While digging through the latest “smoking gun” claims of Republicans about an email from White House advisor Ben Rhodes suggesting the Benghazi protests were based on protests over the “Innocence of Muslims” video rather than al Qaeda activity, Slate’s Dave Weigel gets to a question that, unbelievably, has been rarely asked:

[T]he entire argument is about Rhodes mentioning, hours after the CIA had suggested the Benghazi attack grew out of demonstrations in several countries, that the immediate inspiration for the demonstrations was a video. That’s the scandal—that by giving the video all this credit, the administration was distracting people from the real story that terrorism was surging again. Even though the subsequent 19 months have seen no more attacks on embassies. Even though reporting at the time said the excuse for the protests was said video.

Republicans seem to have forgotten why Benghazi! was supposed to be a big deal in the first place: it showed a feckless, America-hating, Muslim-loving administration so soft on jihadist terrorism that they couldn’t admit it had just happened.

So where did the global conflagration Benghazi! truly signaled go?

The perpetrators of this madness don’t even seem to care.

As noted here yesterday, FiveThirtyEight did an audience survey from which they gleaned the perceptions of people who identify strongly with being “midwestern” or “southern” and then used the results to indicate a consensus view of which states represent the “Midwest” and the “South.”

The “Midwest” results are a bit more compact than I would have expected, with a band of states including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin clearly being included, with Michigan and Nebraska following close behind. It’s a bit surprising the Dakotas seem to be “midwestern” to only about a third of respondents, but maybe that’s because they don’t have Big Ten football there, and/or because some people distinguish the “Midwest” from the “Plains.”

Is there any political significance to this definition? Yes, but probably only to the extent there is a long tradition of treating the Midwest as a political cockpit (or, in less rigorous writing, as some sort of quintessentially American “heartland”). There are rather large differences between Ohio and Kansas, and the latter hasn’t really been a politically competitive state in non-landslide presidential elections since the 1890s.

The “South” is traditionally a touchier definition, both to critical outsiders and self-conscious insiders. The 538 survey unsurprisingly shows majority (or very near-majority) acceptance as “southern” of all eleven of the former Confederate states—plus Kentucky. Defying my own personal definition of the South as states “where people used to own people,” Delaware and Maryland aren’t considered “southern” at all, and Missouri has the distinction of being largely rejected for regional membership by both midwesterners and southerners.

More interestingly, Virginia, with its intensely Confederate history, is perceived as significantly less “southern” than Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Even South Carolina, the state which dragged the rest of the region into secession and had the largest pre-Civil War slave population, trails the GLAM states in perceptions of being “southern.” Now you can say states with a lot of cosmopolitan areas or famous for attracting transplants have lost some of their “southern” character, but Atlanta’s pretty damn cosmopolitan and there are plenty of transplants both in major southern cities and in retirement communities along the seas and in the mountains. Maybe some respondents simply are making a distinction between Deep South and Border States based on geography, not demography, history or even culture.

In any event, “the South” is a politically potent concept in which precision and context are often rather important. The general hazy historical perception is that “the South” during the Civil Rights Era transitioned from being solidly Democratic to being solidly Republican. Actually, as Sean Trende likes to point out, the Republican share of the regional presidential vote was 48% in 1952, 50% in 1956, 46% in 1960 and 49% in 1964—remarkably stable and competitive, though masking some pretty large subregional swings—even before the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. But after that Act, as late as 1976, Jimmy Carter (a southern Democrat, of course) was carrying the region by ten points. In 2000 and 2004, Republicans did indeed carry (if you credit the 2000 Florida results) every state in the former Confederacy. But then in 2008 Barack Obama muddied the waters again by winning Virginia, Florida and North Carolina and won the first two again in 2012.

I’ve gone through this brief history because an awful lot of rhetorical weight has been placed on the impact of the “Republican South” on the GOP, on the conservative movement, on non-southern voters, and on the general tone and character of U.S. politics—and quite rightly so.

Still, subregional variations in the South should by no means be ignored. Last week the New York Times’ Nate Cohn created a bit of a sensation with a column suggesting (a bit more indiscriminately in the headline that he would have liked) that “southern whites” had now become nearly as overwhelmingly Republican as African-Americans were Democratic. Careful readers noted that Cohn was actually only describing white voters in a band of counties “from the high plains of West Texas to the Atlantic Coast of Georgia.” 2012 exit polls showed Obama winning 37% of the white vote in VA and 31% in NC. Upon my own inquiry, Nate noted on Twitter that the statewide Democratic share of the southern white vote in 2012 varied as follows: Kentucky 33%, Arkansas 26%, Tennessee 25%, South Carolina 22%, Texas 22%, Georgia 19%, Alabama 17%, Louisiana 12% and Mississippi 11%.

So in 2012, a white voter in Kentucky was three times as likely to vote for Obama as a white voter in Mississippi. I’d say that’s a variation worth noting when making generalizations about “the South”—not by Nate Cohn, who was careful, but by the very many people who are going to mis-characterize his work.

One of the pleasures of editing the Washington Monthly is watching the young editors who train here go on to do great things in journalism. So I’m extremely proud that two of our alums will be walking down the red carpet at the National Magazine Awards dinner at the Marriott Marquis in New York tonight. One is Charlie Homans, executive editor of The Atavist, the fantastic online nonfiction monthly (co-founded by another former WM editor, Nick Thompson). To give you an idea of how hot the The Atavist is, three of its pieces are nominated in various categories. The other alum is John Gravois, deputy editor of Pacific Standard, the smart and beautifully-produced bimonthly print magazine of culture and social science; it’s nominated in the general excellence/Literature, Science and Politics category, and deservedly so.

Fingers crossed, guys.

For reasons I’ll mention afterwards in an Update, I’m going to repost an item I wrote two years ago today:

May 1 became an international day to commemorate workers—and more specifically, to agitate for an eight-hour work day—in 1889, on the anniversary of the Haymarket Massacre of 1886 in Chicago. It was rapidly adopted around the world, though not, ironically, in the United States, when President Grover Cleveland adopted the Knights of Labor’s proposal for a September Labor Day (in part, it is likely, to avoid commemoration of the Haymarket disturbances, the lethal bomb throwed by persons unknown, and the police massacre of protestors that followed). Canada followed the U.S. example, but May 1 remained, in effect, Labor Day virtually eveywhere else, remaining today a public holiday in over 80 countries. Even the Catholic Church followed the tradition, creating a May 1 feast for St.Joseph the Worker.

For obvious reasons, notably their increasingly spurious claims to function as worker-led socialist republics, Communist regimes made a big show of May Day. But they never owned the day, any more than they owned (or even allowed to exist) the free labor movement it honored, or its very practical goals. And International Workers Day has long survived the virtual end of the “Communist Bloc” as we knew it, and of communist regimes in Europe entirely.

I’ve gone through this brief history in reaction to reading a post at the conservative legal site the Volokh Conspiracy promoting the idea, as it has since 2007, of renaming May 1 “Victims of Communism Day.” I’m sympathetic to the basic idea of a day for reflection on the bloody record of communist regimes, and of their false claim to serve as emancipators of the working class. But that’s all the more reason not to do anything to perpetuate the confusion of communism with legitimate movements for workers’ rights.

The chief advocate of a May 1 “Victims of Communism Day,” Ilya Somin, claims the most likely alternative, November 7, the date of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, inaugurating the first communist regime, is too “Russia-centric.” Well, May 1 is insufficiently “Communo-centric.” All the communist regimes trace their roots back to November 7, and they don’t share it with non-communists. For all I care, we can commemorate victims of communism any day other than May 1; maybe August 23, the anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which revealed even to the most naive the true nature of the Soviet regime and launched one of the most intensively horrific periods of bilateral murder in world history.

But leave May 1 to workers, particularly now that the eight-hour work day is again in peril.

UPDATE: I suspect a new reason some conservatives will resist commemoration of May Day is that it’s again being celebrated with a big march in Moscow, this time tied to the Soviet nostalgia element of Russian nationalism. But if May Day as an international workers day has outlived all but the tattered remnants of Marxism-Leninism, I’m pretty sure it will outlive Vladimir Putin.

This oughtta be a holiday. But for a growing number of us, it’s not even an eight-hour day. So much for the March of Progress.

* TNR’s Jonathan Cohn briskly debunks the House GOP “nobody’s paying Obamacare premiums!” report.

* At Plum Line, Paul Waldman shocked! that administration may have tried to positively spin Benghazi! tragedy.

* 10 of 12 states performing in bottom quartile of new Commonwealth Fund ranking of state healthcare systems are Obamacare (and Medicare expansion) rejectionists.

* Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick explores the causes of Oklahoma’s botched lethal injection execution.

* Brother Benen summons up the energy to throw cold water on the latest fantasy of House Republicans passing comprehensive immigration reform legislation this year.

And in non-political news:

* ESPN host points out that Donald Sterling’s extensive record of housing discrimination might have been a pretty reliable indicator that the man had a few racist bones in his body.

As we break for lunch, here’s another May-Day-appropriate song: Billy Bragg’s version of “There Is Power in a Union.”

Want to know why the new conservative inflammation over Benghazi! will never go away, at least until November of 2016? Consider the 2016 trial heat numbers in a new Quinnipiac poll of Florida:

Clinton tops several possible Republican candidates in Florida:

49 - 41 percent over Bush; 52 - 40 percent over Rubio; 55 - 37 percent over Paul; 52 - 34 percent over Christie; 56 - 36 percent over Ryan; 57 - 31 percent over Cruz; 53 - 35 percent over Huckabee.

Recall that Florida is one of the redder of purple states, and that two of the candidates Clinton would currently trounce are universally known Florida politicians.

Of all the “Obama scandals,” Benghazi! is the only one in which Hillary Clinton can conceivably be implicated or even mentioned. No wonder that more than nineteen months after the events of September 11, 2012, Republicans are still pouring over emails and trying to make this the Mother of All Scandals. Hell, they may yet try to make this an impeachable offense, so seductive is the idea of nullifying the 2012 elections while tilting the board for 2016 as well, striking at the “The One” even as they pull a few points off the approval ratings for the past and future Red Queen they’ve been hating for so many years. So tedius as it may seem, “smoking guns” or not, the only thing that could possibly make Benghazi! go away before November 8, 2016, would be a declaration of non-candidacy by Hillary Clinton. Our little elephant friends just won’t be able to help themselves, bless their hearts.

If you want to see how a political fad can lead to devastating consequences, look no further than the “mandatory minimum sentencing” laws that spread like a plague in the United States (and eventually the UK) in the 1990s. They were typified by “Three Strikes” laws that required very long prison stretches for repeat offenders, often regardless of the crimes committed. But “truth-in-sentencing” laws that restricted probation or early release, and outright prohibitions on parole, contributed to the trend towards more people spending longer prison sentences. Republicans in particular became addicted to such faddish prescriptions in the 1980s and 1990s, often as a byproduct of the “War on Drugs.” But “throw away the key” rhetoric was also common among Democrats wanting to show they were tough on crime (My former boss Georgia governor Zell Miller, in his 1994 re-election campaign, shamefully came out for a “Two Strikes” law on the highly substantive slogan that “You Only Get Three Strikes in Baseball.” Disgust at this mindless “toughness” led me to pen an extensive denunciation of mandatory-minimum laws in my contribution to the Progressive Policy Institute’s 1997 policy book, Building the Bridge).

In a review of a new research report on America’s bloated prison population at Vox, Ezra Klein shows that the role of mandatory-minimum laws has been considerably underappreciated:

Ultimately, the report’s authors say, the common denominator in both of the big causes of mass incarceration — more prisoners per arrest, and longer sentences per prisoner — is the harsher sentencing policies of the 1980s and 1990s. The report tells federal and state governments to take a hard look at the entire criminal justice system — but improving sentencing seems like the right place to start.

Unfortunately myths die hard. It’s no accident that some of the power of the Gun Lobby I wrote about earlier today is based on an entirely counter-factual belief that violent crime is perpetually on the rise, requiring law-abiding citizens who have despaired of any protection from liberal judges and outgunned cops to forcefully break the state’s monopoly on use of deadly force. Sentencing reform, although it enjoys significant renewed support on the Right, will have to overcome some deeply entrenched fears that no studies or statistics can rebut.

In doing some catch-up reading this morning, I noticed our former colleague Ryan Cooper going on quite an eloquent tear at his new perch at The Week. His target was the most sacred of cows, the American Dream of Homeownership, whose perils we have just experienced graphically, without any significant dimunition in the Dream’s power:

Homeownership has long been the way American society has divided itself into a responsible, stable bourgeoisie (owners) and an undisciplined rabble (renters). The divide used to be along stark, overtly racial lines, enforced by white supremacist terrorism, but nowadays the distinction is a bit more subtle.

Traditionally, we’ve promoted homeownership by making houses the primacy vehicle for middle-class savings. The problem is that a house is a crap investment.

Just think about it: Why wouldn’t it be? It’s only land plus a big durable good. Houses don’t increase in productivity to provide more sheltering services; they just slowly fall apart. If median-income people borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars to speculate on the price 30 years hence of a single, highly illiquid asset that wasn’t a house, they would be called financially insane.

But the inherently risky nature of real estate speculation as a the bedrock of democratic capitalism is, of course, disguised by massive public subsidies for mortgage debt, supplemented by land use policies that tend to force housing prices up—until they inevitably come down, sometimes modestly, sometimes catastrophically. But, says Cooper, even in “good” real estate markets, the collateral damage associated with the Dream are substantial:

The vast bulk of subsidies go to the rich. Restricting the supply of housing increases the cost of renting. Homeownership curbs geographic mobility, which has also been shown to discourage class mobility. In the wake of the financial crisis, millions have been stuck with an underwater mortgage. And needless to say, allowing ungodly amounts of mortgage debt to swim around the economy only tempts the financial sector to make the riskiest investments.

The collective irrationality of the Dream is typically offset by what appears to be its rationality for individuals tired of “throwing away” rent money when they could be building equity. But as John Aziz argues in a more recent column for The Week, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for individuals, either:

Even if the housing subsidies don’t stop — and with the mortgage industry, realtors, and homeowners all benefiting from them, they probably won’t stop anytime soon — I’d urge people looking at a mortgage to consider building up capital to buy a house through productive investments, instead of taking on a mortgage that might lead to their having their investment repossessed.

But as Cooper suggests, albeit with great frustration, the Dream of Homeownership is a cultural as much as an economic phenomenon. Back when I used to do rural development work in Georgia, I was fascinated by the fact that homeownership rates in poor rural areas were significantly higher than in cities or even suburbs. Perhaps, I thought, this was the result of poor availability of rental housing. But a few years later, while living in a southern rural area, I began to notice something about my largely impecunious neighbors: it was very common for them to use whatever small assets they could scrape up to buy a plot of land and then live on it in an inexpensive mobile home until such time (if ever) they could build a house. I’m reasonably sure most of them preferred that strategy to one of just renting a house until they could afford to buy one. I used to call this “southern land mysticism,” but it’s probably a more deeply rooted sentiment than can be confined by any region. Perhaps the evolutionary biologists would tell us it’s a hangover from the many centuries in which nearly all human beings were forced to scratch a living from the soil, and owning that soil often meant survival.

You can argue all day long that the Dream is a circular trap in which a strong cultural and economic bias towards homeownership leads to reduced demand for rental housing, which in turn reduces its supply, further marginalizing the despised class of renters. You can see this dynamic in action in any suburban subdivision where a real estate panic sets in when owners start renting out their property. But in any event, dispelling the Dream is not something that can be accomplished by tweaking the tax laws to kill the most blatant subsidies, even if that were remotely possible.

The other day David Frum penned a column about the power of the gun lobby and its cultural roots that deserves a broader reading. After posing the question as to why expansion of the right to own and use firearms has been so much more successful than other conservative causes, Frum suggests it has become an emotional touchstone for a very embattled minority that views itself as exceptionally threatened:

[The NRA’s] string of victories was scored as gun ownership in America tumbled. Only about one-third of American households now own a gun, compared to about one-half in 1973. Much of this decline can be traced to the fading of hunting as an American pastime. Only about 6 percent of Americans hunt even once in a year. That’s just slightly more than the number who attended a ballet performance: 3.9 percent.

Yet a smaller group of gun owners manages to exercise more political power. As gun ownership has dwindled, the remaining cohort has coalesced into a compact and self-conscious minority, for whom guns represent an ideology even more than a sport or hobby.

Republicans are nearly twice as likely to own a gun as Democrats are.

White Americans are twice as likely to own a gun as nonwhite Americans.

Among Americans under age 30, only about one in five owns a gun. Among Americans over age 50, one in three owns a gun.

Nearly half of men own a gun; only 13 percent of women do.

Southerners are 50 percent more likely to own a gun than Easterners, the South being the most gun-owning region and the East being the least.

Add it all up, and the core gun constituency looks a lot like the Tea Party on the firing range: Two-thirds of American households own no guns at all. The vast majority of households that own a gun own only one. Opposing them, a small minority—about 6 percent of American households—have amassed 65 percent of the nation’s privately owned firearms. That group is very white, very Southern, and very conservative indeed.

This small group is seized by a profound sense of loss and alienation from the American majority.

As such, this minority naturally doesn’t put much faith in conventional politics, which in some respects will always reflect majority sentiment. And even the financial power of conservative elites aligned with them provides relatively small comfort: the rich can protect themselves from the chaos engendered by those people with “gated communities and doorman buildings,” not to mention private schools and personal networks.

Gun advocates depict a government that is increasingly remote and alien from everyday concerns, if not outright hostile and menacing. This is a widespread point of view in post-economic-crisis United States. Most conservative causes promise to bring the government closer to the people by having government do less for the people. For obvious reasons, that’s not an easy sell.

Gun advocates offer a very different message. They promise to put the means of self-emancipation from a dangerous world right into one’s own hands. LaPierre again: “In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive, to protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns, and handguns we want.”

At a time when so many people—and especially so many white men—feel devalued and undermined by powerful unseen but inimical forces, gun advocates put the power to deal death at the touch of a button right into their supporters’ hands. Nobody feels powerless when he holds a gun.

It’s no accident that Second Amendment enthusiasts constantly hint—and sometimes flatly assert—that their cause is based on an inherent “right of revolution” against “tyranny,” a term the gun-bearing minority, conveniently enough, may define as it wishes (for some, it may be Obamacare or affirmative action or a legal right to abortion—or even federal grazing fees). Guns have become the supreme symbol of a contingent acceptance of authority—which may at any point be withdrawn via acts of self-righteous violence.

The nineteenth century German Social Democratic leader August Bebel once famously described anti-semitism as “the socialism of fools.” For similar reasons, the gun rights cause has become the ultimate right-wing response to perceived inequality. Yes, the “Tea Party at the firing range” may lose elections or suffer the indignity of putting up with loafers and looters and hippies and Muslims and feminists. But in the end, a gun is always the Equalizer.

In the course of discussing the politics of the minimum wage at TNR, Danny Vinik notes something interesting and important about Republican positioning:

Consider the timing. By sheer coincidence, I’m sure, Democrats scheduled this first minimum wage vote in the spring—months and months before the November election—while Republicans are still contesting their primaries.

To the extent that pandering to the right explains the uniformity of opposition, it confirms a key data point about the GOP and the conservative movement. They don’t want to deal on this issue because from where they stand, tolerating the existing minimum wage is a concession.

One of main, but to a remarkable extent underestimated, aspects of the recent radicalization of the GOP is that grudging acceptance of the New Deal/Great Society legacy that both parties largely took for granted for decades is now considered a generous—and perhaps even dangerously unprincipled—compromise for GOPers. Yet because they know this posture is, to put it mildly, controversial, they don’t much admit this to the general public. Truth is, there is no argument against increasing the minimum wage to restore its past value that isn’t an argument against having a minimum wage to begin with. That’s not a position that is politically kosher in most parts of the country—just yet, at least. So we have this fight on the margins, in the shadows, over procedural issues and linkages to other issues—everything other than the basic conservative proposition that “free markets” should set wages (and working conditions) without interference from government, or for that matter, “distortion” by collective bargaining.

In the mental world in which much of the GOP’s conservative “base” lives, compensation for labor is the result of free individual contracting between employers and employees. (This is a complete hallucination when it comes to wage workers, of course, but it’s a powerful ideological construct nonetheless.). Anything that forces wages above their “natural” or “market” level robs other workers of jobs, by definition. This is how you get Ted Cruz claiming to oppose a minimum wage increase because he cares about African-American and Hispanic teenagers, not because he sides with employers as a class against their largely and increasingly powerless employees as a class.

Cruz is regarded by his fans as a “principled” conservative because he articulates wildly controversial positions that other, less principled conservatives hide or hedge. And that’s why he and people like him exercise disproportionate power in the GOP: in their hearts, Republicans know Ted Cruz is right. So they play a double game, carrying on one conversation with “the base” and another with everyone else. And they call this second conversation “compromise.”

It’s International Workers’ Day. Here’s Florence Reece performing “Which Side Are You On?”

The day got away from me before I could write about 538’s surveys on the definition of “the Midwest” and “the South.” Believe it or not, these definitions have considerable political salience. I’ll get to that tomorrow.

Here are some remains of the day:

* TPM’s Sahil Kapur reports Antonin Scalia made a pretty large factual error in his dissent in the EPA case discussed earlier today. The angry old jurist may be getting a mite sloppy.

* Big Dog at large in Georgetown lecture; raps media coverage of Affordable Care Act as superficial.

* Prospect’s Paul Waldman compares and contrasts liberal with conservative mega-donors, and doesn’t express much sympathy for the former or the latter.

* At Ten Miles Square, Anne Kim takes a close look at the expensive campaigns disproportionately encountered by Democratic moderates.

* At College Guide, Clare McCann examines the initial battle-lines for the delayed FY 2015 budget battle, especially as it may affect education funding.

And in non-political news:

* Flash floods devastating Alabama and Florida Gulf Coasts. But no, there’s no climate change problem.

That’s it for Wednesday. Appropriately, we’ll close with one more offering from Badger, one of my favorites: “On the Way Home.”

Selah.

This is some scary breaking news, from the ABC affiliate in Lynchburg, VA.

Lynchburg emergency officials have confirmed that a train has gone off the tracks in downtown Lynchburg. It happened around 1:45 Wednesday afternoon.

Between 12 and 14 CSX tankers carrying crude oil were involved in the train derailment, according to city officials. A witness on the scene says he saw the rail under the train give way. That is, the dirt and stone beneath the train gave way and according to that witness, the train then toppled over.

Between three and six cars caught fire and the smoke can be seen throughout much of Lynchburg.

According to officials, three railway cars are in the river and the crude oil that was in the tankers is spilling into the river.

Witnesses report seeing flames 80 feet high. Witnesses also reported seeing a very thick, black smoke.

Incredibly, no injuries have been reported so far, though Lord only knows what sort of damage has been wrought to the James River and its ecosystem.

Is it just me, or is this issue of safety and environmental hazards associated with the storage and transportation of fossil fuels and chemicals getting dire enough to call into question metronomic conservative complaints about “over-regulation?”

Truth is, this story caught my attention because I used to live near Lynchburg, and I grew to cherish the slowly decaying old river town with its distinctive architecture and decidedly untrendy (compared to the other city in my vicinity, Charlottesville) ambiance. It helped that I visited Lynchburg a hundred times or so without ever espying the landmarks non-locals usually identify with it, Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University and Thomas Road Baptist Church. But I pretty much stuck to the downtown regions befouled by crude oil today.

As we have all observed, Nate Silver and other purveyors of “data journalism” have gotten a lot of flak early in this election cycle, some of it warranted, but much of it the kind of taunting schoolyard kingpins typically inflict on tyros they instinctively understand will be rich and powerful someday.

Close to the line between rational objection and special pleading is a column from National Journal’s house conservative, Josh Kraushaar, who begins with this hackish complaint about 538’s early Senate projections:

[C]ount me underwhelmed by the new wave of Senate prediction models assessing the probability of Republicans winning the upper chamber by one-tenth of a percentage point. It’s not that the models aren’t effective at what they’re designed to do. It’s that the methodology behind them is flawed. Unlike baseball, where the sample size runs in the thousands of at-bats or innings pitched, these models overemphasize a handful of early polls at the expense of on-the-ground intelligence on candidate quality. As Silver might put it, there’s a lot of noise to the signal.

So? Has Nate somehow failed to observe that the projections will become more reliable the closer we get to November? Or is there something else he’s missing? Yeah, that’s it:

The models also undervalue the big-picture indicators suggesting that 2014 is shaping up to be a wave election for Republicans, the type of environment where even seemingly safe incumbents can become endangered. Nearly every national poll, including Tuesday’s ABC News/Washington Post survey, contains ominous news for Senate Democrats. President Obama’s job approval is at an all-time low of 41 percent, and public opinion on his health care law hasn’t budged and remains a driving force in turning out disaffected voters to the polls to register their anger. Public opinion on the economy isn’t any better than it was before the 2010 midterms when the unemployment rate hit double-digits. Democrats hold only a 1-point lead on the generic ballot in the ABC/WaPo survey—worse positioning than before the GOP’s 2010 landslide.

Now if cherry-picking the most bleak of national indicators and then comparing them to indicators that largely proved wrong in 2010 proves another Republican “wave” is on the way, then it will always, always seem apparent just on the horizon to those who want to see it. National indicators, BTW, are just as subject to change as state polls, and Silver, BTW, does factor in Obama’s approval ratings and economic conditions.

But then having done the journalistic equivalent of “trash-talking,” Kraushaar eschews said practice and offers his own, quasi-empirically based projections, which (with the exception of a strange, wonder-if-they-are-related paean to Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst) follow pretty much the same sorts of micro-indicators Silver uses.

So it’s tough to figure out when a guy like Kaushaar is spinning or telling us what he really thinks. That’s generally not a problem for Nate Silver.

In case anyone reading this blog hasn’t figured this out, I”m proud to say my own election musings are reasonably free from suspicion that I’m shilling for any “team.” Yes, I may occasionally seem to be cheerleading for aggressively weird Republican candidates, but if I’m biased that’s probably because it’s a lot more fun to write about rabid ideologues than buttoned-down automatons, and I also may be defending a general perspective that the GOP is in the grip of an ideological bender that is the closest thing we have right now to a single key to American politics.

As it happens, even as a lot of observers from both “teams” have begun more highly rating the odds of Democrats surviving this November with a majority, I’ve been moving in the opposite direction—not due to any sense of a “wave,” but because of verifiable state-by-state numbers, and not just current polls.

For example: Nate Cohn’s recent stunning analysis of the midterm-presidential turnout “gap” and partisan preferences of old folks and young folks in North Carolina makes me wonder how, mechanically, Kay Hagan is going to build a majority from an electorate that would have given Mitt Romney a ten-point victory if 2012 were re-run in 2014. Similarly, I look at Louisiana and wonder if Mary Landrieu can equal her 33% performance among white voters in 2008 (as compared to 14% for Obama), and if that will be enough given the strong likelihood the white percentage of the electorate will be closer to 2010’s 71% than 2008’s 65%. I also wonder if Democrats can equal their astonishing post-November turnout effort in Louisiana back in 2002 (the last time Landrieu had to run under “jungle primary” procedures). Maybe I’m just not feelin’ a wave, eh?

Truth is, as we do approach November, you should mistrust anyone who is still talking about “waves” and “momentum” and “enthusiasm” and other intangibles instead of just looking at the gradually accumulating data. I know a lot of readers dislike polls, but they are more reliable than talking out of one’s hat and placing thumbs on the scale for “the team.”