Not all the major polling models give Republicans a clear edge to capture the Senate this autumn, but most do. The New York Times’ “The Upshot” puts the chances at 65%, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight most recently called it “in the neighborhood of 60-40” and the Washington Post’s “Election Lab” gives the GOP a 51% shot. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium is the outlier, giving the Democrats a 70% chance of holding the majority. The obvious reasons for the GOP’s advantage are technical, as we wrote earlier this month. More vulnerable Democrats are up for re-election this year than vulnerable Republicans. The GOP needs to take away six seats from the Democrats, and is already nearly assured of winning three; of the six or seven competitive races (depending on who’s counting), Republicans must win just three to gain a majority. Add in Barack Obama’s low approval ratings and the fact that the out-of-power party generally does better in midterm elections, and you have a nice bloodless political-science description of the Republican advantage.
Yet the technical factors don’t quite explain why Democrats feel so listless this autumn. Democratic spin doctors trying to get upbeat media coverage are resorting to state-by-state descriptions of specifics that play in their favour. It is true that things look better for Democrats at a granular level, which is why Mr Wang thinks they will hold the Senate. And the Democrats’ technology-driven ground game, which added a percentage point or so to Barack Obama’s vote total in 2012, may do so again this year. But when Democratic flacks promote these sorts of inside-baseball stories, it only highlights their lack of a persuasive overarching political narrative. This autumn, it is simply not clear what the Democrats want, or what they are promising to do for the people they want to vote for them.
via The Senate midterms: Why the Democrats will probably lose | The Economist.
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