So how’s the election going to shake out in November? Beats me, but in February Seth Masket put up a chart showing what we could expect based solely on two fundamentals: the president’s popularity and the growth in real per-capita disposable income since last year. Those two numbers now look pretty well set in stone: Trump is consistently polling between 35-40 percent, and income growth since last year was 1.9 percent. That means we just have to plug them into Masket’s chart from February:
It looks like Republicans are going to lose about 50 seats. There are no guarantees, of course, and maybe Trump will annex Baja California and suddenly become the most popular president in history. At the moment, though, this is a fairly reliable model and it predicts a big loss for the GOP. All that’s left is for the Democratic Party not to blow it.
