Charlie Cook pronounces doom for the Democrats:
These data confirm anecdotal evidence, and our own view, that the situation this summer has slipped completely out of control for President Obama and Congressional Democrats. Today, The Cook Political Report’s Congressional election model, based on individual races, is pointing toward a net Democratic loss of between six and 12 seats, but our sense, factoring in macro-political dynamics is that this is far too low.
Many veteran Congressional election watchers, including Democratic ones, report an eerie sense of déjà vu, with a consensus forming that the chances of Democratic losses going higher than 20 seats is just as good as the chances of Democratic losses going lower than 20 seats…..
Cook has, of course, been doing this for a long time and is considered one of the best in the business at what he does.
Which, doubtless, has a lot of Democrats thinking hard about their job prospects. And not liking what they are seeing at all.
I’ve mentioned repeatedly that I was sure that the Dem’s internal polls showed them to be in serious trouble. Cook just confirmed that.
Cook also points out that the wounds appear to be self-inflicted. I’d only quibble with one point. He says that signs are pointing to an improved economy (making the self-inflicted nature of the Democrat’s falling prospects even more evident.) I’d say that a sharp – completely unexpected – jump in the jobless numbers does not indicate that the economy is getting better – at least in any way that means squat to Main Street America.
There were 576,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended Aug. 15, up from a revised 561,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said in a weekly report.
A consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com expected only 550,000 new claims.
Believe it or not, it actually gets worse. Some 4 million home loans are now in delinquency (this is in addition to the huge numbers in foreclosure):
The number of Americans who have fallen at least 30 days behind on their home loan payments jumped 44% in the second quarter from a year ago, according to an industry report.
That puts delinquencies at a record 9.24% of mortgages, according to the National Delinquency Report from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). That represents more than 4 million of the 45 million borrowers covered by the report.
What the rate does not include, however, are loans already in foreclosure. Some 4.3% of all the mortgages are in that stage, up from 3.85% three months earlier and 1.55 percentage points from one year ago.
While stocks and some other numbers may indicate the economy is “getting better” that is a pretty tough claim to sell to the newly unemployed or about to be foreclosed on.
And those results are a direct result of the actions of the Democrats and Obama. I suspect that has an enormous impact on their sliding-into-the-toilet poll numbers.
