The New York Post has a story on a possible “NY earthquake” in November, and one of the things it cites is an August poll for NY-24:

Central New York, including the Finger Lakes, Utica and Rome, where incumbent Mike Arcuri trails challenger Richard Hanna by 50-37 in a poll by the Democratic Benenson Strategy Group on Aug. 31.

There is one small problem here. Arcuri led Hanna in that poll 50-37. According to Kyle Trygstad, this was part of a DCCC poll dump to show that some of their targeted incumbents were doing reasonably well:

The DCCC polls, which were taken of 400 likely voters in late August and carried a 4.9-point margin of error, include some of the party’s most vulnerable candidates. For example, a Benenson Strategy Group poll found Rep. Michael Arcuri (D-N.Y.) ahead of Republican Richard Hanna, 50 percent to 37 percent.

It makes the “earthquake” story a lot easier when you just switch the numbers to give the challenger the lead, doesn’t it? Arcuri is also up by eight according to Siena’s most recent poll. This isn’t really surprising. The GOP has lost many upstate New York districts in the last four years, and they lost two of them since the start of 2009. Right now, the Democratic incumbents in both NY-20 and NY-23 are in a decent position to win re-election. Since Scott Murphy defeated the well-liked state politician Jim Tedisco in NY-20, he has apparently won over voters in his district. Remember that these are historically Republican districts that have no modern tradition of electing Democrats to Congress. The most recent poll had Murphy up by 17 against his challenger.

Looking at some of the other races the story mentions among the “possible pick-ups,” I saw that they included NY-20, NY-23 and NY-25. The Post article overlooked the huge Murphy lead reported a few days ago and relied on an older poll with a smaller Murphy lead. As you may remember, Bill Owens was the one who defeated Hoffman in the three-way race for the 23rd District, and according to Politico he was ahead in the last poll taken and has a two-to-one advantage in money. Once again, Hoffman is not the Republican nominee, but he will still contest the race as the Conservative nominee, which makes Owens’ re-election a little more likely. Cook, Sabato, Rothenberg and RCP all consider NY-23 to be at least a “lean Democratic” seat. Dan Maffei’s district in NY-25 is listed anywhere from “lean Democratic” (RCP) to “Democrat favored” (Rothenberg), but it is not on anyone’s list of seats that anyone believes the GOP is likely to win. The article says that the challenger in NY-01 has a “good chance” to defeat the incumbent Bishop, but every ranking system except for RCP puts this seat in the Democratic column. That makes sense, since Bishop was first elected in 2002, an unusually bad year for Democrats, and the district voted for both Gore and Obama. Bear in mind that the non-partisan analysts are far more bullish on Republican gains this year than I am, and even they don’t think many districts in New York are going to change parties. That means that seven of the nine “possible pick-ups” listed in the article are not very likely wins, and the only one that is a likely win is Massa’s open seat, which everyone already knew. For that matter, Gillibrand isn’t going to lose to a friend of KLA terrorists. The quality of reporting in the conservative media about New York politics seems to be unusually bad these days.

Why does any of this matter? For most of the last year and a half, conservative pundits and newspapers have been promoting a story that seems to be untethered to reality. It has a reached a point lately that news “reports” on the midterms have devolved into exercises in wild, unfounded, pro-Republican speculation that have nothing to do with the political conditions in the country. Obviously, some conservative journalists are going to propagandize for the GOP in an election season, but floating the idea that New York Republicans are going to have massive electoral success against all evidence is a good example of the desperate self-deception that many people on the right are practicing this year. It encourages conservatives to think that they are on the verge of a landslide when they aren’t, and in the meantime it destroys the credibility of the people making these claims. Having convinced themselves that the midterms are going to be an unprecedented win for the GOP, conservatives and Republicans have been building up completely unrealistic expectations, and they are going to be bitterly disappointed when reality intrudes. More practically, if the NRCC is wasting its time and money targeting seven districts in New York, it is frittering away resources it doesn’t have to contest races it isn’t likely to win, and meanwhile other pick-up opportunities in more receptive parts of the country (e.g., Ohio or Michigan) will probably be missed as a result. On a more serious note, any national Republican money wasted on DioGuardi’s campaign is just a disgrace and an insult to Orthodox Christians across the nation.