Will There Be a Republican Congress in 2011?

There has been quite a bit of speculation about the results of the November midterm elections, now just a month away. Dick Morris is predicting a Republican landslide, an overturning of control in both houses of Congress with historic gains:

Thanks to the leadership of President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, the Democratic Party is facing the biggest defeat in midterm elections in the past 110 years, perhaps surpassing the modern record of a 74-seat gain set in 1922. They will also lose control of the Senate.

Republicans are now leading in 54 Democratic House districts. In 19 more, the incumbent congressman is under 50 percent and his GOP challenger is within five points. That makes 73 seats where victory is within easy grasp for the Republican Party. The only reason the list is not longer is that there are 160 Democratic House districts that were considered so strongly blue that there is no recent polling available.

Nate Silver presents a more sober evaluation of the prospects for November:

The most likely number of Republican pickups is in the range of about 45 seats — although significantly larger or smaller gains remain possible. The model does not expect a clean sweep: Democrats are favorites in 4 seats currently held by Republicans. But Republicans are favorites in exactly 50 Democratic-held seats, according to the model, which would be enough to give them control of the House.

and here:

Republican chances of taking over the Senate have improved again in this week’s forecast. They are now 22 percent — up from 18 percent last week and 15 percent two weeks ago. Republican chances are now approaching the point where they stood before the Delaware primary, when they had peaked at 26 percent before Christine O’Donnell’s victory.

That comports reasonably well with my intuition on what’s likely to happen: the most that Republicans are likely to take control of is one house of Congress, not two, and that by a fairly narrow margin.

Last week via Jonathan Chait I encountered a study that breaks with the prevailing wisdom:

Using current and historical seat rankings by the Cook and Rothenberg Political Reports as of September 28, I project that the Democrats will retain control of the House of Representatives, albeit with a considerably smaller margin than that enjoyed in the current Congress.

Clearly, the outcome won’t have been written on the election until after the last vote is cast (and, possibly, for weeks or months after as we saw in the Minnesota election for the U. S. Senate). The only thing that would genuinely surprise me is sweeping change. My view of the system as it stands today is that it’s largely designed to preclude that.