Handicapping the House
So, you think President Obama had a tough week? Wait’ll you get a load of what happened to the Congressional Democrats.
By Real Clear Politics‘ poll averaging, the GOP lock has jumped up three to 206 seats and the Democrats lost three to 196. That ten-seat deficit was a 202-202 tie just two weeks ago. When you consider how few seats are really in play, and that the campaign season doesn’t really begin until Labor Day weekend, that’s a remarkable amount of action.
From last week’s polls, a total of 17 seats shifted — and 16 of them moved right. Here’s the visual, courtesy of 270 to Win‘s online tools.
[CLICK TO EMBIGGEN]
If a district is red, it moved right this week. If it’s blue, it moved left. Next week, we’ll look at intensity — but all we’re measuring today is motion.
On now to the individual races, and we’ll do this from left to right to further right.
WA03 has been held by Brian Baird pretty comfortably since 1999, and the Left Coast ain’t exactly red-friendly. So what’s going on? Cook rates the Third’s PVI dead even, and Baird was a big Obamacare supporter. A YouTube video of a 2009 Town Hall, where Baird was taken to task by disabled Marine has been viewed 1.3 million times. His GOP opponent, Jaime Herrera, seems to be running a smart campaign in a close district. She’s been moving up, up, up all summer long.
If I’m reading the map right, then that’s where Vancouver, WA is. My wife, her husband and kids, and my mother and step-father all live there. Liberal? You have to ask?
My schadenfreude meter is twitching mightily right now. If this goes ‘Pub in November, I’ll have to send my brother-in-law a bottle of whiskey so he can drown his sorrows. He’s fanatically pro-Obama. We’ve had some real donnie-brooks in the political argument sphere.
Would a bottle of Johnny Walker Red be over the top?
Not sure about “over the top.” But I know that ideally it’s “inside the tumbler.”
Yes, it would be. Send a bottle of the cheapest rotgut you can find, with a note: “This is all I can afford from what Obama and the Dmeocrats in Congress left me.”
Old Grand Dad? Seems to be one of the most common names one sees on billboards adjacent skid row…
My wife and her husband? Cripes, I must really be tired.
That’s supposed to be read “my sister“.
Sheesh.
Your sister is your wife? What are you? A Democrat?
Something very sinister is afoot;
Harry Read is winning!!!!!!!!!
AND TOO MANY DEMOCRATS ARE WINNING!!!!!!!!!
The TEA Party is effective for good intentions,
BUT, GOOD INTENTIONS DO NOT SEEM TO BE WORKING!!!!!!!!!
The Democrat Parrty has something NUCLEAR proliferating!!!!!!!!!
If this does not advertise a threat to our Republic, nothing does!
Yep!
Wait, what?
The latest poll, which was a week ago, has Harry Reid tied 47-47, according to Rasmussen. The current balance of power projection is 49-45 Democrats, with 6 toss ups, among which are Illinois, Nevada and California.
You forgot to mention how much the Obama’s are enjoying their ‘vacation’!
My wife and her husband? Cripes, I must really be tired.
That’s supposed to be read “my sister“.
Sheesh.
Well, the 9th Circuit has ruled that even after you get divorced …you can still be brother and sister..so, it didn’t read in the least bit odd to the denizens of the deep woods in the Pacific Northwest. In fact, had you not pointed it out yourself, I’m sure they would have missed it entirely.
The ninth circuit be damned,good catch nukem,all good… Bring on the Red Label, and
don’t forget Nevada, boys..it’ll be money well spent.
Hank Johnson is GA-4. GA-2 is Sanford Bishop.
Do my eyes deceive me? Part of the Peoples’ Republic of IL is RED? And part of it is above Cook County?
And what’s with all the red in southern Tejas? I know the tip is usually blue…..
That’s because of the high percentage of illegal aliens–whoops, politically incorrect terminology– is it probationary citizens now? I forget.
“Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional,
illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous
mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is
entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”
Written by an “Aggie” law student (or so I’m told)
I’ve said for months now, that it will be an incredible slaughter come November. People were saying that the Pubs MIGHT take back the House and maybe, might, could, possibly the Senate, too. No maybe about it folks. This is just the beginning. Campaign season is just starting.
And then what?
Exactly.
Kelly’s website makes it look like he’s running for Dáil Éireann, rather than the US House of Representin’.
Here in Left country CA, Sen. Boxer is now rated a toss up against the GOP candidate, I can’t spell here name. I love watching this race, as I’ve hated Boxer for years. Don’t worry folks, what I lack in spelling I make up for in reading. I’ll get her name right at the polls. Go Tea Party!
Karla Fiorini I believe. From another left coastie. But I am not a republican, nor a democrat. I prefer the libertarian point of view but will vote for the lesser of 2 evils. The republicans need to get a spine and follow the constitution.
http://www.scpr.org/news/2010/08/23/carly-fiorina-blasts-boxer-gop-convention/
Sorry, I blew it too. Carla Fiorina is apparently correct.
#10 Rob Spear,
More of the same tired old excuses and blame game. Republicans will not fair any better than Democrats, liberals than conservatives. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
All we do is move corrupt officials around the playing board, if Democrat they will socialize and subsidize Government programs, if Republican they will socialize and subsidize Corporations.
The key for the right is to keep dropping RINO’s. Crist is out in FL, Utah outed a RINO, we lost the maga RINO in PA and Alaska looks like it just retired another one. If things workout we could get 3-5 Senators that are the real deal.
If the republicans return to Karl Rove entitlement pimping then I am done with the party of Lincoln.
Contraire…and I don’t believe a bit true. For one, with a Republican majority, we wouldn’t be under the auspices of ObamaCare.
And how you do derive the conclusion of socializing corporations by Republicans? Seems to me its the Democrats socializing corporations, from corrupt unions, to Government Motors, to rotten financial institutions.
Oh, please. The GOP will not repeal ObamaCare. They will “fix it not nix it”, juggling the rules around so that it takes things away from those who bought Democrats, and steer it all in the the direction of those who bought the GOP.
I have absolutely NO confidence in the GOP doing the right thing. They are obsessed with issues that should not be within the reach of the federal government in the first place. They are too obsessed with the spiritual and private lives of the populace; they’ve no time for bothersome things like budgets, spending, the defunding of useless and unconstitutional agencies, and repealing laws that have crippled our economy.
We’ve heard about abolishing the NEA, the DofEd, etc since Reagan’s time. Results so far? Nada! But we DO have DOMA. Hooray, I guess…
The GOP is obsessed with issues that should not be within reach of the federal government??? HUH? What are you drinking? The DEMON-CRATS are the anti-American criminals who forced the health care down our throats with 70% of Americans saying they didn’t want it. Put down the kool-aid, take what ever pill you are currently on and stay far from the polls. While you are at it, go find a soldier or Veteran and spit in their face! That is what demon-crats do when ever they vote!
Judy, you are right about the “demoncrats”, but the republicans have historically left the unconstitutional programs from previous demoncrats in place. For that matter, Obama hasn’t touched any of the questionable Bush programs he promised to get rid of (e.g. Patriot act).
The two parties work together like a ratchet mechanism. Dems can get certain kinds of unconstitutional things passed when they are in power (generally entitlements and nanny state), and Reps can get different sorts of (generally police state and some entitlement) things passed when they are in power. Neither are willing to undo the “advances” of their predecessor. The result is an inexorable ratcheting toward totalitarian socialism.
Sorry Judy, but the only difference I see between most democrats and most republicans is that the republicans want to socialize the country at a slower rate than the democrats. Neither party follows the constitution. 90% or more of what the federal government does these days is unconstitutional. As a former buyer by trade, I understand what most people don’t, that the constitution is a contract, between “we, the people” and those we’ve chosen to run the country for us. If a regular contractor violated their contract for working on your house (for instance) the way the people in government have, they would have their license revoked and might even be in jail. Certainly a lot of judges and representatives at all levels of government should be in jail.
Strange, I just reread my post and I see nothing that mentions repealing ObamaCare.
Read a little closer – I said ObamaCare never would have happened if we had a Republican Congress.
I won’t hold a breath for an apology – practice on your reading comprehension instead.
Now..
if Obama can vacation for 9 more weeks (got golf?)
the democrats might have a chance.
First administration in history having better poll numbers without a president than with one.
Fearless, I wish our champaign and Rolls Royce Socialist mayor here in NYC would take a long and permanent vacation. Every time he opens his mouth, something stupid comes out. When Riyyadh has a church and a synagogue then we’ll talk about a mosque in lower Manhattan.
To repeat: POLLS ARE NOT CAMPAIGNS!
This early talk of a GOP tsunami could be fatal, if it convinces grassroots conservatives that everything’s all locked up and taken care of. Many Republican challengers are underfunded and, in nearly every competitive district, the GOP suffers from a lack of on-the-ground organization.
What most people don’t fully comprehend is that a mid-term congressional election is actually 435 separate House campaigns. In almost every district with a Democratic incumbent, the GOP challenger is at a very bad disadvantage in terms of fundraising, and these candidates can’t expect help from the national GOP. The NRCC is so dysfunctional now that many longtime grassroots donors won’t send them a cent since last fall’s Scozzafava disaster.
Conservatives who are citing late-summer polls and thinking that it’s going to be an easy cruise to automatic glory on Nov. 2 are setting themselves up for embarrassment and disappointment.
Now I wish we could go into the Universities and kick-out the libs there.
Regarding WA-03:
“… and Baird was a big ObamaCare supporter. A YouTube video of a 2009 Town Hall, where Baird was taken to task by a disabled Marine, has been viewed 1.3 million times. His GOP opponent, Jaime Herrera, seems to be running a smart campaign in a close district.”
This is an open seat. Baird isn’t running. It’s Herrera vs Denny Heck.
Hello Tex, agreed completely with your points about GM, that is on President Obama’s head. However Banking institutions was initiated by President Bush and followed through with President Obama, my point is they are all guilty of not actually doing their job. It is far easier to just keep passing the buck than try to earn it.
there are many examples from both sides of the aisle…its all corrupt and should be dismantled (ALL voted out) and just replace incumbent congress with farmers, bricklayers, plumbers, teachers, regular people as intended. What we have are professional lobbyists managing our government from military to education to energy to health industry.
The next interesting development are 62 million mortgages held on the MERS system. A judge has ruled that system breaks transfer of title, effectively shielding the mortgage holder from liability on the loan. It will be interesting to watch that play out over time, as courts cannot foreclose on property that do not have clear transfer of Title.
The Homeowner with their Mortgage on MERS may have finally found a friend in the court system. The reason they were placed on MERS was to bundle mortgages and trade them in credit markets, the bankers that created this system appear to have been too smart for their own good.
“Six races have narrowed from Leans Dem to Toss Up: IL14, NC11, NY20, OR05, PA10, TX23.”
PA 10, IL 14, TX 23, and NC 11 all went for Bush in ’00 and ’04 by a double-digit average, and with the exception of IL 14 are all R+4 or even more red. IL 14 is only R+1 because it fell so hard for hope n change (voting for zero by 11 after voting for Bush by 11 twice) – its proximity to Chicago obviously having a lot to do with that. NY 20 is clearly red as well as it only went for zero by 3 after going for Bush by 7 and 8. As for OR 5, it is very much a swing district, as it went very narrowly for Bush twice before going to zero by 11 — but the “representative” here, a Connecticut born Cornell graduate (Kurt Schrader), voted for stimulus, cap n tax, and 0care and had an ACU rating in 2009 of 8. Given the events of the past 19 months, none of these ‘rats should be robbing taxpayers next year.
The Republicans are doing nothing to create this wave and not a little to get in the way of it.
See soon to be former Senators Spector and Murkowski.
What we are seeing here is the compound interest pay off of the classic hubris infecting the Urban Leftists running the Democratic Party.
As in:
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
The latest example is Lisa Jackson’s “Green bullet” initiative.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Lisa Jackson, is going after lead bullets as a “toxic pollutant.” This is huge in terms of on-the-ground GOP turn out.
It is even worse in terms of the NRA/Gun-hugger political machine seeing a once in a generation fund raising opportunity in the middle of a depression.
The kicker is that Jackson is doing exactly the same thing with bullet lead that the EPA is doing right now in trying to regulate carbon as a pollutant on “cap and trade” — AKA “exceeding the damned Congressional statutes” — at Obama’s direction.
She is simply following the same script for other, smaller, Democratic Party interest group, with the announcement of the decision the day before the election!!!
Obama can’t disavow her on lead bullets — until it is far too late — because it endangers his entire “Cap & Trade” regulatory implementation strategy, which is far more important to him and his money bags political contributors.
That is why I can’t believe his people at EPA were that stupid to go there.
This action sunders the link between sports hunters, the environmental movement and the Federal environmental regulators.
Making urban environmentalists the blood enemy of all gun owners, most rural Americans and all sports hunters is a major cultural and voting shift. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New Hampshire just saw all their rural counties, and not a few exurbs, get shifted one voting column to the Right in terms of Republican turn out intensity…less than 75 days before a low Democratic Party turn out (from 9.5% unemployment) Congressional mid-term election.
Hells bells, hunters and gun-huggers in Colorado are already asking local Democrats some really difficult environmental questions because of this.
Question so difficult that we have just seen a Democratic Party political equivalent of 15-kiloton nuclear hand grenade detonate in Colorado.
I just got back an e-mail from a very left of center Denver friend of mine — who I e-mailed the EPA lead bullet ban link — on how quickly, and hugely bad, this EPA action is playing in CO:
Happening already. I have a local liberal talk radio show on even as we squeak, and
.
1) The Western Slope has gone up with a whoosh and a roar,
.
2) So has the Eastern Plains, and
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3) So are most Front Range environmentalists calling in, because they can count, and any effective environmental measures out here have always been tied to hunting and fishing (or watershed maintenance).
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So far there’ve been two callers who tried to defend it as a first step toward banning hunting, and the host (who was an Obama guy back in 2007) is bawling them out and hanging up on them. (This may be because he hunts or it may be because he’s the guy from whom I got the useful phrase Second Amendment Socialist. Or both). The program doesn’t seem to have a website or I’d post a link and let you all listen in.
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There is no chance at all of this coming to anyone in the administration’s attention, unless they’re taping it at Ken Salazar’s in-town office. Which they should be. But they won’t.
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Oooh. Just heard a caller say “They’ve got their RINOs and we’ve got our DINOs and we just need to dump the coasts so we can slug it out like honorable gentlemen.” I think it’s the guy who always brings up Lenin having been a passionate bird hunter.
When you are pissing off left wing Colorado Environmentalists and gun-huggers with the same act of EPA looniness…Hubris, nothing but pure Hubris.
This is the logical outcome of appointing a leftist flake like Jackson in the first place, but I doubt that this particular outcome even occurred to Axelrod and Obama.
They both strike me as utterly blind in some respects, and the flakiness of their Leftist appointees is one of them.
IMO, they won’t realize any need to do anything about this action until far too late to have any effect, save pissing off their own side, just like they have done with the Ground Zero Mosque.
The CO Republican base is going to be so superchaged that Tencredo (sp?) may get his Gubernatorial spoiler race spoiled, by straight ticket Republican voting by pissed off pro-gunners, who want to make sure the 2010 CO redistricting has no Democrats at the table.
Trent. I mentioned the lead bullet ban to my wife yesterday. Now, just so you know, she’s about as anti-gun as they come. Real weeping willow liberal as far as that issue goes.
The look on her face was priceless. Her first comment was “What?! Seriously?!”
Then she rolled her eyes and said “Do they really think people die from lead poisoning when they’re shot? What idiots.”
This action by the EPA may very well be the coup de grace. RS McCain is correct–we can’t rest on our laurels. Polls aren’t ballots. And the Tea Party activists, in particular, really need to keep the pedal to the metal. But I think this is the issue that finally breaks the independents away from the Democratic Party for good.
Now we need to keep finding the fiscal and small-government conservatives and getting them on the ballots and into government positions–at local, state and federal levels. That’s the only way we can take this country back.
Along these lines, the NRA is backing Harry Reid because he is OK on the one issue they support and that is gun rights. I am getting pretty fed up with the NRA caving on some issues and supporting people who don’t support all of the constitution. I’ve been a life member for a long time but I’ve seriously considered resigning from them as they don’t seem to represent me any longer.
I have said before and I will say it again: DO NOT count your chickens before they hatch. Opinion polls can be wrong – ask Lisa Murkowski. What counts is what happens on election day, not what we think the polls are telling us will happen on election day.
Donna Campbell, MD, is the woman running against Lloyd Doggett (TX-25). Her talking points are great, especially “Nancy Pelosi is third in line for the presidency.”
http://tinyurl.com/2873zkc
“A vote for any Democrat in U.S. Congress is a vote to keep Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House. This is the same Nancy Pelosi who said we have to pass bills before we can know what’s in them. This is the same Nancy Pelosi who said extending unemployment benefits creates jobs. And yes, this is the same Nancy Pelosi who just last week called for investigating Americans who are opposed to building the mosque at Ground Zero.”
In addition, I met Stephen Broden yesterday who is in a similar fight for TX-30. He’s running against Eddie Bernice Johnson. I, like others, have decided to give money and time to help people like Campbell and Broden.
Keep Austin weird, throw out an incumbent.
I would like to suggest Michael Steele should resign and try and run for some office, any office, just not one where can claim he is a Republican. Everyone knows he isn’t a conservative and I don’t think he would know what a libertarian was. Michael, just keep your mouth shut for another couple of months and then hit the road. They need some good salesmen at my local Car Max. You would fit right in.
Michael Steele is an example of what is wrong with the Republican Party elite. They think that if they campaign for funds and claim they are for the old Republican platforms, they will be successful. But this is a new game, and it is CONSERVATIVE Republicans who need to be running the party, not the current ones who throw money away on RINOs when conservative challengers need and deserve it much more. Support must be earned by voting records, not by years of questionable service (like Specter, Murkowski, Snowe, Collins, Lugar and others).
I keep hearing that the Black Community will never vote
for anyone but the Democrat candidate. This is wrong, I
am sure that lots of the Black people I know would never
sell their country down the river just to vote for the
Democrat man/woman.
Right now we see our counntry is hurting because the Dems
don’t care if we give our country to the Islamics. We
hear that our country has not ‘right’ to be considered
the best in the world. This is wrong and many a great
black man or woman worked hard to make our country what
it is today. We have to realize that some country is going to be rated at the top country so why should our
current president want us to drop out of the top spot that so many good men and women both black and white fought and died to keep it at the top helping other
countries that needed the help. We know that many of the
countries reaching for the top spot will never lend a
hand to a country that needs it. They will merely take
it over and insist on running it their way.
As for our laws and our constitution – there is really no
country that can compare. Sharia law is an affrontery to
humanity. We do not want a law that can demand a boy’s
arms be cut off, a girl’s eyes to be gouged out, or a
man’s spine be cut to make him paralyzed. This is wrong.
Our president must change his ideas of hurting and harming our population. God Bless Martin Luther King, he
was a real man and he did not condone what today’s
president and today’s Democrat pols want to do just to
gain power.
Wow, elderly tess. Thank you for that. Beautifully said.