The tumultuous journey of health reform from President Barack Obama's opening push in February 2009 to his bill signing in March 2010 may be inexplicable from afar. Swept into power on promises of change, Democrats controlled the White House and enjoyed the largest Congressional majorities in decades, and they agreed that the existing health care system cost too much and delivered too little—stranding over 30 million with no health insurance and leaving millions more with only inadequate coverage or dependent on emergency rooms for urgent care. Unified party control and programmatic agreement would seem like a veritable checklist of what was needed to pass health reform legislation.

The fundamentals of electoral change in the 2010 midterm elections are unmistakable. Electoral change depends on two general sets of political conditions: those of the previous election or elections and those of the current election. Both favor the Republicans this year.

All indications are that 2010 will be a very good year for Republicans. After two election setbacks, they are poised for a comeback. Partisanship, ideology, the midterm decline from the prior presidential surge, the partisanship of districts being defended, and even President Obama's approval ratings have set the stage for significant seat gains by Republicans in the House.

As Election Day approaches, many political commentators are asking whether the 2010 midterm elections could be a reprise of 1994, when Republicans picked up eight seats in the Senate and 52 seats in the House of Representatives to take control of both chambers for the first time in 40 years. There is almost universal agreement that Republicans are poised to make major gains in both the House and the Senate. And while the GOP's chances of gaining the 10 seats needed to take control of the upper chamber appear remote, results from the generic ballot forecasting model indicate that the 39 seats required to take back the House of Representatives are well within reach.

In this article, we present a forecast of the 2010 midterm House election based on information available in early July 2010. We combine this forecast with a note of caution, explaining why electoral circumstances might lead our forecast to err. Finally, we present guidance regarding how to update the electoral forecast for 2010 based on new information that will become available leading up to Election Day.

Congressional election forecasting has experienced steady growth. Currently fashionable models stress prediction over explanation. The independent variables do not offer a substantive account of the election outcome. Instead, these variables are tracking variables—that is, indicators that may trace the result but fail to explain it. The outstanding example is the generic ballot measure, which asks respondents for whom they plan to vote in the upcoming congressional race. While this variable correlates highly with presidential party House seat share, it is bereft of substance. The generic ballot measure is the archetypical tracking variable, and it holds pride of place in the Abramowitz (2010) model. Other examples of such tracking variables are exposed seats or lagged seats, features of the Campbell (2010) model. The difficulty with such tracking models is twofold. First, they are not based on a theory of the congressional vote. Second, because they are predictive models, they offer a suboptimal forecasting instrument when compared to models specified according to strong theory.

Historically, statistical models for forecasting the outcome of midterm elections to the United States House of Representatives have not been particularly successful (Jones and Cuzán 2006). However, in what may have been a breakthrough, most models correctly predicted that the Democrats would re-emerge as the majority party in 2006 (Cuzán 2007). One successful model was estimated using 46 elections, beginning with 1914 (only the second time that 435 representatives, the present number, were elected). The model was relatively simple, making use of national-level variables only (Cuzán and Bundrick 2006). Using a similar model, I generated a forecast for the 2010 midterm election.

This article offers forecasts made on July 22, 2010, for the 2010 state legislative elections. Most work in the election forecasting field has been done on presidential and U.S. House elections. Less has been done for U.S. Senate elections, and almost none for gubernatorial or state legislative elections. This year will see much attention directed at the 43 state legislatures holding elections, because many will have the responsibility for drawing new district lines based on the 2010 census. Furthermore, of those chambers with elections scheduled in 2010, seven currently contain one party with less than a 5% margin of control. With so much at stake, these will clearly be contests to watch.

The public relevance of political science research has of late figured prominently in discussions within the profession. The Association's commitment to “public scholarship” has given rise to task forces examining what political science research has to say to policymakers about inequality and American democracy; inequality and difference in the developing world; political violence and terror; religion and American democracy; government indicators; and, most recently, democracy, economic security, and social justice in a volatile world.

At least once a month, I receive an e-mail, phone call, or question from one of my colleagues—how do you get an op-ed into the New York Times? It seems that a great number of my colleagues have at least one public intellectual (PI) bone in their body that they are keen to display. They hold, often for good reason, that they have something to say that will serve the president, the American people, or even the world. Although I have no answer to the immediate question—it is easier to win a lottery than to get into the New York Times—I do have a few thoughts about the greater question: how can an academic, especially a political scientist, gain a public voice? Here, then, follow the lessons of fifty years of trying to speak in that voice, drawing on both my experiences and those of my colleagues.

Amitai Etzioni has written something of a pocket guide for public intellectuals, proffering hard-won lessons from his own time in the trenches. I wish that I had read his primer before I tried to break into the club. And I hope that PS readers seeking to be PI players read his guide with the right mix of humor, curiosity, and skepticism about the rules of success that Etzioni evinces.

I have lived a life in which I have often been involved in public debates and controversies, but not as a public intellectual whose ideas were embraced by the White House or celebrated by the New York Review of Books. Mine has been a very different kind of experience that could be characterized more as an against-the-grain persistence in digging into some fundamental questions of social inequality that were fashionable a half century ago but were abandoned by most Americans with influence and power. I am convinced that we have no viable policies in place that will produce a healthy and successful society as our vast racial transition continues. My research has convinced me that there are much better answers.

Like many political scientists, I willingly align myself with the intellectual side of the public intellectual title, but I make no claim to having a public identity. Still, I am moved to join in the shared confessions of public intellectuals (PI) by responding to Amitai Etzioni's article, because the ten-point distillation of his trials and tribulations so strongly resonates with my own experiences. However marginal they may be, frequent media commentaries and interviews have given me enough exposure to the treacherous pathways between scholarship and the media to sufficiently understand the PI's dilemma.

Upon my first reading of the Etzioni autobiography, I recalled my favorite book review, written by a nine-year-old, who also should have won a prize for the youngest author and the shortest review ever: “This book told me more about penguins than I wanted to know.”

First, I am grateful to PS for putting together this illuminating symposium. Second, given the strict space limitation set aside for my response, please see My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message for all that I would love to say here.

The rise of sustainability rhetoric, curriculum, infrastructure, and marketing on college campuses is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, college presidents are pledging to eliminate their campuses' global warming emissions; colleges and universities are building wind turbines, composters, and green buildings; and sustainability coordinators are the latest surge in new staff hires. However, the greening of college campuses has a less welcome side as well, and examination of the campus sustainability movement suggests an unsettling lack of theoretical and ideological analysis. In this article, I praise what is being done well, identify the political analysis that has been avoided, and provide arguments for what has yet to be addressed. I argue that the trend toward campus sustainability, while praiseworthy in some significant ways, has left some troubling theoretical assumptions largely undisturbed.

In recent decades, the scientific forecasting of election outcomes has made great strides in a number of advanced industrial democracies. One country that has not received much attention to date is Canada. In this article, we present a vote function model to forecast Canadian federal elections. We explain our model's theoretical underpinnings and assess its statistical properties and forecasting capabilities against all federal elections held between 1953 and 2008. We then explore potential ways for improving the model's accuracy. We conclude by discussing the forecast of different hypothetical scenarios for an upcoming federal election.

In October 2009, political scientists learned of a Senate amendment sponsored by Tom Coburn (R-OK) that would eliminate political science funding from the National Science Foundation budget. The American Political Science Association condemned the proposed amendment, and concerned political scientists contacted their senators to urge the amendment's defeat. On November 5, 2009, the amendment was defeated 36-62 after little debate. This article examines the vote on the Coburn Amendment to understand the role that senators' personal, constituency, and institutional characteristics played in their votes. Logit analysis reveals that even after controlling for party, several factors significantly predict the vote, including the number of top-tier political science Ph.D. programs in the senator's state and whether the senator graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science.

Using the most extensive dataset available on the 2008 election, I examine the impact of dog ownership on presidential vote preference. Canines were elevated to the status of a campaign issue when, during the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama publicly promised his daughters a dog after the election was over, a campaign promise that has since been fulfilled. However, this announcement appears to have unintentionally highlighted the absence of a key point of potential identification between this candidate and voters, and thus to have significantly undermined the likelihood that dog-owning voters would support Obama. I elaborate upon the implications of this finding for future presidential candidates.

I have been extremely blessed in my life to have benefitted from some amazing mentors and friends in both psychology (most notably, Amos Tversky, Phil Zimbardo, and Leda Cosmides) and political science. Inspired by the occasion of Robert Jervis' festschrift, which importantly does not signal his imminent retirement, I was prompted to take advantage of this opportunity to express my deep and abiding appreciation for his advice and guidance over the years. In keeping with Kristen Monroe's model of three, I also reflect here on the critical roles that two additional mentors, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Peter Katzenstein, have had on my career and my life.