I find political prognosticators to be boring when they fail to predict what will happen on election day and merely tell you what would happen if the vote happened today. Who cares what would happen today? Political campaigns are geared to election day. Resources are gathered and strategies are plotted and to ignore the actual campaign is pretty unilluminating. So, yes, Stu Rothenberg, you’re boring.
Right now, Democrats look poised to lose five to eight [Senate] seats, and any net loss short of that would have to be regarded with relief by Democratic strategists. But as recent developments in Nevada and Illinois have demonstrated, things can change quickly in the fight for control of the Senate.
Rothenberg credibly predicts that the Democrats will lose four seats: in Indiana, North Dakota, Arkansas, and Delaware. But he ignores that the Democrats might gain seats in North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and New Hampshire. David Vitter in Louisiana and Chuck Grassley in Iowa are also going to have to at least fight to retain their seats. There are going to be real races in all of these states, and in California, Washington, and Wisconsin, too. Who wins and who loses will not be solely determined by the national mood, but by the quality of the campaigns and the candidates. And, in every case, the Democrats have the better candidate.
I predict that Charlie Crist will win in Florida and caucus with the Dems. I also predict that Jack Conway will eventually pull away from a media-averse Rand Paul in Kentucky. I think Joe Sestak will demolish Wall Street’s Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Lee Fisher will chew up George W. Bush’s budget director, Rob Portman, in Ohio. A recent poll shows Elaine Marshall already ahead of incumbent Richard Burr in North Carolina. If I had to put money down, I’d probably bet on the Democrats losing opportunities for pickups in Missouri, New Hampshire, and Louisiana, but those races will get interesting. I don’t think Boxer, Murray, or Feingold will lose their seats. And I don’t think the Republicans will knock off Harry Reid or Michael Bennet, or take over Obama’s old seat in Illinois.
So, as things stand, here’s how I predict things will look on election day.
- Democratic Holds
CA- Barbara Boxer
CO- Michael Bennet
CT- Richard Blumenthal*
HI- Daniel Inouye
IL- Alexi Giannoulias*
MD- Barbara Mikulski
NY (A)- Chuck Schumer
NY (B)- Kirstin Gillibrand
NV- Harry Reid
OR- Ron Wyden
PA- Joe Sestak*
VT- Pat Leahy
WA- Patty Murray
WI- Russ Feingold
WV- Joe Manchin*
Democratic Pickups
FL- Charlie Crist*
KY- Jack Conway*
NC- Elaine Marshall*
OH- Lee Fisher*
Republican Holds
AL- Richard Shelby
AK- Lisa Murkowski
AZ- John McCain
GA- Johnny Isakson
ID- Mike Crapo
IA- Chuck Grassley
KS- Jerry Moran*
LA- David Vitter
MO- Roy Blunt*
NH- Kelly Ayotte*
OK- Tom Coburn
SC- Jim DeMint
SD- John Thune
UT- Mike Lee*
Republican Pick-Ups
AR- John Boozman*
DE- Mike Castle*
IN- Dan Coats
ND- John Hoeven*
[* indicates freshmen]
So, that’s a prediction of no net change in the makeup of the Senate caucus ratio. And I don’t think this is a particularly bold or optimistic assessment. I am basing it on the relative strengths of the candidates and the likely mood of their particular constituents. In a better year, we’d be favored to win the elections in New Hampshire and Missouri, and David Vitter could always implode. I still think Chuck Grassley is going to find himself in a fight, and we might see Indiana become competitive. I see it as slightly more likely that the Republicans will gain a handful of seats than that the Democrats will reach 60 votes, but it’s in the margin of error as far as I am concerned. It’s a Republican year but they have poor candidates and no positive message.
End the filibuster. Deference to the latest election results, if for instance the Republicans gain a few seats, is an open embrace of the massive and unprecedented obstruction of the republican minority. And why should the last election be the only one that matters when Senators are elected for six years? There are two other elections filling out the chamber.
The filibuster is extra-constitutional, was created in far different circumstances, and amounts to no more than an antiquated senatorial procedure.
Of course it will be interesting seeing the media pretend like the filibuster is a sacred totem of democracy after pretending it doesn’t exist for the last two years.
Thank you, Booman. I don’t understand why almost everybody hold it as axiomatic that the Democrats will lose Senate seats. In the House, the Democrats are trying to defend gains of the last two cycles, and losses in some of the marginal districts are rightly viewed as inevitable. In the Senate, the Democrats aren’t defending high ground at all. The 2004 cycle was a strong Republican election in the Senate.
Obama carried five states where Republicans are defending Senate seats: New Hampshire, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Iowa. Throw in Missouri, which Obama nearly carried. That gives you six pickup possibilities, and all except Iowa are open seats. Then there are special circumstances in Kentucky where the Republican candidate is just too kooky to be a Senator, and Arizona, where there may be a backlash against the immigration law.
I think the Democrats should really be looking at ways to get to 60 votes, since doing so is crucial. It’s mind-boggling to me why the Democrats don’t seem to be making this more of a priority, seeing that it seems to be a prerequisite for getting practically anything done.
There is a feeling out there that 2010 is like 1994. That could be true, it’s still fairly early to say. But it seems more likely to me that 2010 is like 1982. We tend to forget that Reagan was not overwhelmingly popular after his first two years in office, and the economy was still in the doldrums. The Democrats thought they had a good shot at taking the Senate back in 1982, but they made no gains. The voters thought that, having put a new party in power after an unpopular president, that party deserved more than two years to have a chance to turn things around.
I’ll be keeping an eye on Arizona, too. McCain has his problems with the base and a fired-up Latino population.
Not to mention, Glassman seems like someone who has his shit together. He’s got a great backstory. Plus, from what little I can find on the race, appears to be a decent fundraiser and campaigner as well.
If the Latino population totally abondons McCain, and the Tea Party sulks over their primary loss come November (or a third party runs maybe?)…Glassman has a real shot.
I’ve been in AZ this week and McCain has some of the worst ads I’ve ever seen airing. Utterly unpersuasive. Oddly enough, it seems like he dictated exactly what the ad would be – McCain according to McCain. It’s honest, but it doesn’t sell.
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PHOENIX – U.S. Sen. John McCain has spared no expense in his primary battle against J.D. Hayworth, spending more than $15 million in his bid to hold off the former congressman’s challenge from the right.
According to a quarterly report filed with the Federal Elections Committee, McCain has spent about 10 times more than Hayworth and far more than all other candidates combined. He reported spending about $15.6 million, compared to about $1.5 million for Hayworth.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Saved to the HD.
In your list, you forgot Missouri as a Republican hold.
I think you are right that we will either break even, or only lose 1-3 seats, not 8 or more. I do think Delaware will get much more competitive than it is now. The latest poll here now has Castle under 50%, at 47%, with only an 11 point lead over Coons, who is barnstorming the state throughout this summer. Since DE campaigns don’t really get going until September, it will be one to watch. But I would still judge it as Lean Castle.
You’re right that Delaware is no slam-dunk for the GOP. But I haven’t seen any evidence to predict a Coons win. It’s too early.
I fixed it to include MO.
Now make a list of those seats that could be moved to the Democratic column with a strong effort to turn out “unlikely voters”.
Conklin in IA
Melancon in LA
Carnahan in MO
Hodes in NH
Coons in DE
So the ceiling for Democrats seems to be 65 seats.
It really all comes down to turnout in a midterm. Some solid seats for Republicans could be taken if turnout is sufficiently organized and the incumbents get complacent. McCain and Isakson are clearly at risk of this.
The other part of it is the extent to which the folks with safe seats are forced to defend them instead of raising money to go to targeted pickups.
This is a year in which the ground game is very much more important than it was in 2008. And no doubt, Karl Rove is getting his preachers lined up to bus their congregations to the polls.
I think you’re too optimistic in Georgia, but with Arizona the top-out is 66 votes; one shy of a true supermajority. Would we then start complaining that our efforts to amend the Constitution were being stymied because we don’t have the votes?
Georgia will no more go Dem than it’ll snow in SC tomorrow.
Unfortunately in Missouri I see Blunt hitting the pavement much harder than Carnahan.
So true, Boo. People vote for candidates, not based on what pundits think the national mood is. Turn out can certainly be a factor but in recent years, Democrats have been winning that battle too. All politics is local and predicting net gains and losses from a national poll of 750 people doesn’t say a damn thing about my local congressional race or even my statewide Senate race.
What makes you think that Fisher is going to win out over Portman in Ohio?
I’m leery of that. Ohio politics are weird. I honestly think that the question of who our next Senator is going to be rests on the question of who our next Governor is – if Strickland can GOTV then Fisher will be our next Senator. If Kasich can GOTV (or successfully suppresses Strickland’s GOTV) then Portman will be our next Senator. And that’s probably going to be that. Though there’s a small chance that Strickland will win and Portman will win anyway, since Fisher is mostly a known quantity who lost a governor race to Bob Taft, Portman is relatively unknown around the state, and Strickland does moderately well with a right-leaning independent voters who ID as Christian. That might cause some to split their votes between Strickland and Portman.
It may seem odd that it would play out that way, but that’s how I think it’s going to go. Normally I’d say Strickland is in trouble because the economy is shitty here, but Kasich’s ties to Wall Street – and his ability to stick his foot in his mouth and shove hard – mean that Strickland has a window. So we’ll see.
Ohio has tight races. I think the Dems will win because the GOP’s candidates suck and can be tied directly to the economic hardship Ohioans are facing. It’s not abstract at all. Portman did Bush’s budgets and served as his
tradeoutsourcing representative.You’re right that the GOP candidates suck. Portman actually isn’t that bad a candidate – he’s mostly unknown. And even with his ties to the Bush administration, they’re fairly difficult to boil down into a soundbite that doesn’t sound like “Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush Bush” – which will work for some people but the folks that will work for in Ohio are unlikely to vote for a Republican again anyway (at least not yet). They could have done worse than Portman.
But Kasich? Who thought digging him up and resurrecting his undead political career was a good idea? Sure he’s popular with the primary base – he’s a Fox News personality and well known among the right-wingers here – but his Wall Street ties should have made him toxic. I guess it goes to how shallow the GOP’s bench is that he looked like a good choice.
And Kasich prevented a Tea Party insurgency here in Ohio like Angle and Paul. He’s definitely a creature of the establishment who has the ‘baggers convinced he’s one of them. So maybe just from that angle it was a decent choice for the GOP.
Melancon just released an internal showing a dead heat. While its probably not quite that close yet, it’s definitely going to be a fight.
If you had looked at the Senate 2010 picture in say, January 2007 this would have looked like an awesome year, ripe with potential. In many respect, a lot of those factors are still in play and if Obama hadn’t caused 4 open seats through his appoitnments, that would still be the case. All these seats were up last in 2004, which was sort of the last days of the GOP dominance from 200NINEELEVEN-200KATRINA. I agree, I’m generally skeptical as well of all this stuff until about September when people start paying attention and the narratives get firmed up.
It’s always surprising how the prediction crowd always assumes that campaigns make no difference. I think the Dems have a good case to make which hasn’t been widely heard yet. I think it will make a difference if they do it right, trumpeting and explaining their accomplishments and waging ideological battle against the wingnut notions that got us into all this trouble in the first place. I saw Harry Reid campaigning on his home turf not long ago, and have to say he was impressive — and I have not been a fan. To my mind, his chances, as with many other Dems, have been greatly underrated with no good reason except early polling. The Dems have the good candidates. The Reps have either fossils or nutcases who have not really been confronted yet. I mean, consider Palin’s fall when people finally saw her for what she is. There are several GOP candidates at high risk for the same fate.
Another factor is the teabagger crowd. I think their dynamic early on hurt the Dems, but it feels like that’s starting to reverse to some extent. I’m not at all sure the far right of the party will come out for “mainstream” Reps unless those Reps pacify them and lose indies and whatever “moderate” Republican voters still exist. All the polls I’ve seen totally overlook that internal conflict.
OTOH, it looks like economic recovery won’t reach the mass of Americans before November. That could hurt a lot, though Dems will be able to claim credit for laying down the groundwork for recovery from a disaster the GOP created. I still think Obama needs to announce a massive new initiative that captures the imagination the way the WPA did for FDR, or the moon landing did for JFK. Just fixing stuff is not enough to win elections in times like these.
On that big initiative: It need not be passed by election day but it should frame the issue of jobs for the election.
And Democrats need to stop reciting Republican talking points about tax cuts.
Wouldn’t it be phenomenal if Obama would craft a narrative for his administration and repeatedly frame each issue accordingly. Sigh. We can always dream…
Your list is very similar to mine, but I give Missouri a better shot than North Carolina at this point. Also, Iowa might be more competitive, but I haven’t looked at the fundraising numbers there.
The Senate we should be fine, but that’s no reason to get complacent.
I think we very may well lose the House, though.
Also, if things changed in the economy, Indiana wouldn’t be such an easy pick-up for the Senate. Our candidate is SOOOOOO much better than theirs.
Lose the House?
Which 37 districts?
I don’t have any spreadsheets for the House yet, this is just based on probability/what gains were made in the past.
I’ll prepare those as we get closer.
Anybody got House predictions? Or is that just too complicated to figure out? If our chances in the Senate are as good as Booman predicts, isn’t the House where the real action lies?