For months the conventional wisdom has held that Democrats are in for an epic shellacking in November, perhaps on a scale that has never been seen in American history. This conventional wisdom is so hardened that if you watch cable news opinion shows or read the op-ed pages of the national papers, you'd think we might as well cancel the elections and just hand the reins over to California Republican Kevin McCarthy in the House and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell in the Senate. Just call it a day already. The assumption is that the Democratic congressional majority isn't just a lame duck, it's a dead duck.
There is certainly good reason to believe that the Democrats are facing a major loss. After all, the party in power almost always loses seats in the midterms. It's often been because the president brings in a number of marginal winners on his coattails and the party loses them again when he isn't on the ballot. (2002 was the only recent exception and that happened because of 9/11 and the fact that George W. Bush didn't really win his election --- which meant that he didn't have any coattails to lose.)
