It's shaping up to be the Fortnight of Fear for Democrats, as midterm jitters blossom into something closer to real panic. It's been months since anyone seriously predicted that Democrats would gain ground (to say nothing of take over) the House, but now the party seems to be coming to grips with the fact that it may lose the Senate, too. If six Senate seats flip, Republicans will control both houses, likely setting up two years of even-worse gridlock between President Obama and a hostile Congress.

This is an interesting study in how panic travels from insiders to the general public. The two biggest material changes in the last month are that two formidable Republicans have entered races against Democratic incumbents—Representative Cory Gardner against Mark Udall in Colorado, and former Senator Scott Brown against Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire. But what really set Democrats off is Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, who on Sunday released a new forecast predicting the GOP would win the Senate.

Of course, the Cook and Rothenberg Political Reports have said much the same as FiveThirtyEight recently. But the august geezers who run those organizations don't have Silver's same star power. It's enough to make one wonder whether there's a bit of a cynicism involved. National Journal's Scott Bland reported earlier this month on how the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee uses doomsday predictions from Silver in solicitations far more than, say, they mention liberal bogeymen the Koch Brothers. Democratic fundraisers told Bland that looked like a calculated strategy. (The chair of the DSCC is Senator Michael Bennet, brother of Atlantic editor-in-chief James Bennet.)