But Rove cautioned against reading too much into polls, or the results of the 2006 midterm elections. “It’s important to keep in perspective how close the election actually was,” he said. “Three thousand five hundred and sixty-two votes and we would have had a Republican Senate. That’s the gap in the Montana Senate race. And eighty-five thousand votes are the difference in the fifteen closest House races. There’s no doubt we’ve taken a short-term hit in the face of a very contentious war, but to have the Republicans suffer an average defeat for the midterm says something about the underlying strength of conservative attitudes in the country.” Rove’s arithmetic was correct, but he sounded like John Kerry, who, shortly after his defeat in the 2004 election, told me, “I received the second-highest number of votes in American history.” ~The New Yorker

Put another way, Rove’s response is a bit like that of an Astros fan who could still say, “Sure, the Sox beat us four games to nothing in ’05, but all of the games were really close.”  Rove quite happily ignores that the national vote–the one that will matter quite a lot next year–gave the Dems a nine point advantage in the midterms.  The Democrats could point to a number of extremely close House elections (in New Mexico or Wyoming or Illinois) that went against them and say, “If we had just had a few thousand more votes here or there, we would have gained 40 seats.”  It might be true, and yet it could very well be irrelevant.  For Rove to continue to describe the losses last year as “average” for a midterm election reveals just how little he has learned: with gerrymandering and advantages of modern incumbency taken into consideration, losing 30 seats is a blowout defeat.

Meanwhile, Rep. Jeff Flake sums up the bankruptcy and desperation of the GOP today:

All we can hope for, I guess, is for the Democrats to overreach on something. 

That’s what they were saying for a lot of last year, too, and it didn’t happen.  Until it does, or until Republicans develop something like an effective response to the demands of the electorate, the GOP can expect to keep sinking.