Nate Silver of 538.com today rejiggers his assessment of the midterm elections to reflect a bunch of new numbers that show Republicans with a bigger edge in the generic ballot.
If Republicans outperformed generic-ballot ratings, as they usually do, Silver projects a worst-case scenario for Democrats of 79 seats in the House switching from blue to red based on the surveys of Rasmussen Reports.
Silver puts the more likely scenario at 51 seats going to the GOP — 11 more than they need to take over the majority.
And while he holds out that much smaller Democratic losses are possible — say 20 or 30 seats — his warning to Democrats is that the worst case scenario is more likely to occur and is more catastrophic than previously imagined.
Worth reading.
“The point is not necessarily that these are the most likely scenarios — we certainly ought not to formulate a judgment based on Rasmussen polls alone, as the jury is still out on whether the substantial house effect they’ve displayed this cycle is a feature or a bug. But these sorts of scenarios are frankly on the table. If Democrats were to lose 50, 60, 70 or even more House seats, it would not totally shock me. Nor would it shock me if they merely lost 15, or 20. But their downside case could be very far down.”
