Six Months After Midterm Disaster, Hopeful Signs for Democrats

[elleng]

Looking at the bigger picture, my view is that the two biggest wild cards so far this year have both broken in favor of the Democrats: one being the risk the Republicans took by voting almost unanimously for Mr. Ryan’s budget, and the other being the killing of Osama bin Laden. Even in an election that mostly comes down to the economy — President Obama and the Democrats, make no mistake, remain extremely vulnerable there — these could be important factors at the margins. Pick up an extra one percent of the vote here, an extra two percent of the vote there, and your strategy starts to look a lot more robust: maybe okay-but-not-good economic growth is enough to get the Democrats elected, in addition to good-but-not-great growth.

Coupled with what is arguably a troubling start for the Republicans in the presidential campaign — a couple of electable candidates aren’t running, while there are signs now that Sarah Palin may — the past six months have played out in a way that is toward the lower end of what the G.O.P. might reasonably have expected in November 2010.

That doesn’t mean there are any guarantees. Far from it: I don’t know that Mr. Obama is much more likely than a 2-to-1 favorite to retain the White House, nor that Democrats better than even money to take back the House. But both sets of odds have improved, in my view, from where I would have pegged them a few months ago.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/six-months-after-midterm-disaster-hopeful-signs-for-democrats/?hp