[UPDATE: Moe can’t count. Thanks to wolfwalker in comments.]
There’s so much wishful-thinking, hard-data-notable-by-its-absence, full-orchestra-past-the-graveyard nonsense available in this Hill piece that I’m tempted to judge it #[9] on my List of DOOM. If you don’t have time: apparently, Democrats are going to keep the House because Republicans are big poopyheads who hate puppies, and because George W Bush is going to have a book published just after the election.
Yup. Special crazy.
Anyway, said Hill piece is generally mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence*, but there was one bit that was especially funny:
House Democrats run far better campaigns than House Republicans. This is why Democrats won three major off-year elections.
I love this meme. I want to take it home and give it a big red bow. The reason that I love this meme is that it means that Democrats are treating NY-20, NY-23, and PA-12 as signs of their super-genius. The reality is: NY-20 got lost because (the appointed) Tedisco didn’t reject the stimulus quickly enough to reassure the Republican base; NY-23 got lost because the NY GOP picked precisely the one candidate that the Conservative party could not support, and the activist base decided to teach the NY GOP a lesson in response; and PA-12… eh. If the Democrats want that one they can have it; contrast it to the way that the DCCC thoroughly mucked up HI-01 (and the delayed LA elections in 2008) and the story looks very different. Here’s a brutal truth: the GOP doesn’t need to sweep New York to get the House back. So unless the DCCC can simultaneously install fusion voting systems and an exquisitely dysfunctional opposition party system** in every state of the Union, it’s probably not a good idea to generalize…