State of the Senate: Can the Republicans Win the Majority?

U.S. Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC), one of the vulnerable Democrats running
in next year's midterms.

If you’ve been following the state of politics in the past few weeks, you’ll know that the Democrats have had better days.  Mitch McConnell cannot seem to contain his joy about his prospects of finally becoming Majority Leader, and the President has been unable to quench the Democrats’ growing anger toward him specifically as they figure out how they should handle the political fallout of the Affordable Care Act.  It’s often said of the White House that the President never has to run for reelection again, but every other Democrat has to run, so his fate is very much tied to the rest of the Democratic party if he wants a remotely productive final two years in office.

With the Republicans always a strong threat to hold the House, the real focus has become the Senate.  The Republicans need six seats to win back the Senate, and with open seats in West Virginia, South Dakota, and Montana all strongly in the Republicans’ corner at the moment, they’re halfway there.

The question is, now, can the GOP make it through three more seats?  Though recent polls have shown people as diverse as Mark Udall and Jeanne Shaheen all with closer than expected reelections, it’s hard to believe that the situation for the Democrats right now is going to be as dire come next November (if it is, we won’t be questioning whether or not McConnell becomes the Majority Leader, we’ll be questioning whether Hillary skips running all-together in such a toxic environment).  The path to the majority remains still through the below eight seats.

Kentucky and Georgia: The thing about a wave election, if that’s what’s about to happen, is that the party that isn’t part of the wave doesn’t pick up seats.  It just doesn’t happen-in 2010, the only seats the Democrats won were seats they had no business losing in the first place (Democratic strongholds in Delaware, Louisiana, and Hawaii).  Georgia and Kentucky are long-shots to begin with-if the Republicans can maintain any sort of momentum, no amount of quality candidates in these races are going to help the Democrats.  Look at 2010 for the best example: Democrats recruited top tier candidates in myriad races where the Republicans held the seat: Paul Hodes (NH), Charlie Melancon (LA), Robin Carnahan (MO), Jack Conway (KY), and Elaine Marshall (NC) all held statewide office or a House seat when they took their shot at the Senate, and all five ended up losing easily in their races despite starting the race in a decent position.  If the Democrats cannot curb the Republican enthusiasm, these are lost causes.

Iowa and Michigan: As we found out in 2010, just because a state is bright blue doesn’t mean that the seat cannot go to the GOP with a national headwind, particularly in open seat races.  Alexi Giannoulias (IL) and Joe Sestak (PA) both had the right profile to make the jump to the Senate, but couldn’t overcome the unpopularity of the president and the national party at the time.  There isn’t a huge number of signs that these two seats are headed toward the Republicans (in Iowa, we don’t even know who that nominee is going to be), but in a true wave, it isn’t the below four seats that become vulnerable-it’s these two.

Arkansas: Of the four red-state Democrats running for reelection, Sen. Mark Pryor is the most vulnerable, and the only one without the Tea Party clause in the state.  All of the other candidates have some type of Tea Party challenger at the fringes that could be the next Christine O’Donnell, but Rep. Tom Cotton isn’t vulnerable on that flank.  This is looking extremely difficult for Pryor without an impressive combination of yellow dog/blue-collar Democrats and extremely strong African-American turnout.  In fact, this is really the conundrum for all but Mark Begich and Bruce Braley in this list-the Democrats need to find some way to get African-American and Latino turnout on-par with a presidential year, which is a near impossible task without the president’s support, but they cannot use the President too much without alienating the moderates they need to cross the finish line.  Essentially, the President can get them to 45%, but he cannot get them to 50%+1, and that’s the big issue for these red-state Democrats.

Louisiana: Sen. Mary Landrieu is probably the scrappiest of all of the campaigners this year-she survived a razor-sharp election in 1996, the Republican wave of 2002, and the president losing the Bayou State dramatically in 2008.  Every six year we talk about the “fight of Landrieu’s political life,” so it’s hard for me to believe that this is it, even if it does look particularly dodgy for Landrieu this year.  Landrieu’s hoping that a Republican Tea Party challenger emerges to challenge Cassidy, but there’s no real indication that this will happen at this point.  The best bet she has if she can use her brother’s role as Mayor of New Orleans to get high African-American turnout while stopping the flooding amongst white Democrats in the redder parts of the states.  This is how she has won before, but the blueprint gets harder if the story headed into November remains an unpopular law that Landrieu cast the decisive vote toward.

Alaska: Unlike Arkansas and Louisiana, Alaska doesn’t really have a great blueprint for the Democrats to win reelection, aside from Mark Begich’s crazy-tight win in 2008.  In the past decade, Blanche Lincoln, Mike Beebe, and Kathleen Blanco have shown that other Democrats can win in Arkansas and Louisiana, but no Democrat aside from Begich has won statewide since Tony Knowles in 1998 (fifteen years is ancient history in politics).  The best bet for the Democrats in Alaska is that Joe Miller, a Tea Party challenger who is massively unpopular with the statewide electorate, skates through in a threeway Republican primary.  When you’re counting on your opponent to be terrible, your electoral strategy has some holes, though, and Begich isn’t resting on his laurels.  The other thing to note here is that while this is a solid red state, it has a pretty thick libertarian streak, and there are issues that Begich agrees with the populace of the state (note how there’s almost no backlash to Lisa Murkowski’s suddenly moderate credentials).

North Carolina: Our final seat to investigate is Kay Hagan’s in North Carolina.  Hagan had been enjoying a high single-digit lead for months before faltering in the past few weeks, with the Republicans now in a virtual tie with the first-term senator.  Hagan, unlike Landrieu and Pryor, has only won election statewide once in the Tar Heel State (whereas Landrieu has won five times and Pryor has three times), making her have less of a relationship than those decades-famous politicians.  However, North Carolina has become far more moderate in recent years and indeed went for President Obama in 2008, and a fact that few remember, unlike Indiana in 2012 (which does indeed appear to be a fluke of 2008), he nearly won it again in 2012 and the Republican governor of the state is just as unpopular as Obama.  Hagan’s hope has to be, like Landrieu and Pryor, that something (almost anything) other than the ACA is the centerpiece of her campaign, but Hagan has a set of issues that can be utilized for North Carolina’s coalition if she can shift the focus of the campaign.  While only keeping Hagan would cost the Democrats the Senate (a fact that we should all keep repeating), her reelection still seems the most likely of the four, and while this is the definition of a tossup, a tie goes to the incumbent when predicting and I’d still say that Hagan holds the seat.

Those are my thoughts right now.  I’d say that if the election were held today that the Senate would go to the GOP (those polls showing that Mitt Romney would have won is ludicrous though-Romney has transformed into “Generic Republican” in the public consciousness, and “Generic Candidate X” always runs better than an actual person), but this is far from over.  The best chance that the Democrats have is to hold Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, and probably Louisiana at this point, but there’s no “lost cause” incumbent for the Democrats…yet.  The job of the DNC, DSCC, and particularly the President is to get the focus off of the ACA as soon as is humanly possible.