The American Conservative

Larry Sabato thinks the Dems will take both houses, and helpfully provides a seat-by-seat breakdown.

Robert Novak predicts the GOP loses 19 seats in the House but keep the Senate. My American Conservative colleague Jim Antle sees House Republicans losing 25 seats but agrees that they’ll hold onto the Senate, though maybe only through the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Cheney.

You want some random guesswork from me? Ok, here are some absolutely final revised predictions:

Senate: Webb beats Allen. Talent beats McCaskill. Tester beats Burns. Whitehouse beats Chaffee. Corker beats Ford. Cardin wins in Maryland, DeWine loses in Ohio. Dems fall one seat short of picking up the Senate.

House: Just a random smattering, then the verdict — Pombo loses in California; Shays goes down in CT, but Nancy Johnson survives; Giffords storms to victory in AZ against Randy Graf (I sort of know Giffords, and although her politics aren’t mine, she’s one of the very few political people I know who doesn’t come off as if she’s trying to sell me a used car. I’m happy to see her win); JD Hayworth loses in AZ; Hostettler loses in Indiana’s Bloody Eighth; Tom Reynolds survives in NY; Heather Wilson loses in NM; Tim Mahoney beats Joe Negron for Mark Foley’s seat in FL but doesn’t last long; Lampson wins DeLay’s old seat in TX; Sestak defeats Curt Weldon in PA. Democrats underperform somewhat and pick up only about 20 seats overall. Moderately entertaining leadership battles, for both parties, ensue.

Larry Arnhart’s blog is worth a link.

I’m probably not exactly a Darwinian conservative myself — my secret wish is to rehabilitate Lamarck — but plainly the assault on Darwin lately is ideological rather than scientific and must be resisted.

Addendum: Actually there’s quite a lot wrong with Arnhart’s specific ideas about Darwinian conservatism, including this, “Darwinian conservatives will agree with President Bush that there is a natural desire for liberty.” What evidence is there for this claim? Most people throughout most of the world for most of history have been quite unfree and don’t seem to have chafed a great deal at their condition. Clearly enough, whatever natural drive there may be for freedom is easly satisfied or else overpowered by other impulses.

My naive impression is that a taste for freedom is both biologically and culturally uncommon. But then, a tend toward a pessimistic, Cram-like view of these things.

Addendum II: Following a link from Steve Sailer, I see the War Nerd has addressed the myth that people want democracy (not the same thing as freedom, of course, but these day people tend to mistake one for the other).

The Washington Post looks toward Tuesday:

Two days before a bitterly fought midterm election, Democrats have moved into position to recapture the House and have laid siege to the Senate, setting the stage for a dramatic recasting of the power structure in Washington for President Bush’s final two years in office, according to a Washington Post analysis of competitive races across the country.

In the battle for the House, Democrats appear almost certain to pick up more than the 15 seats needed to regain the majority. Republicans virtually concede 10 seats, and a split of the 30 tossup races would add an additional 15 to the Democratic column.

The Senate poses a tougher challenge for Democrats, who need to gain six seats to take control of that chamber. A three-seat gain is almost assured, but they would have to find the other three seats from four states considered to have tossup races — Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri and Montana.

Other sources, however, have noted that Republicans have been picking up momentum in the past few days. And Karl Rove is staking his reputation on the GOP playing a much better ground game again this year, as the party has in recent cycles. One other factor is going to help the Republicans and hasn’t been sufficiently noticed: absentee ballots. Whether or not they vote often, the GOP puts a high premium on its people voting early. Reports so far from Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, Pennslyvania, and elsewhere say that absentee ballot requests have been unusually high. Republicans should do better among absentees than among election-day voters.

That probably won’t be enough to keep the House Republican. In the Senate, I expect Talent to pull through in Missouri, where polls typically underestimate Republicans’ performance; Allen might survive in Virginia, too, although the Democrats have built up a pretty good GOTV effort here in the last couple of cycles. If I had to stake my life’s savings on it, I’d have to put my money on Allen, even though I hope he loses. Tennessee and Montana I don’t have much insight into: my guess would be that Burns’s last-minute comeback peters out and he loses, while Corker pulls through in Tennessee.

Neo Culpa, coming up next month in Vanity Fair. Here’s a bit of Richard Perle from the preview:

Richard Perle: “Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I’m getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, ‘Go design the campaign to do that.’ I had no responsibility for that.”

The Democratic Party of Virginia, obviously playing the odds that anyone living in an apartment building in the Rosslyn district of Arlington, Virginia is going to be a Dem, has kindly sent me a sample ballot. Here are the prospects, such as they are:

Friends have asked me whether there’s a libertarian in the Webb-Allen Senate race. Looks like there isn’t, just an Independent Green (I assume that’s what “IG” is), Glenda Gail Parker. None of my conservative friends are planning to vote for Allen, but most of them can’t vote for the pro-Roe Webb, either. For my part, I see several benefits to repudiating Allen and electing Webb. Allen’s not such hot stuff in domestic matters anyway, while in foreign policy Webb is clearly better. Moreoever, putting Democrats like Webb into the Senate (or the House, for that matter) may ever so slowly move the Democrats in the right direction not only on war but also on 2nd Amendment questions and other matters. So I’m for Webb.

For the House, I’m in Democrat Jim Moran’s district, but I won’t consider voting for him. He’s been reliably opposed to the Iraq War, but he’s also a leading advocate for a national ID card. I’m not going to vote for Moran’s nominal Republican rival, Tom O’Donoghue, either — this isn’t the year to shower charity on Republicans. That leaves an Independent candidate about whom I know absolutely nothing, one James T. “Jim” Hurysz. I’ll go with him: better the devil you don’t know, in this case.

Three constitutional amendments are on the ballot. In principle, I’m inclined to vote against all of them: what’s so wrong in the commonwealth of Virginia that it requires amending the constitution to deal with it? Nothing, so far as I can tell — or at least nothing that any of these amendments will address. The first is a Republican get-out-the-vote effort: an amendment to define marriage explicitly as a union of one man and one woman (so far so good) that also would prohibit the commonwealth or any of its subdivisions from creating or recognizing “another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage.” This is sleazy stuff, but I’ll vote for the amendment: by prohibiting Virginia and its muncipalities from redefining marriage or creating marriage-like institutions, the measure prevents state and local governments from compelling individuals to recognize or extend benefits to unions they don’t want to recognize. It doesn’t restrict the ability of homosexuals or others to get together and play house; it only means that nobody else is legally compelled to respect such arrangements. And if private institutions want to extend benefits anyway, they’ll still be able to do so.

The next amendment aims to delete a provision of the constitution that “prohibits the incorporation of churches.” The wording of the amendment suggests this is already a moot point, since this provision “was ruled to be unconstitutional and therefore now is obsolete.” Hmm. If it’s really obsolete and unenforceable, why go to the trouble of amending the constitution to be rid of it? Obsolete laws are the only kind I like. So I’ll vote against this one.

Finally, an amendment “to authorize legislation to permit localities to provide a partial exemption from real property taxes for real estate with new structures and improvements in connection in conservation, redevelopment, or rehabilitation areas.” I suppose empowering localities to lower taxes (albeit selectively) is something I can’t oppose, so I might have to support this one, too. It’s a sad day when I’m voting to amend a constitution — somewhere the ghost of Lord Falkland is rebuking me: “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change,” and none of these changes are necessary.

Then there are five bond issues, for “Local Parks and Recreation” ($35.5 million), “Metro and Transportation Projects” ($31.5 million), “Community Infrastructure” ($27.3 million), “Utilities” ($79 million), and “Arlington County Public Schools” ($33.7 million). Who said that local government is small government? I’ll be voting against all these boondoggles, just as I’ve voted against every bond issue and other state and municipal financing scheme that I can remember since I started voting a decade ago. Take a look at what “Parks and Recreation” means in Rosslyn. You want the taxpayers to foot $35.5 million worth of debt for that?

Reason‘s election-season issue (December) is out now, with a feature on whom libertarians should vote for (a question David Weigel and Katherine Mangu-Ward put to Markos Moulitsas, Grover Norquist, and other partisans). The issue also includes my double-review of Damon Linker’s book and Patrick Hynes’s In Defense of the Religious Right. And on the back page, Jesse Walker has a short piece on the National Guard’s “flat daddy” program to give children of soldiers stationed in Iraq cardboard cutouts of their fathers (or mothers, in some cases) to keep them company. Another achievement of the great war for democracy: Potemkin families.