"Do Democrats Have a Shot at the House?" By NATE SILVER at the NYTimes [View all]

[applegrove]

Do Democrats Have a Shot at the House?

By NATE SILVER at the NYTimes

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/23/do-democrats-have-a-shot-at-the-house/

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The results of special elections for House seats can also be indicators, but they should be employed carefully. However, the special-elections scorecard was mixed. Things look a little more respectable for Democrats now that they retained Gabrielle Giffords’s seat in Arizona in a special election earlier this month. But they had an awful day in September, when they lost Anthony Weiner’s seat in New York and were blown out in what had looked like a competitive race in Nevada. On the other hand, Democrats did flip a Republican seat in upstate New York earlier last year, when their candidate Kathy Hochul campaigned on a platform that hit her Republican opponent on the cuts the Republican budget proposed to entitlement programs.

Taken as a whole, the set of special elections might suggest that races for the House could be more localized and idiosyncratic than in 2006, 2008 or 2010, rather than there being a wave in either direction. The Democrats need to gain a net of 25 seats to take control of the House, probably more than they could realize just by happening to win a lot of coin flips at the district-by-district level.

So where does the Democrats’ upside case come from? There is always the statistical probability that the economy will grow by a faster-than-expected rate in the second half of the year. Economists expect the economy to grow by about 2.3 percent over the next two quarters. But economic forecasting is an extremely rough science and “surprising” results occur more often (and both to the upside and the downside) than forecasters might like to acknowledge. We could be back in a recession by the end of the year, or we could be creating 200,000 jobs per month.

Even the economic upside case, however, would not be an unambiguous good for Democratic Congressional candidates. It would likely help President Obama, and in presidential election years, a large number of people do not pay much attention to House races, enabling the winning presidential candidate to have some coattails down the ballot. Apart from these coattail effects, though, the impact of economic performance is rather ambiguous in races for the Congress when control of government is divided.

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