America Votes 2006

Many of you have been waiting for my election predictions... and why not? I've been wrong so many times before! This year, TCS Daily asked a selected few of its writers to predict the outcome of tomorrow's mid-term Congressional contest: read the full article here, or see below for my section:

CRAIG WINNEKER, Editor, This Europe

Conventional wisdom holds that Democrats will recapture the House - giving them at least two years in which to get medieval on the Republican administration. I for one relish the prospect of Nancy Pelosi staring down George W. Bush in a contest of which deer is in whose headlights.

Democrats had a chance to snag the Senate, too, until last Thursday, when a Zogby poll showed them actually doing it. This was the guy who, on the afternoon of Election Day 2004, predicted a John Kerry landslide. Study hard, get good grades, and you, too, can become a pollster or even a political analyst.

It will all come down to turnout. Yawn. What an election-eve cliché. What it really comes down to is which party will be better able to suppress the potential voting activities of its opponent. One big question mark: will the clandestinely-gay-fundamentalist-Christian-dad vote be mobilized or discouraged by recent news events? I think when push comes to shove these guys will descend from Brokeback Mountain and swarm polling places. They'll probably give Conrad Burns another six years.

Then there is the biennial carping about how democracy suffers because so few Americans bother to go to the polls. I live in Belgium, where election turnout is always 100 percent; citizens are required by law to vote. Well, the electoral system here produces just as many nincompoops as the American one - and the most successful political party has its roots in the SS. So be careful how much turnout you wish for.

My prediction? Democrats "win" in a landslide, but Republicans manage to keep control of the House and Senate. How will this be possible? Not sure, really, but I'm hoping Vanity Fair will explain it to me sometime soon.