49 Days Till Election Day: Democrats Likely To Lose Control

Nate Silver, the election predictions guru whose fivethirtyeight.com blog was recently added to The New York Times online site as FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus has put his sights on predicting the outcome of the November 2nd mid-term elections and things do NOT look good for the Democrats 7 weeks out

There's a reasonable chance the Democrats could lose control of the Senate:

Republicans now have approximately a one-in-four chance of winning enough Senate seats in the Nov. 2 elections to claim an outright majority of the chamber, FiveThirtyEight’s latest forecasting model shows.

The bigger problem is the increasingly likelihood they will lose control of the House:

Republicans have a two-in-three chance of claiming a majority of House seats in November, the FiveThirtyEight forecasting model estimates. And their gains could potentially rival or exceed those made in 1994, when they took a net of 54 seats from the Democrats.

In one sense, a strong performance by the Republicans on Nov. 2 is to be expected. The opposition party typically gains seats – on average, about 20 in midterm elections since 1994 – after the other party wins the White House, as the Democrats did in 2008. Nevertheless, both the magnitude of the Republicans’ potential gains, and the rapidity with which the political balance is poised to shift back to them after two cycles in which Democrats won nearly every competitive election, is unusual by recent standards. According to the model, Republicans have about a one-in-three chance of winning at least 54 seats, their total in 1994, and nearly a one-in-four chance of gaining at least 60.

Were the Republicans to achieve an outcome like that, one might need to look to the first half of the previous century for precedent; in 1948, for example, the Democrats added a net of 75 seats in the House, just two years after losing 54.

Today is the last primary day of the 2010 elections, if you live in one of those states, get out and vote!