May 21 2006
What He Said (II)
Dafydd over at Big Lizards is reading my mind regarding the idea the Democrats are about to ride a wave to Congressional Control:
The Democrats continue being Democrats, and more and more we hear open talk of two years of investigations and impeachment proceedings against Bush.None of these possibilities except the last is in the hands of Democrats; and they are no more capable of controlling themselves than is the scorpion capable of not stinging the frog.
The liberal base is promising years of partisan investigations and attempts to Impeach Bush. There is no other issue in this election cycle. None. The Liberal base wants it and too many liberal dinosaurs in Congress want one last big hurrah before they retire – and they know it will never be passing liberal policies. The left want to go out in a blaze of scandal mongering. My guess is the rest of us just want the left to go out.
AJ,
You are right my friend. Yet, those of us that realize the real and present dangers of a left controlled congress need to work diligently over the next several months to remind voters on the right not to stay home. No matter what differences and disagreements they may have at this point, the agenda of the right would be hurt much more under a Reid senate and a Pelosi house. We need to pound this home.
It always surprises me that so few people (in the MSM, at least) seem to appreciate the errors that make any national congressional preference poll worthless for anything other than idle gossip.
First, what *would* be valid would be head to head surveys done in each district and a total projection made based on the sum of the 435 individual surveys. But apparently that takes too much effort for anyone to be interested in doing, so instead we have these national polls which are nothing but cheap statistically unsound shortcuts trying to masquerade as valid data. They are not.
Biggest flaw out of several – the national survey assumes that the voting population is homogenous across all 435 districts, and that a national total can therefore be extrapolated down. That is a very foolish and invalid assumption. An example of how this assumption invalidates the results – suppose that in the “red” states, the Rep.’s negatives have gone up slightly, but in the blue’s they have gone up greatly. For example, perhaps New York was polling 60/40 for a Dem Congress 1 year ago, but they are polling 80/20 today. (likewise for the rest of the left leaning areas) That would skew any national poll results dramatically, and yet would result in virtually no net gain in actual House seats because it is simply a case of Democrat regions becoming more monolithically democrat.
Now is this happening? who knows? The data is too sloppy and indistinct for anyone to draw these kinds of conclusions – but that in itself is enough to demonstrate that the polls being done today are absolutely useless for any real predictive value. Take a poll on who’s going to win the World Series in October, the results will mean just as much as the results of the Congressional polls do.
Only time will tell but it seems to me that general surveys and polls are pretty useless in Congressional races. People are voting for their rep, not the other guys.
In fact I would say that if Nagin can win it is a pretty good sign that incumbents are hard to beat.
I have yet to see any polling information that shows the Dems are even close to a majority in the house. Here is what I see on my favorite polling site for how things currently look after November:
Governors: 25D 25R
Senate: 48D 51R
House: 205D 230R
So the Dems aren’t showing any majority in either house currently.
Also, I wouldn’t put to much into Nagin’s win. Big city mayors have a lot of dead people voting for them. I seem to remember one mayor of DC being re-elected after being caught with crack and hookers.
Even if you drink the kool aid of the most optomistic outcome for the dems, what would this give you.
Ok you could get an impeachment off the ground and make that pig fly.
But short of something they are not imagining or projecting in their wildest dreams, they would never have enough votes to get a conviction.
And even if somehow they got that GW would probably be out of office before all the testimony was done making the whole process moot.
Exactly. Not only isn’t there enough time, even if the Dems took every single seat up for grabs in the Senate this election, they would still not have 2/3 needed to convict. The reason for that is simple. There are 40 Republican seats that are not up for election this cycle meaning even if the Democrats took EVERY SINGLE SEAT up for election they wouldn’t get 66 seats. The best they could possibly do is 60 seats but there might be some Republicans running unopposed so even 60 might be impossible. So, impeachment is a pipedream.
Conservatives want the Left out. The Left does not. The Left is here to stay.
There is a changing face of the Left. The Democrats are in a difficult situation. Their far left base holds many beliefs that their majority does not hold. Their left hand has to not know what their right hand is doing. But, can we really pretend that both hands are ignorant of each other to such a degree?
Is the Democrat who only embraces some of the beliefs of the far Left really moderate at all?
This is a nation who held the banner of “Peace” under the movement to help the Viet Cong. There absolutely was a base of people that simply did not want our children to die in that foreign war. But, was it really “peace” even for these people? It was really “let the Vietnamese kill themselves, but save our people”, not peace.
In years since we have done anything but look at that horrible lie. We have not held these people account for anything. And, today, over Iraq, we see the very same propaganda although the situation is very different.
If Republicans gain more power now, this means nothing. This only isolates the far Left – the Left – further. This only feeds their movement. Just as if the Democrats gain more power, this only feeds the conservative movement.
The modern conservative movement became what it is under Clinton. Not under Reagan, not under Bush.