Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean is going against the (increasing) political wisdom that the song “Wipe Out” may be the theme song played when the votes come in on Democrats running for House of Representatives. He predicts the Dems will hold the House:
A pipe dream? In fact, conventional wisdom has always been fluid.
Even the meticulous Nate Silver, in making his prediction that its highly like the GOP will make big gains puts in a hedge big enough adorn your front yard:
So, if you force it to pick an number, our model projects a Republican gain of about 48 seats (that projection could change, of course, by Election Day). But because of the high amount of uncertainty intrinsic to the forecast, I couldn’t really take any great dispute with a model that made a “best guess” of 56 seats, or 37 seats, instead….
…..I’ll acknowledge that this puts us in a somewhat awkward position. We’ll probably get a lot of credit if we make a “best guess” of a gain of 48 Republican seats, and they in fact win 47, or 50 — or 48 exactly. But really, we think the value the model provides to New York Times readers is that it is smart enough to know what it can’t and doesn’t know.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.