Jay Cost over at Real Clear Politics gives some indications why the larger number of open GOP House seats does not necessarily translate into an advantage for the Democrats:

open seats are frequently a sign of how politicians view their chances. Thus, we can get a sense of how the parties will do in November based upon seat vacancies today. If, for instance, lots of Republicans are retiring, we could infer that the Republicans sense an anti-Republican climate and have decided to avoid losing. Open seats in 1994 were a sign of the anti-incumbent climate of that year, for instance. What can we infer about the GOP based upon these open seats? Consider the following:

· Of the 17 open Republican seats, 9 of them are open because the incumbents are pursing higher electoral office.

· The median share of the vote that incumbents in these seats took in 2004 was 60%.

· Of the 7 Republican seats that are open because members have decided to retire, 2 of those members faced no opposition in 2004. The remaining won their 2004 election by a median value of 60%.

· Of the same 7 seats, the median length of time each current member has served is 24 years. All of them have served through anti-Republican, anti-incumbent elections.

· 7.3% of the Republican delegation will be open in November. 3.9% of the Democratic delegation will be open.

Clearly, these vacancies do not exist because these Republicans fear losing in November.

Always, always, always look at what people do, rather than what they say. Right now, what people are saying is that the GOP is in trouble, GOPers are running scared and the Democrats are poised for a big win in November. What people are doing, however, indicates otherwise.

Taking one thing with another, the actual lay of the political landscape indicates a status-quo election in 2006 - maybe a couple of seats shift between parties, but nothing which would change the balance of power in Washington. For the Democrats to claim even a psychological victory in 2006, the Republicans would have to suffer at least a net loss of 4 in the Senate and 10 in the House. There is no set of data right now which indicates any such swing.

It is good to keep in mind that the GOP appears to be at a low ebb because of MSM reporting and various polls - but the MSM is relentlessly hostile to the GOP and the polls out of late are uniformly oversampling Democrats, usually by a very large margin. With all this, the best we can see the Democrats doing 8 months from now is picking up one or two Senate seats and four or five House seats. Hardly a resounding rejection of President Bush and the Republican Party. As for my personal opinion, I think that the GOP is not in bad shape at all - in fact, I believe that given the nature of the MSM reporting and the polls, the GOP is the much stronger Party going into the mid terms.

Time will tell if I'm correct, or whistling past the graveyard...but I've rarely been more confident of the outcome.

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