My eyes keep skittering over this Sean Trende piece about likely 2014 Senate losses. Not because it’s bad news: it’s not.
[Sean’s calculation table] is a grim picture for Senate Democrats, suggesting that the president would have to get his approval above 50 percent by Election Day before they would be favored to hold the chamber. This is also consistent with what we’ve seen in polling, which shows the seven “red state” Democrats in truly severe states of distress, while Democrats in Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire and Colorado are exhibiting surprising weakness. If these 11 seats are showing similar signs of weakness in November, Democrats will have an extremely difficult time holding the chamber. At Obama’s current 44 percent approval rating, we’d expect Democrats to lose somewhere between nine and 13 seats.
It’s just so… surreal. What Sean did was a fairly standard Monte Carlo run that was tied to the President’s projected approval rating on Election Day; this is pretty basic stuff, and you would think that Democrats would be able to calculate it, too. And the President’s approval rating is, contrary to popular belief, amenable to positive manipulation: all Barack Obama has to do is start compromising with Republicans on things. Whatever else people’s opinions are on ideology, surely we can all agree that the executive branch must accept the realities of divided government, yes?
And yet this is not being done. It’s almost as if the President wants the Democrats to lose the Senate this cycle, the better to make his last two years an endless confrontation that will ensure that Barack Obama remains the center of the Democratic party’s attention…
…but that’s just crazy talk, surely.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: Hot Air has a similar reaction, with a certain emphasis on the fairly obvious point that Obama’s unlikely to crack 50% between now and Election Day on his current trajectory. Allahpundit is, shockingly, a little more pessimistic than I am about the President’s ability to do that: truly, we live in strange times when that happens.
“At Obama’s current 44 percent approval rating, we’d expect Democrats to lose somewhere between nine and 13 seats.”
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Can you dig it?
And thus started Xeno-Swan’s immortal march to the sea.
“…the president would have to get his approval above 50 percent by Election Day before they would be favored to hold the chamber. ”
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So ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/NYTimes/WaPo have to move the needle 6 points to give the Dems a good chance at holding the Senate? That seems within reach.
Remember, Republican’s have to win by 5% to make up for fraud and keep elections out of the hard to win recounts.
Damn it Sean Trende. Don’t get my hopes up! I can’t take another `12 collapse.
Don’t cross the streams.
A lot can change in 9 months, that said O’bama has a history of not being able to compromise. He seems utterly incapable of seeing, let alone understanding opposing viewpoints. It will be funny in the end if O’bama’s inability to compromise costs him the Senate. After all he ran on his post-partisanship.
Obama compromising at this point really doesn’t matter – everything will be about Obamacare this year, and unless the Democrats do something drastic to change that trajectory, it won’t be about Obama, it will be about them. (For the record, I also believe that Establishment GOP people could be at risk simply because the people will believe they’re at fault for not stopping the bill.) And while many say they couldn’t…there were procedural moves which our GOP did not do – because they’ve been too busy worrying about collegiality.
A quibble, Moe.
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While compromising on some GOP items may help Obama’s numbers with the squishier parts of the GOP, that will come at a cost from the .. more fully immersed in left-wing ideology from the Dems.
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Not saying compromising wouldn’t work, but .. it isn’t a guarantee, especially given toxin levels in the D.C. well.
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Mew