Data guru Harry Enten: GOP in best midterm position in 80 years, predicts 236-241 seats

[Unelectable Bystander]

IndyRep has been banging this drum a lot recently, but I do think it's worth noting the absurd gap between predictions like these and predictions that races like PA-SEN are tossups. It's one or the other, folks.

Not really.  There are far fewer Senate races than House races, so candidate quality in individual Senate races is important.  One way to look at it: if this was a totally neutral environment, who would be favored in PA-SEN?  I'm inclined to think Fetterman would be at least a small favorite.  With that as a starting point, it's reasonable to consider the race a tossup in a pro-R environment; similarly, if it was a pro-D environment I'd expect Fetterman to win easily.

In the House, a 25-30 seat gain for Republicans is right where I'm at based on fundamentals, although I may lower this if it looks like Democratic anger/enthusiasm is sustained following the release of the Dobbs decision.

The house is the same thing though. They have had incumbents like Young Kim, Fitzpatrick, Crenshaw, and Mike Garcia while the Dems have titans who managed to run even with Biden. They’ll be lucky to win any race that was less than Trump +15

[Unelectable Bystander]

At the risk of sounding like a partisan hack, I'm gonna say it anyway: It's actually something we're talking about this, given what the GOP has done recent years. Not just their denial about Trump and 1/6 and extreme political stances, they haven't introduced a single piece of legislation that does advance the average American. NOTA. Save a few random members, they haven't negotiated in good faith about a single piece of legislation to help the average Joe. If anything, they should lose seats from here, not gain.

This is the result of a society and a media climate that refuses to acknowledge that one side could possibly be objectively superior to the other. Both sides must always be treated the exact same way and depicted in the exact same light.

This doesn’t make any sense. If you take a poll of all media in the entire country and asked if the left is morally superior to the right, they would vote yes by a margin of probably 75-25%. If you ask all Americans the same question, they would vote no by roughly the same margin.

The media apparatuses are lopsided in a way that doesn’t even attempt to appear objective. Imagine the hysteria if a late night host brought on Donald Trump and talked about his agenda using terms like “we”. Imagine the hysteria (and rightly so) if a lunatic attempted to take out a left wing Supreme Court justice. What you are actually pouting about is that ordinary Americans don’t buy this “superior left” nonsense even though the media is ordering them to do so. Thus, blame the voters and the institutions as always.

[Unelectable Bystander]

At the risk of sounding like a partisan hack, I'm gonna say it anyway: It's actually something we're talking about this, given what the GOP has done recent years. Not just their denial about Trump and 1/6 and extreme political stances, they haven't introduced a single piece of legislation that does advance the average American. NOTA. Save a few random members, they haven't negotiated in good faith about a single piece of legislation to help the average Joe. If anything, they should lose seats from here, not gain.

The implication of this statement is that if voters choose republicans over democrats in this midterm, they will be essentially saying “I prefer doing absolutely nothing rather than doing what democrats are proposing”. This is what I believe to be the case. Voters have and will vote for “nobody” (even in extreme cases like the NJ truck driver) over a democrat, which speaks to the current administration being way too liberal or way too incompetent for Americans. I wish the answer was too liberal, but I think it’s due to the incompetence