That Light at the End of the Tunnel is an Oncoming Train

The NY Times is trying to buck up their party of choice, the Democrats, by giving them a brief but meaningless glimmer of hope:

A struggling economy has historically meant trouble for the president’s party in midterm elections. So it comes as no surprise that Democrats are girding for a tough November.

They should be. The economy is slowly recovering but remains on its sickbed, and most signs still point to a rough cycle for the party. Political analysts expect Republicans to make gains — possibly significant ones — in Congress in November, threatening to retake the House and maybe even the Senate.

But digging deeper, beyond the national numbers, reveals at least a few glimmers of hope for Democrats — still fairly distant and faint, but bright enough to get campaign strategists scanning the horizon and weighing the odds.

That is because different parts of the country are recovering at different rates — and, in a bit of electoral good luck for the Democrats, some of the areas that are beginning to edge upward more quickly, like parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, happen to be in important battlegrounds for the House and the Senate.

“A lot of the trend lines are turning positive in many of these contested areas,” said Mark Zandi, a chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “It really boils down to: Is there enough time for the trend lines to trump the still pretty difficult conditions in the minds of the voters?”

Let me remind you of something said by a pollster in one of yesterday's posts:

Mr. McInturff said voters' feelings, typically set by June in any election year, are being hardened by frustration over the economy and the oil spill. "It would take an enormous and seismic event to change the drift of these powerful forces before November," he said.

There's no indication at all of any kind of dramatic recovery that will occur before November. In fact, things will likely remain stagnant or even get worse in some areas by then, and who knows, the oil spill may well still be underway with fouled beaches covering much of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. It's could be pretty ugly in lots of ways.