Hopefully this post is understood and sheds light on the way I view the election landscape this year.
I don’t trust polling or media narratives and believe they are used to shape for desired outcomes. They demoralize you, you don’t vote, they win on the margins of a midterm year and its dynamics.
Midterms suck for the party in power, and they have for a century. Reagan lost seats in the House with a 63% approval rating. My skepticism doesn’t mean I see a “red wave” forming in a midterm Dems are supposed to win.
I do believe the GOP is favored to hold the Senate on the fundamentals of the races that will decide it, and believe there is a 1 in 3 shot Republicans hold the House - which is almost 3x better odds than history affords. This is due to redistricting and the fact that Dems have nominated DSA aligned candidates in seats they’d automatically win if not for that. The GOP is also short at least 6 seats they should hold this year for one reason or another.
My mind doesn’t read polling or formulas. It reads trends and sees each county as a unit on the battlefield. Every state has a blue map and red map - I only need to label a few bellwethers to give you a read on what is going on. There are simply races you CAN win (will certainly win, may win, could win in an upset) and then races you CANNOT win (take every House seat in Chicago, for example).
The Texas Senate seats falls into the fringes of that first group for Dems. In a few more years of transplants and Hispanics running right, perhaps more like Florida where there is zero shot. Dems get big vote margins from 4 counties, and modest vote margins in a few others. Those all have to be maxed out, and they need bad GOP county turnout and a full-on reversion of the Latino vote to 2016 splits.
It’s not that it CAN’T happen - it just takes a lot for it to happen and as such you should see a mind that views things at a granular level like an Army intelligence officer veteran.
There are 435 different House races, of which I think perhaps 35-40 are reasonably playable for either side, and 35 Senate seats, of which 12 are interesting this year. Everything else is noise and fluff.