Originally Posted by Wakeforest22890
With odds that the democrats win back the house at 60 percent or so, the chances that they gain more than six is close to 95-100 percent.
I think the Democrats will gain more than six seats, but one has to remember that the average gain in this situation (2 years after new party president) since WW2 has been 26 seats....so a gain of 6, 10 or even 15 should be considered a defeat for them, particularly if they also lose seats in the Senate which is much more likely than their chances of winning control of the House.
The wild card in this election now is the resignation of Justice Kennedy. That will serve to mitigate the Democrats' earlier "enthusiasm advantage" regarding turnout. As one article I read put it, "this is like throwing rocket fuel on the evangelical turnout"....basically making regaining Democratic control of the Senate a near impossibility. So the Democrats are between a rock & a hard place regarding the USSC. They will try to put off a vote until after the election, of course, but that will only further increase the evangelical vote in the critical Senate election states where Trump is extremely popular. If, on the other hand, they decide to roll the dice and hope to persuade Murkowski, Collins and maybe Flake or Corker to vote against conformation, that won't work, either. They would have to get 2 of those 4 to vote against....and hold all of the Democrats together. Even if they somehow got all 4 of those people to vote against conformation, though, it's problematical whether they could keep from losing 3 of their own to prevail. Democrats talk about persuading Murkowski & Collins....but they seem to have forgotten about Manchin, Donnelly, Heitkamp, McCaskill & Tester. Trump carried each of those five states by 19-42%. Each one of those five senators would be signing their own political death warrant if they voted against conformation. Maybe they could convince three of them to do it (assuming they could get all of the 4 Republicans, which is very unlikely)….but I seriously doubt it.