Sabato’s Crystal Ball: THE OTHER “HOUSE” ELECTIONS
08/07/2008:
Sabato’s Crystal Ball’s Larry J. Sabato says, THE OTHER “HOUSE” ELECTIONS: STATEHOUSES ’08
Leave the presidential contest aside for the moment. At other levels of politics, the Republicans may eventually file the 2008 campaign under the Double Jeopardy category of “It Just Keeps Getting Worse”. Surely, GOP House strategists are asking themselves whether they are cursed this year.
Just take a look at New York’s 13th district, which has been a Republican stronghold on Staten Island. GOP Congressman Vito Fossella was breezing to his sixth full term until the wee hours of May 1st, when Fossella was arrested for drunk driving with a small child in the car–a child that turned out to be a daughter fathered with his mistress. The career of yet another “family values” Republican quickly unraveled and Fossella announced he would not seek reelection on May 20th.
The GOP still had a good chance to hold the seat, and coalesced around a wealthy, retired Wall Street executive named Frank Powers. Poor Mr. Powers, only 67, dropped dead of a heart attack on June 22. Now the various GOP powers-that-be in the unlucky 13th are having trouble finding a worthy successor. The probable choice, former state Assemblyman and “hot dog restaurateur” Robert Straniere (R) couldn’t even get the top GOP officials to come to his “unity rally” a few weeks ago. and almost by default, the Democrats now have a good chance to capture the seat with New York City Councilman Mike McMahon, their probable nominee.
As a result of this and pro-Democratic changes in several other contests, the Crystal Ball is lifting our estimate of Democratic House gains to a range of +9 to +16, which will take Democrats to a total of 245 to 252 seats (only 218 are needed to control the chamber). Keep in mind that when we started our projections for this cycle in late 2007, we had Democrats picking up +6 to +12.
Fortunes can change quickly in politics, and by the late autumn, we could move the estimate in the other direction–or expand Democratic gains further. But if Democrats are headed for a good November, how low could the Republicans go? Given current trends in both the House and Senate elections, it’s far from impossible that the Democrats in 2009 could approach the margins they last enjoyed after the 1992 election, before the Republican landslide of 1994. The Congress that met in 1993 and 1994 was comprised of 258 Democratic House members and 57 Democratic U.S. senators.
Enough of the U.S. House of Representatives for now, and onto another set of “houses”. In recent weeks in the Crystal Ball, we have covered not just the November elections for U.S. House but also the U.S. Senate match-ups and the presidential battle for the Electoral College. The last category of noteworthy national politics is state-based. There are eleven governorships up for grabs from coast to coast, six currently held the Democrats and five by the Republicans…
3 Responses to “Sabato’s Crystal Ball: THE OTHER “HOUSE” ELECTIONS”
Of course it is going to get worse for the Republicans. Demographic changes in the U.S. will lock in the Democratic advantage so that anyone interested in politics will have to be a Democrat.
If you want to see the future, it was the re-election campaigns of STeve Cohen and Albert Wynn. The race for those seats was settled in the primary. That is what the future will be for politics. The federal government should push states to have there primaries in early September so that the U.S. House and Senate do not end up with lame ducks hanging around for almost a years (one of the reasons that Albert Wynn retired after losing in the Feb 2008 Democratic primary.
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Before you coronate McMhaon as the NY 13 Democratic nominee, please note he has a primary against 2006 Democratic nominee Steve Harrison, who recived a higher percentage of the vote than any Democrat in the district in a generation last cycle.