Tuesday, June 13, 2006

The Guessing Game

With the midterm election months away, political pundits are trying to guess if Democrats will pick up any seats in the fall election. The Canton Repository has and article and every researcher and writer has his or her own number. Here are some excerpts from the article:

Grover Norquist, president of the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, breaks it down this way.

“Democrats must win 74 percent of all competitive races to gain the majority,” he writes in this month’s American Spectator. “Not impossible, but difficult.”

Nuh-uh, says Amy Walter, who crunches House numbers for Cook Political Report. “They need to win 56 percent of all the competitive races.”

...“Fifty-seven,” says Bernadette Budde, political analyst for the Business Industry Political Action Committee.

“Two dozen,” says Scott Reiter, a representative of the Realtors Political Action Committee....

...We ask Rothenberg to put his expertise on the line: How many seats will the Democrats take?

“Eight to 12,” he says at first, then backs up. That’s what the science tells him, he says, but his “gut” tells him ”15 to 20...”

It should be an interesting four months.