The Washington Times offered an article today about improving GOP prospects that, to me anyway, seemed long on conclusions and short on evidence. Their thesis:

There has been a palpable shift in the mood in Washington in recent weeks. No longer are insiders in both parties sharing predictions of a Democratic rout of Republicans.

Some on both sides had expected an election debacle for the Republicans, driven by the Iraq war, high gas prices and the perception that a Republican-led Washington can neither shoot nor spend straight.

Now those perceptions have changed.

First off, let me just note the strategic use of metaphor in this lead. This is metaphor-as-bet-hedging, which is typical of the press. No longer is there going to be a "rout" of Republicans. No longer are people expecting an "election debacle." This is interesting because -- what exactly is a "rout"? Is it 15 or 30 seats? Or 50 or 70? What is an "election debacle"? Is it that the GOP merely loses control? Or is it maybe that they lose control so badly that they cannot reacquire it in 2008? Who knows! What we do know is that nobody can point to anything specific in this article on November 8 and declare that the Times was wrong! Why? Because the Times has chosen to couch its thesis only in metaphor. One thing that has turned me sour about the press and its pundits is this kind of strategic use of the metaphor -- it subtly and quietly introduces ambiguity where clarity is possible and preferable. I think that this happens because no news outlet wants to put itself on the line, but they also do not want to appear as though they are not putting itself on the line. So -- they hedge their bets by way of metaphor.

Anyway, I will get off the literary high horse and get on with the argument. As I said, the evidence that the Times provides does not seem to me to justify the enthusiasm among DC Republicans.

For instance, here is something offered up by Ken Mehlman that the Times accepts without question:

Comparing the 2006 midterm elections to previous major shifts, Mr. Mehlman says he sees none of the signs that preceded those landslides. In 1974, following the Watergate scandal, there was a surge in the Democratic primary-voter turnout and a decline in Republican voter turnout. The reverse was true before the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress.

So far this year, there has been no indication of a Democratic surge. In 36 of 39 primaries, the Democratic turnout has been lower than the average of the past 20 years. Only Connecticut, North Dakota and Vermont had higher-than-average Democratic turnouts this year.

The Times goes on to imply, though not by way of more Mehlman quotations, that this indicates that Democrats are not activating their base voters as well as they did in 1974. There are two major problems with this. First, they do not need to. They Democrats "only" need 15 seats. Provided that base amplification has a linear relationship with final seat swings, they need to amp the base by a little less than 1/3 the amplification of 1974 or 1994, all else being equal. The Democrats netted 48 seats in 1974, the GOP netted 52 in 1994. The Democrats only need 15 this time around. So -- what the Times notes might actually be consistent with a Democratic takeover.

Second, the argument that low primary turnout is a sign of a relatively placid base does not square with what we know about primary elections. Primaries do not tend to have high turnout because voters are so excited for November that they just have to go out and vote in March. They are not like football preseason. They tend to have high turnout because there are competitive races that attract voter attention. And competitive races in the primary tend to occur when more than one strategic, high quality politician see a good chance at actually getting into Congress, and throw their hats into the ring.

So -- why were Democratic primary races relatively uncompetitive this year? There are at least two reasons, one that favors the GOP and one that favors the Democrats. To the GOP's advantage, there are not many open seats that they have to defend. Strategic, high quality politicians most frequently come out of the woodwork for open seats because they know how hard it is to take on incumbents. Fewer open seats means fewer potential pickup opportunities for the Democrats -- good news for the GOP. To the Democrats advantage, the party can and does play a role in encouraging/discouraging candidates to or from running, and it appears that the national Democrats have done a good job at this. They succeeded in (a) getting good people in about 25 races and (b) helping clear a path for these people through the primaries by discourating competitive, but inferior, candidates from offering a challenge to the recruited candidates. Now -- the Democrats have suffered some embarassments in the recruitment/derecruitment game, notably in CA 11, KY 03 and NH 02. However, this seems to me to be explicable by their unprecedented activity in pre-primary maneuvering. If your failure rate is 15% of the time, you are going to have a lot more failures when you try 50 times than when you try 10 times. If your successes are not mentioned -- and, in this case, they are not because a successful recruitment/derecruitment will have the appearance of the party not being involved -- it will look as though you are stumbling when you really are not.

Taking a step back, this Times article is very peculiar to me. The Times is certainly a right-leaning paper. But right-leaning news outlets, beyond talk radio at least, do not seem to me to be historically guilty of being pollyannaish about the Republicans (I think the left-leaning ones like The New York Times are typically pollannaish about Democratic prospects, which in turn actually damages Democratic prospects). So -- the Times is clearly picking up on a vibe that the GOP elites seem to feel, but do not really justify it well at all. This means one of either two things (or possibly a mixture of both): (a) there is no justification to the vibe, and modified GOP expectations will yield disappointment on November 8; (b) there is some justification to the vibe, but the data that is driving this expectation is not yet publicly available.

I am not sure which it is. This is one of the drawbacks of living in Wrigleyville. I am not in any kind of loop. Of course -- if you are like me and think that separation from the center of power enables one to analyze power more clearly, overall one is better off being a stone's throw from the Cubs home than the Nationals home.