The Key to the Senate?

Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes (D-KY)

Even if you don’t have your ear to the ground to every Roll Call and Hill article being published, you’d be a fool if you couldn’t start to see the panic setting in with Senate Democrats.  The party, while not assured defeat in November, is looking closer and closer to defeat every day.  In Colorado, rising star Rep. Cory Gardner has entered the race against Sen. Mark Udall, setting up a race that could turn Tossup at a moment’s notice (those special elections last year may have been the canary in the coal mine).  In North Carolina, Kay Hagan’s approval ratings are in the toilet, and it’s starting to feel like she could very well be the Blanche Lincoln of 2014 (I’m not quite there yet, but I think she’s weaker than Landrieu and Begich, which is not a strong sign for any involved).  And in Michigan, in the race that for some reason no one is paying attention to, former Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land has been tied with or ahead of Rep. Gary Peters, despite her Republican label in a fairly blue state.

No, the Democrats have very few silver linings, with the possible exception of two very unlikely states.  It’s been said before, but the Republicans need six seats, and are assured South Dakota and West Virginia (so really they need four).  Some combination of Montana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, and Michigan should provide those four (I don’t buy the Scott Brown thing for a multitude of reasons, though I will concede that some think he has a real shot).  However, the weird thing is what is happening in Kentucky and Georgia.

Both of these very red states have female challengers taking on Republican titans.  Kentucky is of course host to the nastiest election in the country-that between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.  McConnell is the prohibitive favorite, and we would all assume he was winning were it not for the nagging string of poll numbers out of the state.  Conventional wisdom says that McConnell would never lose in an election where his seat could mean the majority…his majority.  But if you took the names off this election it’d be hard to argue that Lundergan Grimes is posting numbers just as impressive as Terri Lynn Land or even Tom Cotton in Arkansas.  The same can be said for Michelle Nunn, who is just praying she gets one of the Tea Party loyalists to run against in Georgia, where she’s running a pitch perfect campaign so far and has done the due diligence of making herself a viable moderate alternative.

So the question is-how often do seats go in both directions in an election, and is that ever enough to make a difference?  It’s become relatively rare for both parties to take seats in an election in the last decade-only once in the past four Senate cycles (2012) has each party picked up a seat held by the other side, and that was just one seat in 2012 (Ben Nelson’s seat in Nebraska).  Overall, the Senate generally moves in one direction with most of the vulnerable senators, and when it does have the occasional outlier, it’s typically holding a seat rather than gaining one (think of Michael Bennet in 2010 or Dean Heller in 2012).

Looking at the math, though, the Kentucky and Georgia seats could become critical if one or both go the Democrats.  Those seven seats I listed above are not created equally-Udall of Colorado and the open Iowa seat in particular still favor the Democrats.  The Republicans have struggled to get a viable nominee in Iowa, and Udall has history on his side; while only three incumbent Democratic senators have lost in the past decade (a fact the DSCC trots out with relative frequency), only one of those (Russ Feingold) was in a state that the Democrats had won in the previous presidential election-you have to go back to 1998 to find another.  The other two, Tom Daschle and Blanche Lincoln, were in solidly red states.

So if the Republicans lose Kentucky and/or Georgia, they have to start either running the table or picking up seats like Udall’s or the open seat in Iowa.  The question is: can the Democrats do this?

The easiest case for the Democrats may be in Georgia.  It’s not impossible to pick up a seat while the other side is running the board, with Nebraska in 2012 being used as an example.  However, Nebraska is a solidly red state and Georgia is not safe for the Democrats.  You’d have to look to 2004, when the Republicans were winning the Senate but the (at the time) red state of Colorado went for the Democrats in an extremely tight open race.  The Democrats won by nominating their best possible candidate (Attorney General Ken Salazar) against a weak Republican challenger.  Now, I’m not saying that Nunn is as proven as Salazar was (she’s not-he was a statewide elected official at the time), but this is probably your best blueprint for winning in Georgia this year.

Alison Lundergan Grimes best blueprint would probably be the year before, when the Republicans were again sweeping the country, but Tim Hutchinson in Arkansas lost to Attorney General Mark Pryor.  Like Pryor, Lundergan Grimes is from a prominent political family and holds statewide office.  She also is competing against a Republican who is far less popular in his state than his political affiliation would normally allow.  Now, the similarities are not perfect (Hutchinson was involved in a marital scandal at the time that the happily married McConnell will not be), but again-here’s your proof that Lundergan Grimes could win.

The question also is, though-if the Senate is up-for-grabs, will these seats turn?  This is probably your hardest argument to make.  2002 is still your best example here-in 2002, the Democrats went into the election with a 51-49 majority, knowing full-well that they had a number of seats that they would have trouble holding (oddly enough, those seats are all up for re-election this year).  The Democrats had the odds stacked against them (and it’s worth noting, they did lose), but Arkansas voters still went against the tide despite the question of who would have the majority was very much in the air on election night.  The loss in Georgia by Max Cleland was considered something of a surprise on election night, and races in Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, and South Dakota were close enough that it was a coin toss going into the night over who would gain the majority.  And yet Hutchinson still lost.

This is all to say that the thought of Lundergan Grimes  and Nunn winning is not an alien concept, and it’s also worth noting that 2002 also had Tim Johnson winning re-election despite a strong Republican challenger and a solid red state (so don’t quite write off Hagan, Begich, and Pryor just yet), and had Mary Landrieu somehow pulling off a runoff despite common sense and her electorate making that seem impossible.

What about you-what do you think of Lundergan Grimes and Nunn’s shots at the Senate?  Do you think they have a better chance than someone like Pryor or Hagan?  And what is the Republicans’ best chance to a successful majority?