Procrastinating Senate Majority Leader Is Bailed Out by Ted Cruz

Conventional wisdom over the last two days has coalesced around the idea that bumbling arch-conservative Ted Cruz misfired when he requested additional time for the Senate to be in session, because it allowed a bunch of liberal Obama judicial nominees to get confirmed.

Here are the headlines about this gambit:

• Ted Cruz does it again (Politico)
• Ted Cruz Just Did Obama a Big Favor (Slate)
• Ted Cruz Gave Obama An Early Christmas Gift Over The Weekend (Business Insider)
• Republicans blame Cruz for year-end confirmations (AP)
• Did Ted Cruz Give Harry Reid One Last Victory? (Weekly Standard)
• Ted Cruz just did a huge favor for Democrats (Vox)

This is from the AP:

Under the Senate's rules, Cruz's maneuver allowed Reid to begin the time-consuming process of confirming nominations on Saturday at noon - when lawmakers had been scheduled to be home for the weekend. 

Had Cruz not made his move when he did, according to officials in both parties, Reid would have had to wait until Monday night - more than 48 hours later. Disgruntled Republicans said they felt confident that Reid's rank and file would not have been willing to remain in Washington in that case, and only four or five nominees would be confirmed instead of 23.

Man, what a putz that guy Cruz is! Does he even know how to do politics?

But this view ignores the question of why Harry Reid waited until the very last days of the very last session of the 113th U.S. Congress to get the ball rolling on all these nominations.  It seems a little bit like maybe he was foot-dragging a bit.  Everyone's piling on Ted Cruz, but why did it take a knuckleheaded political move on Cruz's part for these nominations to come to the full Senate?

Too many Democrats seem to be happy to mock Ted Cruz for this, but are unwilling to direct ire at Harry Reid for cutting it so close in the first place.

It's Election Day!

Well, Dixville Notch already voted, so I guess I'd better make official predictions.  My method predicts 303 electoral votes for Obama (actually 294 with a tie in Colorado, but I'll wager that Colorado goes blue) and 54 senate seats for Democrats.

• I didn't add polling data from the states shaded gray in my database -- either due to no polls, no credible polls, me being lazy and not adding in uncompetitive states, or not wanting to deal with three-way senate races (MD, ME) -- so the spread I'm forecasting in those states is just my best guess. 
• I'm predicting Oklahoma will not be the most conservative presidential-voting state this year.  I predict those "honors" will belong to Utah this year. 
• My official guess will be based on spread, not Obama's total or Romney's total.

And the senate races.  There's a huge gap between the 58th senate seat (Nebraska) and the 59th (Texas).  If Democrats manage to upend polling convention by 20 points, opening up holes to long-established mathematical laws and basically breaking the entire field of statistics, they still will only get 58 seats. Also, no way do I think Ted Cruz will only get 52% of the vote, and even a 20.5% victory seems low.