Eugene Robinson speculates why the 2014 midterm elections might not be shaping up to be the "wave election" many had predicted months ago:
The [Republican] candidates may be plausible, but they’re running on the wrong issues. Rather, the wrong issue: the Affordable Care Act.
“Repeal Obamacare” remains a rallying cry for the GOP’s activist base — perhaps less for the law itself than the president for whom it is named. But for independent voters, undoing health-care reform is not the sure-fire issue Republicans hoped it would be.
The program is in effect. Some people who previously could not obtain health insurance now have it. Most people are unaffected. Despite all the dire GOP predictions, the sky has not fallen.
Yet Republican candidates say otherwise, describing a dystopian breakdown of the nation’s health-care system that simply has not occurred. And they go all tongue-tied when asked how they could manage to repeal Obamacare in the face of a certain veto by Obama — or, more tellingly, just what they would put in place if they somehow succeeded.
But forget wave, or even ripple, election. Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium
sees a much different outcome at this time:
Long-term forecasting is based on methods that worked nearly perfectly in 2010-2012. We will soon install code to display the long-term forecast, which is also based purely on polls. Currently, the long-term forecast for Democratic control on Election Day is 65%, about 2-1 odds in favor.
Now, the usual caveats apply (i.e., "It's two months until the election!!"), and Wang is swimming against the tide of conventional wisdom and most, if not all, of the polling community. Not to mention Wang is putting his probabilities in the realm of a "work in progress." But, given that he was dead on in earlier projections (we recall him picking all of the 2012 Senate winners and nailing the Presidential results), one would be stupid to dismiss his analysis even at this relatively early stage in the midterm election cycle.
