "Super" wave, "just" the "Happy Time" wave. But this is what my number-crunching spat out.

I'll be more than happy to have Cost-Hulk kick my ass tomorrow night if it'll knock over Manchin, Boxer, and ESPECIALLY Porky Murray.

And now....The Final Act.