Over the weekend a commenter on my South Dakota post remarked that I had been “almost uniformly wrong” on my political race blogging for the last two years. That was an interesting claim, since I’m fairly sure that when it comes to House races my assessments of the special elections since Obama’s inauguration have been reasonably accurate. It’s true that it didn’t take great insight to recognize that Jim Tedisco was blowing an easy Republican win in NY-20. There were plenty of other people remarking on how poorly the GOP had to do to allow NY-23 to slip away for the first time in over a century. It was even easier in PA-12 to see that the Republican candidate was not going to win. It’s true that I never saw the Massachusetts Senate upset coming, but then the same might be said for the vast majority of observers.

When it comes to looking at House races during the past two years, I believe I have been correctly identifying the unifying theme that connects Republican failures in special House elections, and this is the tendency of the Republican candidate to run on a national party platform and to ignore or neglect local issues and interests. In NY-20 and NY-23, and again in PA-12, Republicans keep wanting to nationalize House races, and when they try this they are unsuccessful. Democratic candidates have been successful in these races because they have been resolutely parochial and preoccupied with their respective districts’ local concerns. If I understand Republican strategy for the midterms, it seems that they would like to nationalize the election and imitate their repeated failed attempts to hold or pick up seats in the last two years. Maybe that will work better during a general election. The GOP had better hope so. They now have the overwhelming majority of the media and the pundit class analyzing their impending victory almost as if it has already happened, so falling short will look even worse than before.

Most of the claims about the midterms we are hearing now continue to be based on the gaudy, seemingly incredible Republican advantage on generic ballot polling. As a matter of analysis, I find the obsession with the generic ballot poll to be something that unites Republican enthusiasts and Democratic doomsayers in their complete obliviousness to the variety of House races. The closer one looks at many of the individual races, the harder it becomes to see where the Republicans pick up all these seats they’re supposedly going to take over.

Obviously, an advantage in money isn’t everything, but when I see (via Weigel) the 8-to-1 money advantage belonging to Tom Perriello, the presumed dead man walking from VA-05, it makes me want to question my own assumption that he will lose. Of course, Perriello is probably finished because of the political leanings of his district, but most others can’t be taken for granted.

Walt Minnick in Idaho has an enormous 16-to-1 cash-on-hand advantage over his Republican challenger, and his seat is no longer seen as being all that vulnerable. If there is a tsunami coming, shouldn’t Democrats in Idaho (even if they are former Republicans who opposed every major piece of legislation for the past two years) be among the first swept out to sea? It did Jon Hostettler and Jim Leach no good to be antiwar, anti-Bush Republicans in 2006, but Minnick seems to have protected himself against the backlash. Why won’t other Blue Dogs be able to do the same thing?

I know I keep coming back to Travis Childers in MS-01, but he represents exactly the sort of district Republicans must win this year, and he is not doing that badly. Childers has a four-to-one cash-on-hand advantage, and he ran 17 points ahead of Obama in his district in 2008. According to the latest poll from there, Childers currently leads his opponent by five points, and he has positive favorability and job approval ratings. Presumably a GOP tsunami should be swamping a Democrat in northern Mississippi in a district that gave Roger Wicker almost 66% of the vote in 2006, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. At the very least, the race is so competitive that Republicans cannot assume that they will win MS-01, and if they can’t win there they are fast running out of easy pick-ups.

The point is not that Republicans aren’t going to gain a large number of seats. Gaining 25-30 seats is still significant. 35 or 38 would be even more impressive, but it still won’t be enough. My point here is that Republicans will have to win every single one of the seats I have mentioned here to manage a takeover of the House. As well as they are polling on the generic ballot, they are not doing nearly as well in several of the races that they must win.

Update: Buried in the new ABC poll is an interesting result. When asked whether their vote in the midterms will be to express opposition to or support for Obama, 25% said support and 27% said opposition, and 49% said that Obama is not a factor. Compare that to poll ahead of the ’06 midterms in which 35% said opposition and 18% said support. That is what a backlash against a President looks like.