How Much Does a Senate Loss Hurt?

Secretary of State Natalie Tennant (D-WV)

There are a lot of decisions if you are running for the Senate that you want to consider.  Do you have a chance at winning?  If you do, do you want to put your family (and yourself) under that sort of public scrutiny?  Being a United States senator in this day and age is an extremely high profile gig-with Twitter, YouTube, and a 24-hour media cycle desperate for something new to sell, all 100 members of the United States Senate are potential celebrities in the waiting, with everyone desperate to sell a Todd Akin style gaffe.

One of the other things that politicians have to consider is what affect this will have on their future political careers, particularly if you are a challenger or running for an open seat.  Incumbent senators already have to maintain the status quo, but people like Natalie Tennant, Alison Lundergan Grimes, Daniel Sullivan, and Tom Cotton all have their own political careers to look at for the future.  A win is of course ideal for them and a great stepping stone, but these are ambitious people who are weighing both sides of an issue.  And let’s not forget that there’s theoretically greater risks riding on a win for this office (only two presidential elections in the past 100 years have not featured a senator on one of the major tickets).  That’s a lot to give up when a governor’s seat or another Senate seat may be only a few years away, so you have to ask, will a loss for the Senate cost me politically later?

I figured with so many younger candidates making a stab at the Senate (all four of those candidates listed above are under fifty), this was a question worth pondering, so I decided to look back on both the present membership of the Senate, as well as Senate losers from the past five cycles to see what a Senate loss could mean to your future electoral chances.

Looking at the current lineup, there are four senators who ran for the Senate and lost, but then went on to win in a later election: Jeanne Shaheen, John Thune, Bob Corker, and Bernie Sanders.  In the cases of Shaheen and Thune, they didn’t hold any political offices between their runs, whereas Corker and Sanders went on to hold other offices.  Many, many other senators (too many for me to accurately count) have lost other elections prior to being elected to the Senate, amongst them Dianne Feinstein, Bill Nelson, Mazie Hirono, Dick Durbin, Mary Landrieu, Barbara Mikulski, Maria Cantwell, Joe Donnelly, Tom Harkin, Roy Blunt, Harry Reid, and Bob Casey, Jr.  As you can see from the list, it seems as if Democrats are a tad more likely to give someone a second chance with a Senate election.  This is evidenced this year with the Democrats running Natalie Tennant and Gary Peters amongst their challengers, as both have lost statewide before this year.

Shaheen and Thune’s Senate losses, however, are not what you would consider recent history, and there are a number of other candidates in recent cycles who have completely lost their political momentum as a result of their losses.  Looking at the 2002 elections (when Thune and Shaheen suffered their losses), you see candidates who at the time were fairly prominent and ran strong races like Tom Strickland, Suzie Terrell, Doug Forrester, and Erskine Bowles who are no longer to be found (oddly enough, one person who lost in a blowout, Chellie Pingree, is actually a sitting member of Congress now and would be a frontrunner if a Senate seat in her state ever opened up).  Taking a look at the Senate cycles from 2004-2010, you find the following:

2004: I thought that, considering the blowout the Democrats had pushed their way this year that some of the political stars that got swept up in the wave may have made comebacks, but this year is absolutely silent on that front.  The only candidate who eventually got higher office is Daniel Mongiardo, who became Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky (he was a state senator at the time), but then tried to get into the Senate in 2010 and couldn't even make it past the primary.

2006: Several of the losing candidates went on to win higher or different office.  Lincoln Chafee was later elected governor of  Rhode Island, and Pete Ricketts seems on-track to be the next governor of Nebraska.  Michael Steele would have a rocky tenure as Chairman of the RNC, and Mike DeWine, in one of those “I’ll take any office” sorts of deals became the Attorney General of Ohio, and could be a theoretical candidate for governor in 2018 if he wins reelection this year.

2008: Rep. Steve Pearce reclaimed his House seat two years later, though it’s worth noting that no other losers from this cycle have staged a comeback, and Pearce returning to the House as a losing Senate candidate hardly is a step up.  Admittedly, it’s a few years out, but none of them even appear to be trying to rebuild their careers by running for a constitutional office or a local office (unless they already held one), so this could end up being a bust for all that lost.

2010: Though only a couple of years removed, we’re seeing some movement on this front.  Joe Miller, Ken Buck, Andrew Romanoff, and Charlie Crist are all running for political office this year, with the latter two in strong positions to actually win their elections, and Jack Conway is running for governor in 2015.  While running a second race is always a hodgepodge (many candidates who lost once run and lose again), this is at least indicative of a class that will potential have some stars amongst the fallen (doesn't that sound like a Transformers or Shailene Woodley title?).

So there you have it-while there are a spattering of success stories, a lot of these candidates couldn't really handle a loss, making the races for these current political stars all the more important.  

What about you-who do you think is taking a big (and potentially critical) risk in their careers this year?  What failed Senate candidate do you think should make a comeback (Inez Tenenbaum, anyone?)?  Share in the comments below!