The non-partisan Cook Political Report has some GOOD NEWS for Democrats

[pnwmom]

who are mourning the loss yesterday.

In November 2018 if we continue to outperform our expected share of the vote (as we have been in the elections so far), we would be gaining dozens of seats, and we'd flip the House.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/06/21/dont-get-demoralized-by-the-big-georgia-loss-democrats/?utm_term=.9e214f6a2875

But still, the last thing Democrats should do right now is allow this loss — Ossoff fell short by just under 4 points — to demoralize them. . . .

Instead, let’s hope Democrats take a different message from this year’s special elections: The House is very much in play in 2018.

First, there’s the numbers-based case for the House being in play. That is made in a good piece by Dave Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, who is very much not given to fluffing Democrats’ chances when that’s unwarranted. Wasserman points out that Ossoff’s loss showed that he outperformed the district’s partisan lean by 6 points. (That partisan lean is calculated with a metric known as the Partisan Voter Index, which measures how each party should perform in each district by measuring the last two presidential vote spreads relative to the nation as a whole.) More to the point, Wasserman notes that Democratic candidates have outperformed their district’s partisan makeup in all five special elections this year, by an average of 8 points:

"If Democrats were to outperform their “generic” share by eight points across the board in November 2018, they would pick up 80 seats. Of course, that won’t happen because Republican incumbents will be tougher to dislodge than special election nominees. But these results fit a pattern that should still worry GOP incumbents everywhere, regardless of Trump’s national approval rating and the outcome of the healthcare debate in Congress."

SNIP

[Gothmog]

1. The Cook Political report is very trustworthy