Who Wins and Who Loses in Debt Battle

Nate Silver published an informative article recently entitled "Surveying the Electoral Damage of the Debt Debate" that should be required reading for anyone who is interested in about the political landscape following the debt "crisis."

While I understand that a lot of people are more worried about whether their social security and Medicare will be cut than about who wins and who loses in the end, there are a large amount of politicos out there who eat, sleep, and breathe polling data and statistical analysis.

The most notable analysis was in regards to the 2012 election cycle.

FiveThirtyEight

Since Congress’s approval rating is now extremely low, 2012 could be another high-volatility cycle. There are 93 first-term members of the current House (78 of whom are Republicans). Next year could match or exceed that threshold, especially given redistricting, which could be responsible for another 20 or so incumbents either losing or retiring above and beyond the impact of the overall political climate.

What’s less clear is how the losses might be distributed between the parties. An anti-Republican wave is plausible, but so is an anti-incumbent one. The election of 2012 could resemble that of another redistricting year, 1992, in which there were a remarkable 110 first-term members of Congress elected, but in which the losses were split fairly evenly between the parties. (Democrats lost a net of 9 seats in the House despite winning the presidency.)

One thing that is for sure? Congressional Republicans are in trouble:

In other words, I think we’re seeing a lot of caution lights for the Republicans — but not yet any red flags. The nearest thing to an exception is probably this: the recent CNN poll that finds that 58 percent of voters think the policies proposed by Republicans in Congress would take the country in the wrong direction. Not only is that figure up significantly from where it was when CNN last polled it in January (when it stood at 50 percent). It’s also by some margin the worst rating that CNN has found for either party since they began polling on the question in 1994.

Read the whole article here.