Panicking, Not Panicking and Phantom Swings

(Bloomberg View) -- 1. Brian Schaffner and Anthony Rentsch at the Monkey Cage make the case that early voting is a good predictor of election results. 

2. Andrew Gelman at Slate on a new open-source poll aggregation and prediction program (found here). 

3. Doug Rivers and Benjamin Lauderdale at YouGov warn us against "phantom swings." 

4. Natalie Jackson at the Huffington Post doesn't think Democrats should panic.

5. Nate Silver sort of does. 

6. Matthew Dallek on war powers and how Congress can constrain the White House. 

7. And more Republican talk about blocking all Supreme Court nominations if Hillary Clinton is president. Kevin Drum has the roundup. Yes, this would be absolutely outrageous -- the proper role for a Senate majority during divided government is to insist on compromise, not to simply refuse to confirm anyone. But be careful about this: Many liberals believed Republicans would entirely shut down judicial nominations in 2015, when it turned out that they only shut down many of those choices. I'm not at all convinced a 51-49 Republican Senate would really do a two-year blockade of the Supreme Court. On the other hand, it might, and it almost certainly would fall far short of what Democratic Senates have done when there's a Republican president. 

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To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net.

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