The GOP Brand and the 2010 Elections

A point I’ve been wanting to make about the coming midterm elections is that a lot of commentators seem to me to be operating with a misleading implicit model of how these things work. The way they see it, the status quo in any given pre-election House is a kind of equilibrium, and moving the House off that equilibrium requires force. Since the Democrats currently have a large majority, it follows that to move from a large Democratic majority to parity would require an enormous amount of force.

Not only am I old enough to remember when picking Nancy Pelosi to stay on as Minority Leader doomed Democrats to never regain the majority, I’m old to even remember way back in 2005 when choosing her made it impossible for them to take it in the first place. And today:

I briefly noted this yesterday, but it turns out that state legislative outcomes are highly correlated with House of Representatives elections. For example:

I think John Boehner has a reasonable take on the question of bipartisanship:

Short Stack, the Post's book blog, co-author of a new book on presidential efforts to pass health-care reform, to weigh in on the current tussle. Moderate Democrats, he says, are making a terrible tactical error:

House Speaker John Boehner has struggled to lead his Republican majority in the face of challenges from a hard core of conservative newcomers who are demanding a much harder line against President Obama and the Democrats on spending cuts, and tax and entitlement reform. 

By Dylan Matthews quarkpt asks:

There’s a body of research showing the relationship between early generic congressional ballot polling and outcomes of House elections. Harry Joe has run the numbers on the most up-to-date polls, and if the model based on past trends holds, Democrats can expert their worst midterm performance ever: