Baseball All-Star Game Portends GOP Gains

I love statistics. Especially when they work in my favor. From Smart Politics comes this:

A Smart Politics analysis of All-Star game history and U.S. House elections over the past 60 years finds that a National League victory has preceded each of the last nine election cycles in which Republicans have enjoyed double-digit gains in the House since 1950.

The last time the GOP scored a substantial victory in the U.S. House was, of course, in 1994 - picking up 54 seats during the Republican Revolution that November.

On July 12th earlier that summer, the National League ended a six-game losing streak with a dramatic come-from-behind 8-7 victory. The NL scored two runs in the bottom of the ninth to tie it up and won the game in the bottom of the 10th when San Diego's Tony Gwynn scored on a double by Montreal's Moises Alou.

The second biggest House Republican victory since 1950 took place in 1966, with the GOP winning back 47 seats after yielding 36 seats to the Democrats when LBJ was elected in 1964.

In the All-Star game on July 12, 1966, after spotting the American League a run in the top of the 2nd inning, the National League came back to tie the game in the 4th and won on a single by the Dodgers' Maury Wills in the bottom of the 10th.

The third biggest GOP U.S. House coup in the second half of the 20th Century was a 34-seat gain in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected President.

On July 8th of that year, the National League again came from behind, scoring four unanswered runs in the 5th, 6th, and 7th innings to defeat the American League 4-2 - buoyed by a home run by Cincinnati's Ken Griffey, Sr.

See, it's all about baseball. Who'd a thunk it?