Will James Comey Allow the Supreme Court Blockade to Continue?

James Comey’s disgraceful partisan intervention into the 2016 election probably will not change the outcome of the Electoral College. The Senate, though, may be a different story:

Still, if you look at our win-probability graphic, while Clinton’s chances were slightly declining already after she came off her post-debate peak, the rate of decline began to accelerate a couple of days after Comey, once we began to receive some post-Comey polls. Now the decline has leveled off, and her lead has held steady over the past several days. One advantage of having a model like ours that’s pretty quick to detect changes in the polls is that we can potentially make better inferences about the cause of polling shifts. And while it isn’t proof of anything, the pattern is at least consistent with a “shock” caused by a burst of negative news for a candidate, as opposed to a more gradual decline.

In fact, the shift looks pretty similar to a period in July after Comey reprimanded but did not charge Clinton for her email server and testified before Congress about it. That period produced about a 2-point swing against Clinton.

The news may also have had an effect down-ballot. Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate were generally hovering around 70 percent in late October. Today, they’re 50 percent. It doesn’t take a lot to swing the numbers in the Senate forecast because of the large number of competitive races — even a 1-point swing toward Republicans because of higher turnout could affect the odds significantly.

It’s also worth noting that even if the Democrats get to 50, if Comey’s election-rigging (and it doesn’t matter whether it was willful or if he was Jason Chafetz’s useful idiot) flipped a state or two it still matters. Especially for the Democrats, every Senate vote counts. A Senate in which each and every senator has a de facto veto over whether to end the filibuster and appointments is different than one in which you can afford to lose a vote or three.

And while Comey’s behavior was scandalous, the media’s behavior is much more so. Comey’s letter indicating that he had no actual information about a bullshit non-scandal did not have to be covered like D-Day. And the obsessive coverage the media gave to this trivial non-scandal has almost certainly been worth multiple Senate seats for the GOP.