” Most sensible analysts predicted the GOP pickup was going to be around 50 seats..”
Prove it.
And you didn’t answer my observation about the Republicans taking over 26 state legislatures.
I know there’s ras-bots who love their rat hero, but he is very fallible.
Okay, if you wish to dispute my points and yet are too lazy to do your own research I guess I will have further demonstrate how entirely wrong you are:
Here are the final pre-election 2010 congressional generic match up numbers taken from RCP:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/2010_generic_congressional_vote-2171.html
Rasmussen has the Republicans with a +12 generic ballot spread spread over the Democrats (which is EXACTLY what I told you already). EVERYONE in the world other than head-in-the-sand lefties knew the GOP would pick up 40-60 seats in the House - with most suggesting around a 50 seat pick up. Rasmussen's polling was some of the evidence used to predict this. Rasmussen had predicted about a 52 seat House gain for Republicans - which would easily have resulted in a GOP House majority. It turned out to be more, but he was clearly on the right track and was correct that the Dem's were about to get the boot.
Here was Stu Rothenberg predicting Republicans winning at least 50 seats in the House.
BULLETIN Stu Rothenberg, The Rothenberg Political Report: Democrats seem likely to lose at least 50 seats, but the GOPs ceiling for gains is much harder to predict. With close to 100 Democratic seats in play, GOP gains of five or six dozen seats are not at all impossible. House Democrats appear headed for a historic bloodbath, with losses probably exceeding 1994s 52 seats. We estimate likely GOP House gains at 55 to 65 seats, with gains at or above 70 seats possible.
The liberal Nate Silver also almost predicted these outcomes very accurately. Here were his predictions in the NY Times on 2010 based on polling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fivethirtyeight#2010_U.S._mid-term_elections
The 538 model had forecast a net pickup of 7 seats by the Republicans in the Senate, but the outcome was a pickup of 6 seats.
Our forecasting model, which is based on a consensus of indicators including generic ballot polling, polling of local districts, expert forecasts, and fund-raising data, now predicts an average Republican net gain of 54 seats (up one from 53 seats in last nights forecast), and a median net Republican gain of 55 seats. These figures would exceed the 52 seats that Republicans won from Democrats in the 1994 midterms. In final vote tallys as of December 10, 2010, the Republicans had a net gain of 63 seats in the House, 8 more than the total predicted on election eve though still within the reported confidence interval
Of the 37 gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner of 36. Only in Illinois, in which the Democratic candidate Pat Quinn defeated the Republican Bill Brady 46.6% to 46.1%, was the FiveThirtyEight prediction wrong by just half a percentage point.
Charlie Cook and Larry Sabato were also very close in their predictions of a GOP take over of the House with around 50 seats, a 6-8 Senate seat pickup, and EVERYONE basically agreed that at the state legislature level the Democrats were going to lose at least 700 seats (the number ended up exceeding even that because so many Democrats defected and became Republicans shortly after the massacre
Did you want me to do your research for Cook and Sabato as well? It shouldn't hard to find.
I know theres ras-bots who love their rat hero, but he is very fallible.
This is what everyone says when A)they don't like the polling results or B) refuse to accept polling is pretty darn accurate and getting better all the time.
General election and generic polling is remarkably accurate actually - especially when you use a tool like the RCP average. Lots of people refuse to believe this, but the facts are what they are. Primary polling tends to be less accurate - especially when dealing with caucuses, but it is also getting better all the time. The Dem outfit PPP nailed Wisconsin almost perfectly by predicting a Romney 7 point win. Other pollsters were showing the same, a 7 or 8 point Willard victory.
As the 2010 midterms came near, almost every serious analyst (who wasn't so partisan their analysis could be safely ingored) know the Republicans would win the House, come up with about 6-8 Seats in the Senate (could have been 10 had we not run crappy candidates like Christine O Donnell, Sharon Angle, McMahon, etc), and would romp the Democrats even worse at the local level. This was no secret. If you were surprised at the outcome, you weren't following the news.