Okay, we’ll see. I’ll remember that you predicted that Hillary would lose the nomination (unless my memory is faulty).
No, I’m fine with potshots for now. 
I haven’t made a firm prediction on that yet. But I do think she may very well fail to be the nominee. If Biden gets in the race, I will actually make that call.
THen please limit your potshots to when I got things wrong three years ago.
Okay, we’ll see.
I can’t make any promises.
Well, I’m on a serious hot streak lately, so if you want to be wrong…
How many of the current crop of candidates have you at some point since 2012 insisted was going to be the one to win it in 2016? Is it fewer than six?
None. I picked my favorite candidates that I was supporting, not predicting winners.
I find this completely bizarre since I was so impressed by Walker as noted upthread. But my nose isn’t too bent out of shape, as Walker is the candidate about whom I feel the greatest combination of fear and loathing, so I’m happy to see him drop in the polls even if I find it mystifying. I still wouldn’t count him out though.
All this means is that we have people who can become president, at which time you’ll grumble that they aren’t seasoned enough. In presidential politics, you can assemble your perfect GOP candidate and put him/her against an “unready” or otherwise imperfect Democrat, and the Democrat will win simply because they are not a Republican.
Your party is doing well currently in Congress and state houses–bully for you. But it is doing so with a coalition of old white voters that is strong only because it built up a good head of steam in the middle of the 20th century. You’re not replacing those voters as they die off, while we are adding to our ranks all the time. So our time will come in downticket races.
In the meantime, though, it’s already pretty well over for you guys on the presidential level. You’ve only won the popular vote in one presidential election since the 1980s, and that was the narrow reelection of a wartime incumbent. And every cycle the electorate loses old white folks and adds young brown folks.
You like to talk about prognostication. Here’s one: You. Will. Not. Win. The. Presidency. In. 2016. Take that to the bank.
One more reason I’ll take my party’s situation, even as it stands in Congress and in state races, over yours: the Big Sort. Progressives and conservatives are increasingly moving to likeminded blue and red states/districts respectively. What this means for Democrats is that it is increasingly common for them to get to vote for all winners in every election: mayor, state legislature, governor, U.S. House, Senate, president. They are represented at every level of government by a Democrat, while Republicans are just some far-off Other they can wrinkle their noses at when they see them on TV, or just laugh at them.
But Republicans? Despite their (your) being able to enjoy elections like 2010 and 2014, and point to various downballot victories, they constantly have to live under a president they loathe. And boy do they hate that. Well, get used to it. 
That’s not really how it works. You are underestimating the sheer amount of charisma it takes. JFK and Obama pulled it off. All the other winners were governors or VPs. It’s no coincidence that JFK and Obama were very unusual candidates. I don’t think any of the young Democrats mentioned here have those political chops.
Sure, IF your voters get motivated, and IF they don’t get more conservative as they age. Chew on this:
18-24 voters
2008-66-32 Democrats
2012-60-39 Democrats
2014(18-29)-54-43 Democrats
Looks like Republicans are slowly leeching those millenials away from the Democrats. That’s the price of governing badly.
Noted.
We always have to live with divided government. That’s how our system is structured. If I had to choose, I’d rather be where we are now than in the Democrats’ situation, with a President facing opposition from Congress and a large majority of state governments. After all, we don’t need to win too many more to make a President irrelevant. Plus with 7 more states we can change the Constitution and enhance the power of Congress at the expense of the President(or more accurately, restore Congress’ role, since Presidents have expanded their power with each successive administration).
None of the Republicans do either.
For the millionth time, midterms aren’t comparable to presidential elections. From '04 to '08 Democrats went way up with young voters. In '12 they went down, but still higher than '04. We’ll see in '16 which way the trend is going.
Only seven more states, you say! Which states are your best prospects, then? (Problem being, of course, that when Democrats are at low ebb, there is no low-hanging fruit for your side, to say the least.)
You are whistling past the graveyard when it coms to Millennials. Here’s a good article for you, from the highly respected Pew research organization:
The GOP’s Millennial problem runs deep
Part of the problem for you guys is simply that Millennials aren’t nearly as white as the older generations that make up the GOP base. Nor are they remotely as religious. Those two factors alone make the GOP a tough sell for them.
And even among white Millennials, they are a lot more liberal than older whites, and research suggests that among whites, political views gel in early adulthood and usually do not change when they get older.
Jon Chait sums it up nicely:
To be fair to the demographers, ‘aging out of the electorate’ may include being overtaken by Alzheimer’s or other forms of senior dementia. I’m sure my wife’s 91 year old grandmother didn’t vote last November for the first time in her adult life, despite being physically in good health.
So your defense of the claim that you only predict well when your prediction coincides with what you want is to point to an election where your prediction coincided with what you wanted to happen? How about you point to a case where you predicted against your desires and got it right?
So 5 out of 7, where you picked 6 Republicans to win.
The Republican party is on a hot streak. You’re just along for the ride.
Say it out loud why midterms are different. Why do young people, minorities, virtually everyone, vote more Republican in midterms the last two elections?
We got Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maryland. If your voters won’t come out, there’s no state we can’t win.
Yet we are still making slow gains. Our millenials are still voting. Yours, disillusioned because their hopes were dashed with Obama, stayed home in huge numbers in 2010, 2012, and 2014. We don’t have to appeal to groups that don’t vote. Obama used the millenials then turned out to be just another politician, which kept them on the sidelines for the next three national elections.
Yep, nothing but blue skies and sunshine ahead for the Republican Party!
Bernie Sanders is a Republican?
Sure looks good so far. Half the name recognition yet only a few points behind Clinton nationally, and with some candidates leading in states Obama won.
It was all a blur until I read this: good forecasters revisit their track record and think about how they could have done better. Until then the arguments weren’t worth bothering with.
So. Let’s take a look. Reviewing adaher’s prediction thread, I see a problem. A true forecast typically contains a central outcome, a feel for probability and an outline of your reasoning. Roughly speaking (very) that’s how science works as well: you typically need to present a statistically significant relationship and a coherent story. You need to enter into the game with the view that your perspective could be falsified.
We learned something about the 2012 campaign. Ad hoc nit-picking directed at a systematic and scientific forecast framework is asinine. (Hey: blow dried TV pundits do it too.) But if you want to push a POV, you have to do more. This isn’t ideology talking: Bricker for example always explains his reasoning or at least part of it. That makes it possible to do a proper post-event assessment. He got the 2012 Obama election wrong for example, but his error was pretty subtle: he relied on a metric (unemployment) which though correlated with the right sort of variables wasn’t especially robust. The moral was to rely heavier on technical experts like Fair and Silver as opposed to superficially inclined journalists. Bricker was so close!
“I think Perry will be the first to drop out”, doesn’t impress me. “I think Perry will be the first to drop out and here’s why,” gives you an entrance ticket. Even better is to say, “Oh, and here’s how I might be wrong.” If the jabber can be falsified as well, you’ve made a compound forecast, which is a better test of your world view. Another poster who has done that successfully is Exapno Mapcase.
Massachusetts:
House 125 D 35 R
Senate 34 D 6 R
Illinois:
House 71 D 47 R
Senate 39 D 20 R
Maryland:
House of Delegates 91 D 50 R
Senate 33 D 14 R