I actually had the honor to meet Mr. Barone over dinner with a small group of Republicans...he's an amazingly smart man, as well as an entertaining speaker, if you are a political junkie, as I am. Here's his take on the 2006 midterms:

Hypothesis One sees House elections as a referendum on the president and his party. If the president's job rating is above 50 percent, his party tends to suffer only narrow losses or even, as in 1934 and 1998 -- and almost in 1962 -- makes gains. If the president's job rating is significantly under 50 percent, his party tends to lose lots of seats...

...Hypothesis One was developed by political scientists and psephologists over many years. Hypothesis Two is one I developed myself, and it's based only on the elections of the last 10 years. In the five House elections from 1996 to 2004, there has been very little variation in the popular vote percentages for both parties. The Republican percentage of the popular vote for the House has fluctuated between 49 and 51 percent, the Democratic percentage between 46 and 48.5 percent.

This has been true despite great differences in the job ratings of the parties' leading figures. Republicans won pluralities of the popular vote for the House in 1996 and 1998, when Bill Clinton's job rating was high and the favorability ratings of the highly visible Newt Gingrich were very low. Clinton's job rating was high in 2000, too, but Republicans still won the popular vote 49 percent to 48 percent. In 2002, when George W. Bush's job rating was up around 70 percent, Republicans won 51 percent of the popular vote for the House. In 2004, when his job rating was around 50 percent, Republicans won 50 percent.

Mr. Barone goes on to note that the California 50th House district went 44% for Kerry in 2004 - in 2006, with a Republican just forced out in one of the worst political corruption scandals to rock the House in 50 years, the Democrats managed to get all the way up to 45% of the vote. If there was a time when the Democrats could win the CA 50, right now was it - the fact that they can't, shows that the stories of Republican death are greatly exaggerated.

A majority of American voters are Republican - for the Republicans to win, all they need to is turn out their voters. There is a problem here - on matters of spending and immigration, a lot of core GOP voters are in a bad mood about the GOP, esepcially the Congressional GOP. The task for the Congressional GOP is to put forth some core GOP proposals over the next couple months - they'll either be enacted, thus delighting the base, or they'll be blocked by the Democrats, thus enraging the GOP base...in either case, it would propel GOP turnout...that plus the prospect of a Speaker Pelosi plus impeachment hearings on President Bush should be more than sufficient in getting the GOP to show up in November.

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