The last time we saw a double-digit shift in Senate seats in a single election was when a former movie actor by the name of Ronald Reagan was elected president (Republicans won a dozen seats back in 1980). A shift of those dimensions in a non-presidential election year would be basically unheard of. ~Peter Wehner

There is a reason this is unheard of. A ten-seat gain by the non-presidential party has happened just twice before in the first midterm election of a new President’s term, and these were 1910 and 1946 under very different circumstances after fairly long periods of one-party government. Even with Bayh’s retirement and a Republican pick-up there, it would be necessary for Republicans to pick up Pennsylvania and Illinois in addition to the five much more vulnerable seats (NV, DE, ND, CO, AR), and then they would also have to win in California and Connecticut. If even one of their own open seats changed hands, this would still not be enough to regain a majority. The open seat in Indiana brings the Republicans closer to this goal, but the goal remains extremely unrealistic. To continue to talk about it as if it were a probable outcome will make anything less than this seem rather underwhelming.

It is also important to note that most Democratic wounds over at least the last six weeks have been self-inflicted. The Republicans are in the position they are in today on account of nothing they have done. Byron Dorgan panicked at the prospect of a real contest, Massachusetts Democrats nominated the worst possible candidate from their primary field, and Evan Bayh decided to give up rather than go through an election campaign that he could conceivably lose. Delusional Republicans claiming that the Democrats are in worse shape now than they were in 1994 are in no position to take full advantage of these mistakes. Wehner is reinforcing these delusions when he writes:

The Democratic party is in worse shape now than it was at a comparable period then [1994]. The mistrust of government runs deeper. The anti-incumbent tide is stronger. And the public uprising is greater.

There were far more House Democratic retirements in 1994, and Democrats were generally far more complacent and oblivious to the danger they were facing. Today there are more Republican Senate and House retirements than there are comparable Democratic retirements. In 1994, the Democratic presidential candidate had won a mere 43% of the popular vote two years earlier. In 2008, Obama won 52% of the popular vote. In 1994 it had been forty years since the Republicans had been in charge of Congress. Voting for the GOP seemed as if it might offer some change from the perpetual Democratic majority. Today memories of a Republican majority are fresh and generally negative.

As Chait points out, a recent Pew survey confirms what the NBC/WSJ poll showed a couple weeks ago and what post-Massachusetts polling showed last month:

Currently, slightly more voters say they think of their vote as a vote for Obama (24%) than as a vote against him (20%). Throughout most of 2006, roughly twice as many said they were voting “against” Bush as “for” him. And in three surveys during the fall of 1994, slightly higher percentages said they thought of their vote as against Clinton rather than for him.

As I wrote about the NBC/WSJ poll after it came out:

That doesn’t mean that Democrats aren’t going to lose many seats this fall. They will. However, it does suggest that most voters’ frustrations right now are not a product of their dissatisfaction with Obama. It is possible that these numbers could change and the anti-presidential vote could increase, but if we look at the ‘06 numbers we see that the levels of support and opposition were locked in over a year earlier and barely changed at all between the end of ‘05 and the election. After everything we have been hearing about Republican successes and the administration’s approaching doom, what is interesting here is that there are relatively so few respondents in this poll that want to express opposition to Obama in the midterms.

It is not clear that Congressional Democrats are going to have a worse-than-average election. However, if Congressional Democrats are poised to have a worse-than-average election year, it does not follow that the results represent deep public hostility to Obama. The RCP average of Obama’s approval rating continues to show that he has more support than Clinton did at a comparable point. If post-election polling in Massachusetts shows that Obama was not a factor for most Brown voters and two national surveys show that more midterm voters intend to vote to express support for him rather than opposition to him, it makes no sense to conclude that Obama is dragging his party down. For that matter, it is not yet clear that his party will experience a worse-than-average midterm election, so it is even more unreasonable to blame Obama for being the cause of this.