The "coming tidal wave" works for us on many levels. Jonathan hit on two (1. More people may be willing to identify as/with Dems, and 2. GOP voters may stay home), and I wanted to highlight a key third:

Many people who have done more than vote Democratic over the past several cycles can now be successfully called upon to do a lot more.

I can promise friends and colleagues that this time around volunteering, donating, organizing, and fundraising are all going to be a lot more fun -- because we're going to WIN.

I nearly wet my pants when I saw cook's graph today (it's my Friday treat, kinda sad I know). But still those are good numbers. The trick now is to maintain. As weird as this sounds, we need to keep a low profile from now til August. If we push too much it'll just give us an opening to be exploited and the message will wear thin (see Perot). Come August, the first thing to do is lay down our "contract" which we have been hinting at and showign pieces of for the last few months. I know this sounds like Beltway insider stuff but really, it is just common sense. The election isn't tomorrow, it's in November. We just need to keep the same message we're pushing now and hammer the specifics out in early fall. Over the summer it's get the money to the challengers, help them build a staff/base, and start to get bumper stickers and yard signs where they belong. Start the candidate hype now, tell them why later.

Interestingly, 3 districts I felt were needed but missing from Cook's chart were TX-14, TX-21, and WV-02. Also MN-02 got dropped, why?

Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of a political newsletter, now has 42 Republican districts, including Drake's, on his list of competitive races. Last September, he had 26 competitive GOP districts, and Drake's wasn't on the list. "That's a pretty significant increase," he said. "The national atmospherics are making long shots suddenly less long."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con tent/article/2006/05/19/AR2006051901921. html

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

I have to think seeing some of the results out of Pennsylvania, excluding the pay raise fiasco losers,
opened some eyes.

First, Andy Dinniman, a ChesCo commissioner, beat his opponent by 13 pts in state senate district that hasn't had a Democratic state senator in 80-90 years. Chester co has been run and controlled by Rs since about forever, yet Democrats did an amazing job at turning out and Dinniman's sensible positions won over Republican voters. This indicates how energized Democratic voters are this year.

Second was Sherwood's narrow win over Scott in PA-10 in the GOP primary. Scott was essentially just a "name on the ballot", yet she picked up almost 45% of the vote. Some of the votes were
clearly anger over Sherwood's handling of the affair he had, but some part was also likely general unhappiness with GOP-controlled Washington.

Third, it looks very likely that not one, but TWO
Democrats waged successful write-in campaigns for
congressional seats that Dems hadn't had challengers in - Detinger in the 15th (Dent) and
Barr in the 9th (Schuster). It says a lot that Dems were able to get so many voters to write-in a name. From what I can gather, both men got well over the 1000 votes needed to win.

IMO, this is says Dems are organized and energized this year and that could lead to a very real Dem
tidal wave in Novemember.

Good post, except for this:

Over the past week, something has happened to shake up the common wisdom of the Beltway pundits -- and it's not necessarily President Bush's approval numbers, which have once again settled in the mid-30s, up a couple of points (perhaps) from the previous week.

The best ongoing analysis of where presidential approval stands that I'm aware of is at Political Artihmetik, which uses a smoothing function to produce a pretty reliable trend line free from a lot of misleading statistical noise (often amplified by house effects).

Thie most recent post, " Fox finds Bush approval at 35%" notes:

A new Fox News poll taken 5/16-18/06 finds approval of President Bush at 35%, with disapproval at 56%. That matches the new CBS News poll and is a point below the 36% reading by CNN. The three polls together provide some evidence that approval may have moved up following the president's Monday night address, though the data remain short of statistical significance. With all three new polls in the data my trend estimate stands at 33.01%, nearly a full point above my estimate as of 5/16 polling which was 32.05%. These revised estimates do NOT mean that approval has turned up, but they do mean that all the polls, when taken together, are painting a less bleak picture for the White House. It takes 6-10 polls for my model to detect a clear upturn in approval, so watch that trend estimate-- if it continues to move up over the next several polls, we'll see a bend start to form in the downward trend line.

The Fox poll is actually a 3 percentage point decline from Fox's previous poll on 5/2-3/06. But that poll was unusually high. I wrote about it here pointing out that Fox appeared to have been too low in the previous poll, then too high at 38%. [Emphasis added]

Here's his current chart of Bush's numbers from the above post:

I never seem to hear the Senate races talked about. What's going on there? Any chance of retaking both houses?

"I do not believe it to be out of the realm of possibility that the scenario laid out in the previous paragraph comes to pass."

Could you be a little less bold with your predictions?  ;-)

I dig it. And it's still more than 5 months to go, which means that if trends continue, these numbers will only get better.

On a sidenote, thanks for ANYthing not to do with Lieberman/Lamont. Finally.

I think the poll showing Francine Busby with a 7% lead over Bilbray in CA-50 has to have spooked a lot of GOPers.  That should have been a solid district, the GOP has been forced to spend over $2 mil to defend it, and she is winning as of the latest poll.  Multiply that across the nation and they are in a deep, deep hole.  CA-50 should have been in Cook's "likely GOP" and now Cook has it as "Republican toss-up," and the poll would put it as "lean Dem."

This looks like one we could actually win, in partnership with the DCCC.

I commented on this last time around, and all I got was agreement. Virgil is getting more negative attention for his shady dealings with Mitchell Wade and his illegal campaign contributions. Virgil was elected as a Democrat, and the district is full of independents, so Virgil's incumbency advantage has been keeping him afloat since his defection to the Republican party, and name recognition is a huge factor here.

Speaking of name reco, Al Weed ran againt Virgil in '04 and was just nominated to challenge him again this year (like, 3 hours ago). Al got more votes in 2004 than Virgil got in 2002, so the numbers are out there; it's the turnout that matters, and haven't frontpage diarists on this site been arguing that this is supposed to be a turnout election?

Usually the optimist and the pessimist are only a few points away from one another, but in this district they're miles apart. This race is a microcosm of all the factors that make up the Democrats' "Perfect Storm" and if all the pieces fall into place here like Jonathon said they might nationally, Al Weed will be going to congress.

Northup is double-counted as both "lean" & "likely" R, which may represent some post-primary confusion/shifting?

It's sad to see no races in MI in play, nor Renzi/AZ, nor Schmidt or others in Ohio.

Capito/WV may simply be too strong.

Hayes/NC ought to be in play; 1 seat in NC & 3 in CA are too few to be optimal.

However -- for all these wishes/ponies... the DCCC has done a great job, given how slow many with $ or currently interesting jobs (prospective candidates) were to come onto the bandwagon that the House could be in play in 2006.

I would like to take issue with Jonathan's charactorization that the Cook Political Report that "the folks at the Cook Political Report are beginning to change their minds" about whether there were enough seats in play for Democrats to capture a majority in the House.  

Every week we make assessments about every House and Senate race on our seven-point ratings scales, based on our interviews with the candidates and their campaigns, analysis of polling and FEC data, our own reporting with sources that we have developed in each state over the years and conversations that we are having with campaign consultants and strategists in both parties. When enough evidence builds that the circumstances have changed in a specific race so that it warrants a ratings change, we do it, but not before.  

While the vast majority of MyDD readers are Democrats and badly want to see a Democratic takeover of the House, our job is to be right, and we are often open to criticism for being cautious, but that is something that our subscribers over the last 22 years have come to expect.  When we say a situation has changed, they can pretty much count on it having changed, it's not based on wishful thinking our optimism.

On Friday we switched a dozen more Republican seats from our "Likely Republican" category, which means theoretically possible but not yet competitive, into our "Lean Republican" category, which means competitive, though still short of our toss up category (we also have a "Solid" category for each party, for all the seats that are not even theoretically competitive).  So now we have 11 Republicans in our Toss Up category, 25 more in Lean Republican, 18 more in Likely, the balance in Solid.

At this point, one could reasonably say that the House is close to 50-50, perhaps a bit better for Democrats, but there are still five months to go.  Remember as late as September 2000, it looked like Democrats might take the House that year, but faded over the last six weeks.  

Please never again use the phrase "a fact which cannot be overstated."  Every fact can be overstated.  This phrase drives me batty!

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