Despite predictions otherwise, don’t expect a major political sea change this year.
This fall’s midterm elections haven’t been in the news much as of late, which is being dominated by chaos in Ferguson, Missouri and the Middle East in general, but they were being hyped quite a bit over the last year or so. It’s hard to remember now, but it was quite fashionable last fall for liberals to argue that the unpopular Republican led shutdown of the federal government would lead to Republicans being tossed out in mass. That was follow by it becoming popular for conservatives to argue that problems with the Healthcare.gov website meant that Democrats were doomed.
Unfortunately for partisans on both sides it doesn’t look like either of these two scenarios will come to pass. This fall all members of the House of Representatives and one third of the Senate seats will be up for grabs. But most of the new data driven predicting based websites think that the House is well beyond the reach of the Democrats, and the only major change we could see would be a GOP takeover of the Senate.
How likely is such a change? Well it depends who you ask. Nate Silver’s FiveThrityEight site has the Republicans as very slight favorites to take control of the Senate; The Upshot, the data project of The New York Times, gives the GOP a 61 percent chance of taking control; and independent predictor Sam Wang gives the Democrats a 52 percent chance of keeping a majority of some size in the Senate.
So if you’re looking for a big wave election this year you are probably going to be really disappointed. Obama and the Democrats won’t see themselves roundly rejected, and the current Republican Party won’t be going away anytime soon either. But that doesn’t mean this fall’s campaign will be boring. Because control of the Senate could depend on just a few Senate elections, and there are a lot of close elections for Senate this cycle, the campaign could get really interesting.
But as for a 2006 or 2010 style landslide? Well let’s just say don’t hold your breath.
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