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.