Whether from a tweaked convergence of methodology or a universally recognized dispersal of Democratic incompetence, the midterm's leading handicappers have, over the weekend, come to eerily similar forecasts.
On Friday, the NYT's Upshot catapulted the odds of a GOP Senate from 50 percent to 61 percent; last night, they advanced them to 64 percent (due chiefly to polling shifts in Iowa, Colorado and Alaska). FiveThirtyEight now gives Republicans a 60 percent chance of taking the majority. (If you're straining to see an upside, Silver estimates a mere 17 percent chance of a 52-seat Republican majority.) At Princeton Election Consortium, Sam Wang says "current conditions" are a 61 percent chance of a GOP majority.
Wang's Election Day forecast, however, remains contrarian. He still gives the Dems a 70 percent chance of retaining control, since, in his psephological opinion, the Upshot and 538 continue to place too much importance on political science's "fundamentals," such as the Democrats' midterm disadvantage of a sitting president of their own party. Recent history, says Wang, has diminished that disadvantage.
My instincts--admittedly a poor forecaster when stacked up against Wang's "Meta-Margins" and "MATLAB" computer codes--tell me that the anti-Wang handicappers are correct. In general this seems a particularly lousy year for the Dems, what with the lopsided number of Democratic seats playing defense, a Democratic president's poor approval ratings, the right's traditionally higher electoral engagement, the recent immigration kerfuffle, and now a Middle East war.