One of the frustrating things about politics is there is a lot of conventional wisdom associated with it. This is frustrating in two ways, one it tends to tell folks who want to buck the system that they are going to lose in their efforts. The other is the fact the problem with all conventional wisdom, namely for a predictable outcome all the extraneous factors have to be similar to previous elections

The conventional wisdom is says that the party which holds the White House loses seats in the House and the Senate during the mid-term elections. This has been true most of the time, with most recent notable exception of 2002, when the Republicans rode a wave of fear from the 9/11 attacks to a larger majority.

The question becomes is the 2010 election cycle similar enough to previous cycles for the CW from folks like Charlie Cook of the Cook Report to be accurate or is this an outlier year where there are so many factors in play that the CW is not really an accurate model to predict the outcome.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

There are times when you think that you know what is right, but when new information and new understanding comes along you find out that you were wrong. When this happens it is important to recognize it and explain it. This dairy does both.