I am so happy to see that Robert Creamer is challenging conventional wisdom. In speaking to people all over my conservative town there are those who are adamantly against the President and the Democrats that borders on hate. Many however are simply seeking direction. Many really do not care who they vote for as long as the case can be made that a solution will be forthcoming.
We will not be able to change the adamant Tea Party type. Their level of misinformation that leads to their mistrust and irrational hate will take years to resolve as at this point it is really a psychological illness. I am a liberal but I am not in a state that I cannot vote for anyone in any party of any persuasion who will advance the country in a manner we all know is necessary.
It is incumbent upon us to get the word contrasting progress going forward as opposed to ever increasing tax cuts that debilitates the fabric of our country as it causes a transfer of wealth to the top of the upper class.
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My Book: As I See It: Class Warfare: The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom
Book’s Webpage: http://books.egbertowillies.com – Twitter: http://twitter.com/egbertowillies
With two weeks to go in the 2010 mid-term elections there are a number of good reasons to believe — contrary to most conventional wisdom — that Democrats will still control the House once the smoke clears from the electoral battlefield.
For the last several years Nate Silver, of fivethirtyeight.com, now owned by the New York Times, has become the gold standard for projecting electoral outcomes. For some time, Silver has projected that Democrats would lose control of the House and maintain control of the Senate. Though he quotes an 82% odds that Democrats will continue to control the Senate, he currently gives daunting 73% odds of Republican takeover in the House. He says that the consensus forecast has converged on the loss of 50 Democratic House seats, which would give Republicans enough seats to control the gavel. Not so good, right?
But that’s not the end of the story. Silver qualifies his projections with a major caveat. Saturday, he wrote:
However, there is considerable uncertainty in the forecast because of the unusually large number of House seats now in play. A gain of as large as 70-80 seats is not completely out of the question if everything broke right for Republicans. Conversely, if Democrats managed to see a material rebound in their national standing over the final two weeks of the campaign, they could lose as few as 20-30 seats, as relatively few individual districts are certain pickups for Republicans….. In many of the in-play seats the Republican margins that have been used to project a big Republican win are very narrow. Even a subtle shift in the overall political atmosphere over the next two weeks could cause a major shift in outcome.
Silver himself predicts that if things continue on the current trajectory, Democrats will end with 207.7 seats — about ten seats shy of a majority.
But there are more than enough seats on bubble to make up the difference. Among the most important seats held by Democratic incumbents that could go either way are: Salazar, CO-3; Grayson FL-24; Titus NV-3; Herseth-Sandlin SD-AL; Pomeroy, ND-AL; Kagen WI-8; Kissell, NC-8; Davis, TN-4; Acuri, NY-24; Hall, NY-19; Foster, IL-14; Schauer, MI-7; Marshall, GA-8; Mitchel, AZ-5; McNerney CA-11; Owens NY-23. And there are more.
There are a number of reasons to believe that — contrary to the "consensus" view — Democrats will in fact protect their House majority:
1). The Pew Research Center released a study last week showing that most of the major polls being used this year poll only voters with landlines — not cell phones. It notes that the increasing reliance of many Americans — particularly young people — on cell phones as their only telephone introduces an increasing pro-Republican bias into many polls.
In reporting on the Pew Poll, Mark Blumenthal of Huffington Post’s Pollster.com wrote:
Pollsters have been reluctant to sample and call Americans on their cell phones, partly because it costs more and partly because federal law requires hand dialing any call placed to a cell phone, which makes such calls less efficient and puts cell phone polling off limits to automated survey methodologies.
For the last four years, the Pew Research Center has conducted public opinion surveys involving separate, parallel samples of both landline and mobile phones. Their design allows for a comparison between combined samples of landline and cell interviews and samples based only on landline calls.
Before the 2008 election, they found that calling only landline phones introduced a "small but real" bias in favor of John McCain, an average bias of 2.3 percentage points on the margin on nine national surveys conducted between June and October of that year.
This year, according to today’s report, the Pew Center finds that sampling only landline phones creates an even bigger bias — "differences of four to six points on the margin" – in favor of the Republicans.
2). For many weeks Republicans and their allies have enjoyed a major advantage over Democrats in overall communication volume, due mainly to the unlimited corporate spending allowed by the Citizens United Case. But over the next two weeks there will be increasing parity of the levels of communication swing voters will hear from the two sides. This will be true both because when you have less money you spend it when it matters most — at the end; and because the value of marginal increases in persuasion communication diminishes as the volume goes up.
Robert Creamer: Two Weeks Out — Nine Reasons Why Democrats Will Keep Control of the House
