Here we are, this is the big post, the one where your friend and mine, the Gladiator, gives you his Official 2010 Election Predictions! Let's start with the House, since the polls are showing a double digit GOP Victory, with Gallup showing a Historic 15 point GOP House Victory, so it looks like the number will be huge. How huge? Well, I thought about going Race by Race, but seriously, House races are so tough to do going by that. I can't say for certain whether, for example, Barney Frank will win re-election in his seat, but I can say for sure that he might not, and that by itself tells you what you need to know to know that its going to be a huge number for the GOP. I'm tempted to play it Conservative, but with this Historic huge wave, I'm going to throw out my Conservative Prediction of 85 seats, which is what part of me is thinking, and say it's going to be 105 seat Pickup for the GOP, because in a historic wave like this you're really much more likely to miss low than miss high, so 105 seat pickup for the GOP is what I'm projecting.
On the Senate side, we know the polls show that the GOP will fall short of winning the Senate. We also know that whenever one party wins control of the House, they always, ALWAYS, win control of the Senate, and with this historic wave in their favor the GOP will take control of the Senate. So which state's polls will turn out to be wrong? That's the question. The easiest first answer is Delaware, because in truth there's been so little polling there lately, and what little there has been has tended to indicate very strongly a huge movement up by O'Donnell. I'm going to predict that O'Donnell wins in Delaware. I'm going to say that Manchin actually wins in West Virginia, he's run VERY far to the right, he's run as a Pro-Life, Pro-Marriage, Pro-Gun, Anti-Cap and Tax candidate, and most recently he's actually been complimenting Sarah Palin. This is a man who is literally to the right of multiple Republican Senate candidates, and yet he's the Democrat, so that's why he's going to win, he embraced the Tea Party's values when the other Democrats were running against it and getting beaten.
In other races, Republicans are about to sweep a ton of other races, you're looking at Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Arkansas, Florida, Nevada, and the Republicans are going to win them all. Connecticut is tougher, we know the polls show the disgraced Democrat still leading, but will a man who was caught lying about his war record, specificly by saying that he HAD one when he actually didnt, actually win a statewide election for ANYTHING, much less a prestigious Senate position? Louisiana voters are about to re-elect a man who was caught cheating on his wife with a prostitute, so maybe the sad answer is yes. I'm predicting that Blumenthal in CT, and Vitter in LA, will win their races despite the fact that voters should be ashamed of themselves if they vote for them.
Moving further west, its so close in California and Washington State. Sweet mercy. Obviously the polls continue to give the edge to the Democrat Incumbants in these states, but here again, the wave could push the Republican challengers over the top. I'm going to predict Republican wins in both states, going against the polls, going with the wave. Staying out west, in Alaska, it appears that Sarah Palin has helped Joe Miller to a comfortable lead out there, and with that scandal hitting hard just two days before the election he should win easily. If anybody hasn't heard, some local CBS reporters in Alaska were caught on a cell-phone, Jerry Brown style, but they didn't call Joe Miller a 'whore', they were caught conspiring against him, talking about trying to find an evil sex-offender in the crowd at an upcoming Joe Miller rally, presumably to make it look like Joe Miller=the candidate of sex offenders. They also talked about possibly using facebook to say 'Joe Miller got punched at rally' or some such, it was speculation on various ways of making Joe Miller look bad, really crazy, insane stuff. If you haven't heard that audio tape you should, its yellow journalism at its most entertaining, because it was caught on tape. That scandal means that Joe Miller will likely not just win, but win by double digits.
Its worth noting that at the beginning of this cycle, the Senate races actually seemed likely to go in favor of the Democrats, as there were more Republican seats up than Democrat seats, and there were some pretty seemingly vulnerable GOP seats, particularly in New Hampshire and Missouri. Those races are blowouts in favor of the Republicans, and seats that seemed totally safe for the Democrats like North Datoka and Arkansas are just totally blowout level gone.
So overall I'm going to say the GOP picks up 12 Senate seats, 105 House seats, and its just going to be a huge night for the GOP. But whether they win 12 and 105, or only 2 and 25, its going to be a super exciting night and I hope everyone here will watch Election Night, it's going to be Super Fun!
