Humans are not very good fortune tellers, not even when there’s lots of data on which to make educated guesses. That’s certainly been true of recent political polling in 2016 and 2020 and to a lesser degree in 2018. Nevertheless, the pressure to make predictions is strong. So today, Matt Yglesias has put forward his best guess as to what will happen nationally next month. His conclusion is that polls are once again underestimating GOP strength in various races and that, partly because of that bad data, Democrats are going to underperform even current (low) expectations.

According to 538, Republicans have a 72 percent chance of taking the House, while Democrats have a 64 percent chance of holding the Senate. Those forecasts seem D-skewed to me. I will be genuinely shocked if Democrats hold the House. The only precedents for that happening in remotely recent history are the 9/11 election and the 1962 midterms held right after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m not saying it’s impossible — we do have those two examples — but it’s difficult to understand why that would happen this fall. By contrast, Republicans picking up a net of one Senate seat would be a completely banal outcome. The fact that polling is giving it only a 1-in-3 chance of happening is, I believe, a consequence of the polling being skewed.

He offers his best guess which is a 70% chance that the GOP takes the Senate (adding 1-3 seats) and a 30% chance Democrats hold it (no change or adding one seat). That’s quite a bit more positive for the GOP than the FiveThirtyEight estimate which gives Democrats a 60% chance of holding the Senate (he said 64% above so the FiveThirtyEight estimate may have shifted a bit since he wrote this).

As Yglesias sees this (and I think he’s right), this is an election where history and the map favor the GOP but those factors still come up against candidate selection on the GOP side and campaign strategy on the Democratic side. The candidate selection problem could refer to Herschel Walker or Mehmet Oz or others but it’s something that many commenters have already talked about as hurting the GOP’s chances. Yglesias sums it up this way, “Republicans could have put themselves in a much better position to win in Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania just by nominating real professional politicians.”

But there’s a countervailing force that hasn’t gotten as much attention in the media and that’s the ideological rigidity and lack of discipline on the left. For instance, the left really did have an opening with the Dobbs decision but as Yglesias sees it, they have mostly squandered it by taking extreme left positions most Americans don’t support.

Dobbs, meanwhile, delivered a big jolt to Democrats and continues to be a millstone around the GOP’s neck. But individual Democratic Party candidates keep squandering it by staking out a very odd “no restrictions on abortion under any circumstances” position rather than promising to return to the pre-Dobbs status quo or even copying the actually existing policy in liberal states. I don’t really understand the communications breakdown between the pro-choice groups and candidates that has led to them being so poorly equipped to talk about this. But it’s a huge failure.

I’d also note that while progressives routinely tell me it’s impossible to expect activists to exert discipline, pro-life groups have done exactly that since Dobbs. You do not see safe-seat House Republicans tweeting in favor of a national abortion ban, Mitch McConnell is not committing to hold a floor vote on one, and anti-abortion activists are not staging a sit-in in his office. You know and I know that the GOP base is committed to a very extreme position on abortion. But they are giving their members latitude to try to win the election, and then basing their post-election strategy on the seat count. It’s smart politics.

We’ve seen several recent examples of this lack of discipline. Mark Kelly is a relatively moderate Democrat on some issues but on abortion he struggles to clearly distance himself from the most extreme position, i.e. no limitations until birth. Similarly, Stacey Abrams has repeatedly struggled to sound even a little moderate on the issue though she must know doing so could help her in a state like Georgia which is still very purple.

So why do Democrats keep taking these far left positions in states where a more moderate approach would help them? Here Yglesias says it’s the combination of bad polling and ideological rigidity. The bad polling (which inevitably favors Democrats) convinces candidates and their teams that their lefty positions are more popular than they actually are. Some of them just don’t believe they need to moderate at all when more accurate polling (if it existed) would show them that they do need to dial it back a notch if they want to win.

The other problem is that a lot of these candidates, and the bevy of activists surrounding them, are true believers. They refuse to make winning a priority even when they’re warning about the dire consequences of losing.

I continue to think there is a remarkable mismatch between how progressives portray the stakes and what progressives are actually willing to do. The MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid says “literal fascism” and “female serfdom” among other things are on the table, which seems pretty bad.

So to tempt voters away from literal fascism, have they been given candidates in the purple districts (D+4/R+4) who disagree with progressives about gun control? Who support banning late-term abortions? Who have qualms about trans women competing against cis women in college sports? Who favor changing asylum law to try to cut off the flow of migrants arriving at the southern border? Who think it’s a problem that college admissions offices discriminate against Asian applicants and low-income whites? I’m not saying every candidate in every swing district should dissent from party leaders on all those subjects, but how many dissent on any of them?

You can either ride the far left rail with the Squad at all times or you can win in moderate states and districts. Generally speaking, you can’t do both. But the people screaming the loudest about the end of Democracy should the GOP win anything seem unable to make any kind of practical compromise to avoid that outcome.

And that sort of makes sense emotionally since the people most scared of the right will want to be as far away from right-wing positions as possible. But it doesn’t make sense in the real world where a lot of voters are still somewhere in the middle and get turned off by left-wing extremism on issues like abortion (no limits until birth), immigration (abolish ICE), crime (defund the police), criminal justice (bail reform, charge downs), drugs (safe injection sites), homelessness (no sweeps, no charges), etc.