Full Swing

The fall election season is now officially in full swing. I urge all of you to click on the icon to the left (electoral.vote.com) and check out Andy's site. It is chock full o' great data and info. He will be updating it pretty much every day from now through November.

His algorithm has the Dems keeping the House but being more in danger of losing the Senate which is interesting. He bases this on the fact that 94 percent of House district's don't have any polls out. So how does Chris Matthews know that the House is "gone?" Good question. Also interesting is that Andy has pointed out that three seats (DE-AL, HI-1, and LA-2) are nearly certain to go blue. That would mean that the GOP needs 42 out of the others to flip.

If the House does go GOP, Andy's got an interesting take on what could happen.

Also worth considering is the difference between 218 seats in the House and a working majority. A number of new representatives are probably going to be tea partiers who are running on a platform of cutting the federal deficit. If the first thing a new Republican-controlled House does is bring up a bill to cut taxes--without cutting spending, which is always difficult to do because every line in the federal budget has supporters--then passing this bill would increase the deficit. Some of the people who ran on cutting the deficit may not be too keen on increasing it as their first official act. So in practice, to actually get anything done, the Republicans may have to pick up 45 to 50 seats, a much more difficult task than getting 39 because it requires winning some of the "landslider" seats, which the Democrats-who have more money than the Republicans--will fiercely defend.

While I don't want the GOP to take over the House, it would be interesting to see what might happen if this were to occur. The old school GOPers aren't going to cut spending....even though they say they are going to..which puts them in a fight with the new TP backed folks. These folks may end up voting with the Dems on bills but for opposite reasons.

Something else to look at is this article from the Times today.

Republicans are within reach of gaining control of eight or more chambers in state legislatures this fall, according to interviews with Republicans, Democrats and independent political analysts. That would give Republicans the power to draw more Congressional districts in their favor, since the expected gains come just as many legislatures will play a major role in the once-a-decade process of redrawing the boundaries of those districts.

As the saying goes, all politics are local. This is the real story of the Election 2010. With the census being done this year, new CDs are going to be drawn for 2012 that will have sweeping consequences. Pay attention to how these local state houses turn out and if many stay blue, the GOP taking the House back for two years might not be the end of the world for Democrats.