I published my first election-eve predictions in 1992. As a young think tanker and newspaper columnist in North Carolina, I also did my first stint as an election-night commentator that year, calling races for the public TV station in Chapel Hill. You can guess where the prevailing sentiments lay in the newsroom. Fortunately, none of my colleagues remembered my predictions, so I caught little grief. Or perhaps they were just cheering too loudly for President-elect Clinton to notice me.

Unfortunately, I was entering the field near the end of its golden era. The World Wide Web would soon arrive, intruding on the self-important, self-serving world of political punditry. No longer could a pundit offer authoritative-sounding analysis of political races after the election, secure in the knowledge that few readers would remember how far off the pundit’s pre-election predictions proved to be. Now, armed with just a dial-up connection, people could look the predictions up.

The Internet ruined our cozy little racket. DARPA be damned.

Suddenly accountable for results, some pundits chickened out and stopped predicting altogether. Others hemmed, hawed, and hedged. In my little world, I decided to just keep issuing predictions as long as people naively kept asking me. So here goes. I predict that Republicans will achieve a net gain of 60 seats in the U.S. House, eight seats in the U.S. Senate, seven governorships, and 12 to 15 legislative chambers. As there are still roughly 20 percent of U.S. households lacking home computers or regular Internet access, I’ll resign myself to serving that (shrinking) niche of the audience should these predictions prove wildly off the mark.