Might As Well Hit The Governors' Races

I haven't been fully engaged in this year's gubernatorial races until lately, mostly because they're so depressing, but here's my predictions for how they play out on Tuesday....

Alabama--Bentley by 21

Alaska--Parnell by 17

Arizona--Brewer by 15 (often overlooked in the lexicon of unimaginably bad GOP candidates nonetheless poised to have easy victories this week)

Arkansas--Beebe by 15 (a few weeks ago, I thought the tidal wave in Arkansas was so big that it was even gonna sweep Beebe away in the same way Roy Barnes was in Georgia in 2002, but a couple polls since then have show Beebe still comfortably ahead and have changed my mind)

California--Brown by 8 (the one major race that Democrats should be doing everything they can to lose so they don't take ownership over ungovernable California is, naturally, the one race breaking decidedly their way)

Colorado--Tancredo by 1 (one of the biggest upsets of the nights....the wingnut tidal wave will push Tancredo past the finish line and render Hickenlooper the biggest imbecile of the year for managing to piss this one away)

Connecticut--Foley by 3 (another last-minute Republican upset, of which we're gonna see dozens all across the country)

Florida--Scott by 5 (Cell phone gate and the insane fallout from the Meek-Crist pissing match in the Senate race will help the GOP crook pull ahead in the clutch...along with the usual Republican overperformance in Florida polls)

Georgia--Deal by 11 (even if Deal got caught on camera murdering a nun on top of his dozens of additional scandals, the (R) next to his name would still lead him to victory in Georgia this year)

Hawaii--Abercrombie by 6 (the upside to this is when Inouye or Akaka die in office, we'll at least get a Democratic Senator appointed to fill their shoes)

Idaho--Otter by 44

Illinois--Brady by 4 (simply no way in the wake of Blago that we were gonna hold this one)

Iowa--Branstad by 11 (Iowans are gonna be damn sorry six months from now when they remember how much of a douche this guy is)

Kansas--Brownback by 38

Maine--LePage by 7 (another idiotic three-way race helps the wingnut win....will allegedly sane voters ever learn?)

Maryland--O'Malley by 10

Massachusetts--Baker by 2 (third-party candidate implosion at the last minute tips this one to the Republicans)

Michigan--Snyder by 23 (gotta love how the Dems are able to win these big-state governorships at the worst time....the eight years in between redistricting fights...before handing them back to the GOP)

Minnesota--Emmer by 3 (another upset as Democrat Mark Dayton falls apart in the final days of the campaign....I've been watching this movie for 20 years now regarding Minnesota gubernatorial races)

Nebraska--Heineman by 47

Nevada--Sandoval by 18 (who's ever bright idea it was to put a second Reid on the ticket in Nevada this year should be shot)

New Hampshire--Lynch by 3 (Democrat barely hangs on with GOP wave in his state)

New Mexico--Martinez by 14 (wins so big that Democrats Heinrich and Teague both lose their House seats)

New York--Cuomo by 20

Ohio--Kasich by 4 (the fact that Kasich has home-field advantage in Columbus, the region of Ohio that has been moving most towards Democrats in recent years, will be what keeps Strickland from scoring a second term)

Oklahoma--Fallin by 18

Oregon--Dudley by 2

Pennsylvania--Corbett by 9

Rhode Island--Chafee by 8 (looked like he was gonna win even before Caprio's meltdown)

South Carolina--Haley by 14

South Dakota--Daugaard by 13

Tennessee--Haslam by 23

Texas--Perry by 14 (some dreamers still think Bill White is gonna make this close...wrong year)

Vermont--Shumlin by 6 (rare case of a Democrat that gets late momentum)

Wisconsin--Walker by 10

Wyoming--Mead by 47

Right now, there are 25 Democratic Governors and 25 Republicans. After next Tuesday, the breakdown will be 14 Democratic Governors and 36 Republicans counting Tancredo.

Absolute Last Call on the Election

It looks as though my September for 110 Republican seats gained in the House was overly bullish for the GOP, although I submit that conditions on the ground at the time made such a scenario possible. I'm now rolling back my calls for Republican gains back to my original instinct from earlier this summer....in the 92 range. A number of Democrats who I suspected were endangered have showed enough polling data to suggest they're not, but much of this polling remains dubious. Two polls showed Ben Chandler in KY-06 with a comfortable lead but the latest shows him with a scant four-point lead. Meanwhile, also as predicted, other polls are coming out to show Democrats long believed untouchable to be very vulnerable. Solomon Ortiz in Texas is the latest to be caught flat-footed.

Whatever the case, conditions are still rotten and far more rotten than what most believe. I fully expect a bare minimum of 80 lost seats for Democrats in the House.

Moving onto the Senate, I'll update most of my calls with predicted margins.

Alabama--Shelby by 31

Alaska--Miller by 3 (Murkowski's write-in campaign will come up short because of the obvious inconvenience of it, as Shelley Sekula-Gibbs can attest to, managing to lose by 10 points to a Democrat among an electorate of suburban Houston oil barons!)

Arizona--McCain by 43

Arkansas--Boozman by 28 (Even I wouldn't have thought Blanche Lincoln would underperform Obama in AR, but now I suspect she will)

California--Boxer by 3 (This morning's LA Times poll showing her up by eight is bullshit but I do suspect the SEIU's ground game will save her)

Colorado--Buck by 3 (Barring another major gaffe, suburban Denver voters that swing CO elections will hold their nose and cast a protest vote for this clown)

Connecticut--Blumenthal by 10 (McMahon's momentum that I thought would guide her to victory last month was short-lived)

Delaware--Coons by 15 (O'Donnell has proven an even worse candidate than I suspected last month at this time)

Florida--Rubio by 21 (Disgusting that the divided non-Rubio vote couldn't consolidate and keep this very dangerous GOP all-star out of the Senate....Crist vs. Rubio would probably produce a Crist win)

Georgia--Isaakson by 23

Hawaii--Inouye by 14 (This will be closer than a lot of people think with plenty thinking Inouye has overstayed his welcome)

Idaho--Crapo by 45

Illinois--Kirk by 3 (Alexi overplayed by calling Kirk a "traitor"....otherwise this race may have broken the other way....a perfect storm for the GOP in the wake of Blagojevich and an incredibly bad Democratic Senate candidate capable of pushing this unlikely state to the GOP)

Indiana--Coats by 22 (Another horribly wasted opportunity mismanaged from the get-go. Rot in hell, Evan Bayh)

Iowa--Grassley by 30

Kansas--Moran by 40

Kentucky--Paul by 10 (Conway will slowly lose support by those who grow into disrespecting him because of the over-the-top Aqua Buddha ad. He wasn't gonna win, but he could have had a two-point race here with the quality campaign he was running up to that point)

Louisiana--Vitter by 15

Maryland--Mikulski by 17

Missouri--Blunt by 10

Nevada--Angle by 3 (The blowback from Reid's monthslong ad campaign that "this woman is crazy" backfired during their only debate when she did not appear crazy. She remains a walking gaffe machine but Reid is too weak and too pitiful to effectively take advantage of it. The SEIU could still theoretically pull this out for Reid, but I'm not optimistic.)

New Hampshire--Ayotte by 8 (Crazy how silent this race has been this month)

New York A--Schumer by 37

New York B--Gillibrand by 16 (DioGuardi needed a surge of momentum and a bully pulpit to win as I thought he would last month. He didn't get the surge and the insanely awful Carl Palladino stole his bully pulpit and wasted it.)

North Carolina--Burr by 16 (Another pathetic waste)

North Dakota--Hoeven by 50

Ohio--Portman by 20 (The saddest waste of all. How do you lose by 20 points in Ohio to Bush's former outsourcing guru?)

Oklahoma--Coburn by 42

Oregon--Wyden by 16

Pennsylvania--Toomey by 4 (I think Sestak peaked a week too soon)

South Carolina--De Mint by 46 (Greene may finish third place here)

South Dakota--Thune uncontested

Utah--Lee by 43

Vermont--Leahy by 31

Washington--Murray by 2 (By no means are we out of the woods here)

West Virginia--Raese by 12 (Breaks BIG for Raese in the closing week, effectively leaving Manchin with nothing more than the 2008 Obama voters as everybody else will buy into Raese's "don't give Obama an ally" argument. Raese's "hicky" ad came two weeks too early. The anger by WV voters will be long forgotten by November 2.)

Wisconsin--Johnson by 4 (Feingold could have pulled this one out if he had taken the challenge seriously. He was his own worst enemy and his late surge will be too little, too late.)

The Race Is NOT "Tightening Up"

Every election cycle it's the same story. A combination of obsessive poll watching and wishful thinking triggers the punditocracy to doubt conventional wisdom about the advantage one party has had as soon as a couple of conflicting polls turn up. We saw it at various points in 2006, where Republicans briefly breathed a sigh of relief that things were getting better for their team. Even in 1994, the Democrats thought they were out of the woods a few times when some polls swung the slightest bit in their favor. Now it's time for the biennial tradition in 2010, with column after column and talking head after talking head telling us the tide has turned and Democrats are on their way to reducing losses.

The only problem is that it's not at all true, and even if it was, the fundamentals of the election favor the opposition party by every conceivable metric, far more so even than 1994 and 2006. This means two things.....the climate will almost assuredly worsen further as more low-information voters become engaged and that late-breaking voters will go predominately to the challenger. In the last two wave midterm elections, losses on election day ended up far worse than most imagined one month before the election. Few would have expected, for example, that Chris Carney would have so handily spanked Don Sherwood in his conservative PA-10 district on October 7 until they saw the actual returns on November 7. The problems that the incumbent party has in a toxic political party very seldom resolve themselves in a month...they usually worsen.

Now that's not to say that vulnerable Democrats in blue states like Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray won't win. My expectation is that both will....just as Ted Kennedy and Dianne Feinstein ended up prevailing in 1994 after a flirtation with vulnerability. But other races will go the other direction, such as West Virginia, Wisconsin, and probably Connecticut as well, and we won't even get into the lower-profile House races where Democrats nobody considers vulnerable today will be fired by voters on November 2 because of the national tide.

Yet people that should know better are nonetheless convinced the worst of the Democrats' problems are over....that they've moved votes since August...that they've fired up a lethargic base....and that most of the undecided voters are Democrats who are likely to come home. Don't buy it. To whatever extent it is occurring, it's the ebb and flow of public (and private) polling which produces a lot of very bad samples. But the real hilarity of it all is that the polling hasn't changed that much except for a few Democratic candidates who have seen an uptick. Most of them are in worse standing than they were in August. Just ask Russ Feingold, Dick Blumenthal, and Joe Manchin for just a few examples. And for the majority of Democrats, their standing will get only worse leading up to November 2.