Michael Barone:
Which party is going to control the House and hold a majority in the Senate in January 2017? Even if you regard the presidential contest as over — a proposition for which there is powerful evidence, including Donald Trump’s current campaign message choices — the answers to those questions are, respectively, mildly and very unclear.
The Trump campaign has a legitimate gripe against mainstream media for their nonstop coverage of the groping charges against him and their downplaying — or complete blackout — of the WikiLeaks and other revelations about Hillary Clinton and her supporters inside and outside the Obama administration. Does she really, as she swore under oath, have no recollection of key facts about her e-mail servers?
Her advisers’ contempt for the Roman Catholic faith and willingness to use politics and government to transform it should put a chill up the spine of anyone who thinks the Framers got it right with the First Amendment in banning the federal government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion.
Mainstream (and other) media were happy to give Trump lots of airtime in the primaries, while the Clinton folks, we learn, tried to manipulate the nomination process in his favor. But the First Amendment guarantees a free press, not a fair one. Any Republican candidate has to expect unfair treatment, and one vulnerable to damaging last-minute stories maybe shouldn’t run.
So far, the evidence suggests that the effect of all this on down-ballot races is less than you might think. Americans have been voting mostly straight party tickets for 20 years, as the major parties’ presidential and congressional candidates have been closely aligned. The Republicans are obviously not so aligned this year. The fact that Trump hasn’t been endorsed by the men who won six of the past seven Republican nominations underlines the point.
Polling conducted between September 26 (when the first debate was) and October 12, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten, shows Trump losing ground in all the 26 states with Senate races being polled. But it also shows Republican candidates gaining ground — some a little, some a lot — in 24 of the 26 states. The exceptions are Illinois, where Republican incumbent Mark Kirk has always been the underdog, and Colorado.
Senate races are relatively high-visibility contests. Enten’s numbers show that even as Trump’s chances have fallen, Republican Senate candidates have gained ground in key races in Wisconsin (where many had given up on incumbent Ron Johnson), Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Nevada (the one possible Republican gain). His website rates the chances of Republicans limiting their net loss to three, which would guarantee their majority, as slightly under 50 percent.
There’s not much publicly available polling in House races — aside from the two parties’ committees’ releases, which understandably are limited to those showing their side winning or doing better than expected. But information about district demographics provided by the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman helps identify districts where a Trump downdraft could cost Republicans seats.
While it seems that Trump’s obnoxious vulgarity, racism, sexism, admission of it being smart to cheat contractors and workers out of their hard earned money for a job well done, depict hard working tax payers as stupid, disregard of the Constitution and due process, and Lord knows where to stop hasn’t been as harmful to down tickets as expected (but then, what is to be expected of this disaster of an election?), its hard to say what each hour brings and to what extent people will still stand behind Senators who endorse him- or for that matter, the rabid bigots and batshit crazies that will turn on the Senator who has to disavow him.
They certainly have to walk a tight rope and it doesn’t help that they have a loose cannon constantly firing shots at them.
I like 538 but I also like Predictwise which also factors in data from bookies and prediction markets. They also tend to put more weight on the more recent Senate polling, 538 doesn’t
For any posters willing to risk real money on the GOP controlling the Senate they odds are about 4-1 both PredictIt and IEM (Iowa Electronic Markets) will be happy to allow you to wager/predict.