Nate Silver and company are even more certain that Democrats will take the House of Representatives than they were that Hillary Clinton would be elected President (72{8359bd26b913e24a7303d212a23546aa4fafa0cfcdec25c849ef881c8a4ae759}):
3 in 4 Chance Democrats win control (74.6{8359bd26b913e24a7303d212a23546aa4fafa0cfcdec25c849ef881c8a4ae759})
1 in 4 Chance Republicans keep control (25.4{8359bd26b913e24a7303d212a23546aa4fafa0cfcdec25c849ef881c8a4ae759})
They are so certain of victory that they are desperately appealing to Republicans to vote for Democratic Congressional candidates:
In November, many Republican leaners and independents will face a difficult decision. The national Democratic Party under Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer doesn’t share their views or values. But Trump is a rolling disaster of mendacity, corruption and prejudice. What should they do?
They should vote Democratic in their House race, no matter who the Democrats put forward. And they should vote Republican in Senate races with mainstream candidates (unlike, say, Corey Stewart in Virginia).
Why vote strategically in this case? Because American politics is in the midst of an emergency.
If Democrats gain control of the House but not the Senate, they will be a check on the president without becoming a threat to his best policies (from a Republican perspective) or able to enact their worst policies. The tax cut will stand. The Senate will still approve conservative judges. But the House will conduct real oversight hearings and expose both Russian influence and administration corruption. Under Republican control, important committees — such as chairman Devin Nunes’ Intelligence Committee — have become scraping, sniveling, panting, pathetic tools of the executive branch. Only Democratic control can drain this particular swamp.
Alternatively: If Republicans retain control of the House in November, Trump will (correctly) claim victory and vindication. He will have beaten the political performances of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their first midterms. He will have proven the electoral value of racial and ethnic stereotyping. He will have demonstrated the effectiveness of circuslike distraction. He will have shown the political power of bold, constant, uncorrected lies. And he will gain many more enablers and imitators.
Perhaps worst of all, a victorious Trump will complete his takeover of the Republican Party (which is already far along). Even murmured dissent will be silenced. The GOP will be fully committed to a 2020 presidential campaign conducted in the spirit of George Wallace — a campaign of racial division, of rural/urban division, of religious division, of party division that metastasizes into mutual contempt.
This would leave many Americans entirely abandoned in American politics: Catholics who are both pro-life and pro-immigrant. Evangelicals who are conservative but think that character matters, that compassion counts, that racial healing is a Christian calling. Traditional Republicans who miss a time — not so long ago — when leaders such as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush modeled grace and led the West in defending freedom.
In a democracy, a vote is usually not a matter of good and evil. It is a matter of weighing competing goods and choosing lesser evils. The possible outcomes this November come down to this: Trump contained, or Trump triumphant.
Democrats, I suspect, will make a victory harder than it should be. A significant number seem to view Trump’s vulnerability as an opportunity to ideologically purify their party. They are actively undermining the job of containing the president by alienating centrist voters they need to turn the House.
But this does not change the political and ethical reality. The only way to save the GOP is to defeat it in the House. In this case, a Republican vote for a Democratic representative will be an act of conscience.
The media simply does not understand, they simply will not accept, that it is the God-Emperor who is increasingly popular with the people, not the useless Republican cucks and cons in Congress. They also don’t understand that the higher turnout in Democratic primaries isn’t just a useful sign of party enthusiasm, it’s also an indicator that the Democratic candidates nominated are going to be further to the left than they were in 2016. Which, in genuinely competitive districts, is usually going to render them less electable in November.