Megan McArdle tries her hand at concern-trolling:
As I understand it, there is about a 0% chance that Democrats will retake the House in 2014, which means that Republicans already have quite an efficient veto over any legislation they might like to pass. Meanwhile, there’s about a 70% chance that Republicans will control the White House, the House, and the Senate come January 2017. Without the filibuster in place, Republicans could do a lot of damage to programs that Democrats like. That seems an expensive risk to run in order to get some presidential nominees through, however mad you are about GOP obstructionism.
Logic and prognosis are not her strong suits. After the upcoming special election in New Jersey, the Democrats will have 55 seats in the Senate. Do you think that the Republicans have a 70% chance of netting six Senate seats in the next two elections? Remember, in 2016, the Republicans will be defending all those seats they won in 2010, like Kelly Ayotte’s seat in New Hampshire, Ron Johnson’s in Wisconsin, Rob Portman’s in Ohio, and Pat Toomey’s in Pennsylvania, but they’ll be doing it in a presidential election cycle with much higher turnout.
On the presidential level, the Republicans have lost the popular vote in all but one election since 1988, and they have never cracked 300 electoral votes. Does anyone think they have a 70% of winning the White House in 2016? Based on what?
As for the House, it certainly will be hard to win it back. But is it true that the Democrats have a zero percent chance of winning 17 seats in the next two midterms? Surely, their chances must be somewhat better than zero.
McGargle Bargle.
I’d sure like some of what she’s been smoking.
“…Republicans already have quite an efficient veto over any legislation they might like to pass.”
I guess she figures it’s the Republican’s job to do nothing but thwart Democratic legislation? Again confirming that Republicans are post-policy.
Nooners has competition.
I guess it will be in the next week or so when we’ll see if Reid’s mild filibuster reforms will get implemented? Let’s hope the dems have the backbone to take this forward.
The house is still totally screwed up though. I propose a constitutional amendment to get rid of gerrymandering in all states, on the California commission model. That would go a long way to reducing the partisanship there.
It’s all irrelevant anyway, because there’s about a 0% chance that the filibuster would survive Republican control of the House, Senate, and Oval Office. The only way the Democrats could preserve it would be not to use it.
It’s true – the GOP is willing to break any and all precendents – if they did have control of the senate they’d nuke the filibuster in a heartbeat.
It’s true – the GOP is willing to break any and all precendents – if they did have control of the senate they’d nuke the filibuster in a heartbeat.
Even by Village standards, McArdle regularly serves up forehead-slapping idiocy like this, and has done so for years. I really don’t understand how she could still be employable.
Just joking about that last part, of course.
It’s an old insight at this point, but she gathers page views and as long as she does that, she’s employable. There’s about a 94.7 percent chance of that.
How many pageviews does she really gather? That really has nothing to do with it. It’s the fact that she’s part of the wingnut welfare network
It’s even worse than you say. Assume a 100% chance that the Republicans keep the House, thanks to the hideous gerrymanders. If you expect a 70% chance that the Republicans will also get the Senate and the Presidency, you’re assuming just about an 84% chance for each of those two things individually. Of course, if there’s any chance the Dems win the House, the 84% goes up meaningfully.
Now, McArdle didn’t do this math. (Of course, if pressed, she’d say that the two are linked sufficiently that they aren’t independent events, which is not entirely wrong, but a lot closer to wrong than right.) She just pulled the number out of thin air because she wants it to be right.
“Without the filibuster in place, Republicans could do a lot of damage”
Man I’m so effing sick of this crap line. There is no “filibuster in place”. It can be changed at the start of every session. (As Reid should have done in the first place). What is done in this session has no relevance except precedent in whether the filibuster, or the rest of the Senate rules, survive. Is that really so hard to understand? Apparently it is for this yammering moron. I don’t get, Boo, why you waste your oxygen reading analysis that the average dandelion could do better.
Megan McCardle is not a smart person. She is a dumb person, who is well-educated and sounds smart.
I’ve watched a fair bit of Megan McArdent on bloggingheads.tv – where, believe it or not, there are actually some reasonably intelligent conservatives. She, however, has never impressed me as being one of them. She’s smooth and has plenty of confidence and poise, but her reasoning is usually sloppy and flawed.
The 70% comment, however, is really jumping the McShark. The house bit isn’t as shocking. By zero percent, she could simply mean less than one half of one percent, and that’s probably too optimistic (from her side) but whether it’s .5% or 15%, it’s going to be very hard to get the Republicans out of the house before the next census.
But a 70% chance that the Republicans take the WH in 2016 is patently absurd. The demographics are as skewed against the GOP nationally as they are skewed against us locally.
I would say the dems have a 70% chance if they run someone we’ve never heard of and if they run Hillary – this time even Mark Penn, Rahm Emanuel, Lanny Davis and Larry Summers couldn’t screw it up for her. Barring some unexpected act of god she wins in a landslide – all the Obama states by bigger margins, plus No. Carolina, Arkansas, probably West Virginia, Montana, maybe SD, IN, MO, AZ, TN, GA … forget about it. She’d be so far ahead so early that she could (and should) spend the whole year campaigning for individual democratic congressman on the basis that she needs some help in the house.
What the GOP pollyannas don’t get is that Obama winning twice wasn’t because he’s a charismatic AA – it was IN SPITE OF THAT – millions of white racists who voted for McCain and Romney would vote for Hillary in a heartbeat. It’s sad but true.
The electoral demographics are changing as fast or faster than the social mores about homosexuality did. Republicans may want to go back to the 50s, but the truth is that they can’t even go back to 2004. They’re dead men walking – they just don’t realize it yet. And their ability to control the house – and the state houses – is clearly shortening what little life span they have left.
Here in California, the GOP destroyed their brand through a decade of highly successful and total obstruction. They were in the minority in the Senate and Assembly throughout the late ’90’s and ’00’s, but because of our awful budget laws which require 2/3rds of the Legislature to approve budgets which include even a thin dime of new revenues, Republicans forced the Legislature to eviscerate funding for education, health and social services, and just about everything else except tax cuts for corporations. It got particularly unacceptable when the financial crash happened, but even though they were down to about 40% of the Legislature, they held into the “NO TAXES ON ANYONE EVER” position, even when it meant Granny didn’t get her meals or day care assistance and the kid’s neighborhood school closed.
In 2011 the GOP caucus even refused to provide the paltry 4 votes needed to place a tax proposition on the statewide ballot. Governor Brown and other allies were forced to collect the signatures to put it to the voters in the 2012 General election, and Californians by about a 10% margin voted to tax themselves more. The voters also sank GOP representation in the legislature below the 1/3rds margin, so now we can pass a responsible budget without any GOP votes at all, and we have the revenue needed to pass a budget with a small surplus and without overall cuts. Hallelujah, and a canary in the Republican coalmine.
Well-explained. I too have been suffering away in CA and am thrilled that the GOP has finally become utterly irrelevant.
So we’ve established that the GOP will probably control the House until the next census, but let’s analyze that. In order to finally get rid of them we need to have successful state government elections in 2018, right? Or is it 2020? Trying to think through that. Okay, the reason the House is such a mess is that the GOP won in a landslide in 2010, the last census year. So, actually, it’s a good thing that the next census year aligns with the presidential election cycle, right? Since dems will forseeably do better in those elections.
To put it another way, it doesn’t matter what the census says so much as who has the reins of the gerrymandering engine, right?
The 2020 elections will be extraordinarily important.
I think you are spot on everything here. Except that I think Hillary probably has a more than 70% chance given that these jokers will probably nominate someone like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. Christie is the only one who would give her a run for the money, but he has very low probability of being nominated (I think).
Would she be getting her statistics fromthe same polling companies that supplied Romney’s presidential campaign?