How Big Will The Anti-Red Wave Be?

Joe Cunningham (SC) & Amy McGrath (KY)-- their races will be the 1st reported. If they both win, the  Republicans will lose 60 seats

Next Tuesday we may have an idea how big the wave is going to be because of something that happens in South Carolina. SC-01 is, generally speaking, the coast-- not counting the stretch from Georgetown to Myrtle Beach and the North Carolina border. It includes most of Charleston (the white parts of the city), stretches down through Beaufort to Hilton Head and takes in a lump of inland country northwest of Charleston to Summerville and Moncks Corner as far north as Lake Moultrie. The PVI is R+10 but Trump (53.5%) didn't do as well as either McCain (56.1%) or Romney (58.3%). I'll guess it's the least Trumpified of the 6 red districts in the state. And the Republican candidate for Congress this cycle, Katie Arrington, is pure Trump. With Trump's help she ousted Mark Sanford in the GOP primary and now she has to face Democrat Joe Cunningham. People will still be voting in most of the country when South Carolina polls close on Tuesday. If Cunningham wins, it will signal a humongous Democratic wave is sweeping the country. Can he?

Well... as of the October 17 FEC reporting deadline he had outraged her $1,908,175 to $1,313,382 and outside spending has been modest on both sides. A very conservative 538 underestimates his chances, which are not great to start with.

In June, soon after Arrington beat Sanford 33,089 (50.6%) to 30,428 (46.5%), she was in a serious auto accident suffering a broken ribs and a back fracture that have kept her from vigorous campaigning. There hasn't been any public polling since the end of August when PPP found Arrington leading Cunningham 49-42%. What's changed since then? Cunningham has become much better known. And Trump has become more disgusting than ever. This week the Post And Courier reported that Sanford won't endorse Arrington. "Sanford’s silence," wrote Caitlin Byrd, "comes as Arrington’s race with Democrat Joe Cunningham is showing signs of being much closer than Republicans envisioned months ago, with the National Republican Congressional Committee on Monday sinking $87,000 into TV ads on her behalf.

The buy signals the race could be more competitive than initially thought, experts say, in a district traditionally considered “safe Republican.”

“She’s in a fight,” College of Charleston political scientist Jordan Ragusa said of Arrington. “She is still likely to win that fight, but it’s going to be a tough battle.”

...The fact the NRCC is investing at all in this race is raising eyebrows among political watchers.

If Arrington wins in an R+11 district it won't say anything at all about the rest of the night's results. If Cunningham wins, the GOP nationally should be on suicide watch. J.D. Scholten's district is also R+11. But the next bellwether seat that will probably be reporting is KY-06 (with an R+9 PVI), where Democrat Amy McGrath has outraised Republican incumbent Andy Barr $7,767,610 to $4,778,302 and has him on the ropes. Ryan's sleazoid SuperPAC has felt that it had to jump in to save his seat and has spent $3,237,558 smearing McGrath. The DCCC and Pelosi's PAC responded weakly with around $1.3 million. If Cunningham and McGrath both win, Republicans waiting on line to vote in Orange County and the Central Valley will stop waiting and start to drift home, understanding that they've lost the House-- by a lot. Cunningham and McGrath victories will signal that the pundits and pros had it all wrong again and that the Democrats won't be taking 25 seats by closer to three times that number!

So what happened to all that GOP enthusiasm because of Kavanaugh? It motivated more Democrats than Republicans. And Trump's rallies? They're  motivating more Democrats (and independents) than Republicans. If anything, the hate rallies are actually turning off mainstream Republicans! The frontlines are mow deep in the heart of Republican territory... like the aforementioned districts in South Carolina, Iowa and Kentucky. No, Democrats can't wage plausible battles against Mo Brooks or Rob Aderholt in Alabama or in the Florida, Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, serious fighting in those districts would be like Republicans trying to win inner city districts in Chicago, Baltimore, Newark, Los Angeles and New York. Instead, there are no longer any safe GOP seats in California... and Orange County-- once the soul of the party-- is about to be free of Republicans completely. Washington state has 4 GOP-held seats. 3 of them are all but gone. Democrats-- if not the lame and short-sighted DCCC-- are fighting seriously for Amish country in Pennsylvania, for Wichita, Kansas, for severely gerrymandered Texas districts, for at-large seats in Alaska and Montana... even for seats in West Virginia.

It looks like this is the year that women take their revenge on the GOP for its anti-family agenda, its anti-education agenda, for its anti-women agenda, for its gun agenda, its pollution agenda, and for the divisiveness, bullying and immoral essence of its contemptible leader. Here's where they get pay-back for the enabling and the rubber stamp attitude just when a Congress with some guts and dignity is most demanded. You think Kavanaugh is going to help GOP incumbents with women in suburban districts.

And the #MAGAbomber Trump rally nut from Florida and the murderous #MAGAshooter in Pittsburgh... you think women appreciate that? Or independent voters. That was a last straw for many-- even in Republican strongholds in Utah, Kansas, North Carolina... where the party never expected to be forced to spend millions of Sheldon Adelson's dollars to defend incumbents in carefully gerrymandered seats Trump won on auto-pilot.

Writing for super-cautious RealClear Politics, Sean Trende reports the outdated conventional wisdom that even he doesn't believe: "The consensus view is that Democrats are favored to take the lower chamber. Analysts disagree on just how large a majority they are likely to win, and how likely that majority is. If you split the RealClearPolitics tossups in half, it results in Democrats gaining about 25 seats, for a narrow 220-215 majority. I tend to think that the tossups will break disproportionately toward Democrats, and see something more on the order of a 225-210 Democratic majority." It's hard to realistically see the Republicans with 200 seats.

He also admits that almost all their House polling comes from a gimmicky and totally unreliable source, the worst polling operation of the cycle-- sillier than GOP polling firm Rasmussen: "[M]ost of our House race polling has come from the New York Times, in partnership with Siena.  On the one hand, this is good, because without them we would have virtually no polling. On the other hand, polling is both an art and a science, and having a disproportionate amount of our data coming from a single view of what the electorate looks like increases the chances of" absurd assumptions and ridiculous mistakes. (My words, not his.)