Ok, Today is the big day, so, what is it going to be? The Dems get the house? The Dems get the Senate, the Dems get both, or the Repubs stay in control? Your chance to be a prognosticator here: Good luck ! DD
I remain cautiously optimistic that the dems will gain 25 to 30 house seats but fall just short in the senate, picking up 4 to 5 seats. Off to the polls! VOTE!!!!
Not going to be any. From what I understand because of the 2004 election. All MSM outlets are holding back predictions and no one will have access to exit polls until after 5pm. from TPM -- Keeping the bloggers at bay: Two-by-two, polling specialists from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press will go into rooms in New York and Washington shortly before noon Tuesday. Their cellphones and BlackBerrys will be confiscated; proctors will monitor the doors; and for the next five hours, these experts will pore over exit-poll data from across the country. If all goes well, only when they emerge from their cloisters will the legions of ravenous political bloggers have any chance of getting their hands on the earliest indication of which party will end up controlling Congress. Let's just remember folks that this is about protecting the value of their proprietary information, not some high-minded effort to prevent the misuse of the polling data. That's fine. No one is expected to reveal his or her scoop in advance (in this instance, literally before it's ready for primetime). What remains ironic though is that it's the major news organizations themselves that over-rely on the exit polls and have done so for years. The 2000 and 2004 debacles aside, the exit polls have long driven the networks' election night coverage, providing them with the pretense of speaking authoritatively about the results before the results are known. It is television that has turned election night into the political equivalent of the Superbowl, where the Democrats and Republicans will battle it out for four hours or so and then a winner will be handed the trophy by a beaming TV announcer. For those four hours, they want us on the couch eating Doritos, not surfing the web for exit poll data. You wonder though. If all the money the networks pour into exit polling went instead into political reporting, actual political reporting, wearing out the shoe leather about who's doing what and where during the last hours of the campaigns and on election day, whether the result might be more informative for the electorate. Maybe, for instance, the networks would have caught on to the NRCC's nationwide robocall scam first, instead of the blogs. The networks closing themselves off in sealed rooms with no connections to the outside world for five hours in the middle of Election Day is, in many ways, the perfect metaphor for what is wrong with the mainstream media. -- TPM Reader DK http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ But there have been widespread stories of voting problems already in several states.
Democrats win the House, handily, and the Senate is a tie, broken by a Republican moderate Senator who feels marginalized, if not outright abandoned by their own party, like Olympia Snowe of Maine. Keep D&D Civil.
If the Maine Senators were going to bolt they would have done it by now... if not officially, then by standing with Dems on some of the more odious of votes... and I mean where it matters, not just rhetoric. That they have done neither is telling. This is why Chaffee's going to lose... nice guy, does some good things, votes against the administration when his vote doesn't matter, but ultimately votes with the administration when he's needed. Edit: Another thing to blame Bush for... the death of Moderates.
Hey, I'm trying to be optimistic! I never expected Jeffords to jump the aisle. Hopefully, it won't matter. Let's hope not. The idea of Cheney making the different turns the stomach. No question that Bush/Rove and company have run just about all the moderate Republicans out of the GOP. Keep D&D Civil.
Yea, kind of ticks me off. Although Chafee is such a mystery. The guy votes with the Democrats on almost everything and yet he's a republican. He makes Joe Lieberman look like a Democratic party loyalist. Chafee supports abortion, the legalization of gay marriage, voted against tax cuts, for minimum wage raise, voted against the war in iraq, voted for stem cell research, big environmentalist and on top of that he didn't vote for Dubya in the 2004 election. (He wrote in the older Bush) But even with all that, he's a republican. But this election will probably bring in a bunch of centrists, albiet they will be democrats that lean more to the right. The group of republicans that lean to the left is slowly disappearing. At last count its pretty much Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Chafee (if he wins), and maybe John McCain (although he's sold out so much to the Republican base that you can hardly call him a moderate anymore)
Interesting.... 7 votes for republicans retaining both house and senate but not one explanation in the thread of said votes. Any one of those 7 want to explain their reasoning?
1) the dems have not stated their position well enough (i.e. no contract with america) 2) john kerry 3) the radical left is as bad as the radical right. based on this, most people would rather not vote than vote for the dems... thus keeping those in power. in the last thread we had about this, like 2 weeks ago, i voted dems take the senate but republicans keep the house.... in that time saddam was found guilty, and kerry made his joke. having said that, in real life, i voted for kinky, and libertarian party. if that wasn't a choice, i voted against the incumbant.
