Friday, September 12, 2014

Hey, GOP, Don't Get Cocky

By Douglas V. Gibbs

The word on the street is that the Republicans are going to do quite well in this year's mid-term election.  After a blow-out landslide win for the Tea Party Republicans in 2010, surely folks are sick enough of the liberal left's failures and tyranny to bring back another massive GOP win.

There is nothing like a President Barack Obama to turn off voters, and swing the pendulum back towards politicians that claim to be for a more limited style of government.

Don't hold your breath.

Some sources are even saying that the Republicans taking the Senate in 2014 is practically a shoe-in.  All they need is eight seats, and ten look like they may flip to red.

My message to the GOP is that I agree, there is a good chance to begin spinning the merry-go-round back in the right direction, but don't get cocky.

“We’re currently projecting that Republicans have a better chance than Democrats to control the Senate, but it's still up for grabs,” FiveThirtyEight political analyst Harry Enten said. “The current number that we're going for is a 62.2 percent chance that Republicans will take control of the United States Senate in November.”

“We’re calculating the percentage chance that Republicans will win each seat, and then we're adding up those probabilities, and then we come up with an overall top line,” he said. “We believe that Republicans do have a better chance of controlling the Senate than Democrats.”

The projections for each race, Enten explained, don’t have to do with how many percentage points a given candidate leads their opponent; instead, it has to do with how consistent that lead is.

“Remember, President Obama only had a small lead through most of the 2012 campaign, but it was consistent, so the percentage chance of winning was higher,” Enten said.

And he pointed to another 2012 reality that continues to ring true in FiveThirtyEight’s 2014 projections.

“If you look at the map where we're projecting Republicans to win seats from Democrats, these are all states where Mitt Romney won and most of them are states where Mitt Romney won handily in 2012,” Enten said.

The numbers seem to add up, but we can never take for granted other factors that the Democrats bring to elections, such as their incredible ability to use social media, the massive propaganda machine they have in the liberal media, and the GOP's uncanny ability to drive daggers into the hearts of their own campaigns.

Well, that, and yeah, unsavory tactics by the liberal left, too (ACORN, and the dead rising to vote in Chicago comes to mine).

So, before we start popping corks off of champagne bottles, let's play the full four quarters of the election, do the work necessary to fight the good fight, and pray about it.

And don't get cocky.  Nothing is every in the bag.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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