by Dish Staff
Steinglass assesses the damage:
In the face of the far right’s effective veto over the congressional GOP, Democrats have given up on passing any significant legislation either until they regain control of the House, an impossibly remote prospect, or until the Tea Party somehow withers away, which shows no signs of happening. The Democrats’ acceptance of their inability to accomplish anything significant has left them unable to campaign on big themes. The party feels exhausted, still convinced of the need for immigration reform, climate change legislation and expanded benefits for the middle class, but unable to imagine a political pathway to get there. If the Democrats lose the Senate this fall, it may be technically due to an unlucky roster of elections and the traditional midterm setback for the party in power. But it will also be a verdict on the party’s inability to conjure a sense of élan or vision in the face of the political paralysis tea-party Republicans have induced.
Tomasky agrees that, thus far, DC’s dysfunction has harmed Democrats more than Republicans:
Too much of Obama’s America is just too worn down. In that sense, the scorched-earth campaign has won. But Republicans should remember that in 2016, that America will be back, and bigger by a few percentage points than before, and still hungry to win the fights the obstructionists have blocked.
In other midterm analysis, Bernstein recommends taking Senate forecasts with a big pinch of salt:
I’ll continue to emphasize that the headline numbers suggest unearned precision. Most of these modelers, most of the time, don’t really make unsupported claims – but the numbers often suggest more certainty than the prose claims, and both the headline writers and the chart designers rarely include important caveats.
So we shouldn’t trust any single model, or even a single average of the various models. Instead, the best way to read all of this is to focus on the range, both in individual models when supplied by the authors, and across models. That’s going to give smart readers uncertainty, and that’s exactly what we all should be experiencing right now. If you want certainty, try the U.S. House: It’s going to stay Republican. But we don’t know who is going to win the Senate, and there’s a very good chance we won’t on Election Day morning, or on Election Day night – until Alaska comes in, and even then we may have to wait for Louisiana to hold a runoff to really know.
(Image: the latest Senate forecast from The Upshot.)
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