CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
April 22, 2009 – 12:06 a.m.
Bob Benenson’s Jigsaw Politics: Long Odds for GOP Rebound
By Bob Benenson, CQ Staff
It is notable that the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is not yet engaging the party faithful in happy talk about a big rebound in 2010, after the big setbacks over the past two election cycles that plunged the GOP into the Senate minority.
The NRSC, which orchestrates the Republicans’ national Senate campaign efforts, is emphasizing quite the opposite, at least at this early point in the 2010 campaign cycle. Its fundraising appeals urge Republican activists to send money to prevent the Democrats from gaining even more seats — which would push them Democrats past the “filibuster-proof” majority of 60 seats.
The Republicans’ caution appears justified, according to CQ Politics’ just-published ratings of the 36 Senate races scheduled for November 2010. Democrats, who have 17 seats on state ballots next year, will have to play serious defense in several races. But Republicans, who hold 19 of the seats up for election next year, have even more seats that CQ Politics rates as vulnerable.
With the caveat that these ratings will change over the year and a half before the midterm elections, seven of the nine rated No Clear Favorite (or tossup) by CQ Politics are now held by Republicans.
The fact that this is actually an improvement for the GOP over the 2006 and 2008 cycles underscores how bad those years were for that party.
A scarcity of serious Republican competition on their turf abetted the Democrats’ six-seat upsurge in 2006 and seven-seat gain from 2008, which is likely to become an eight-seat gain when the long-delayed outcome in last year’s Minnesota race is finally delivered. If a series of rulings by state election officials in favor of challenger Al Franken hold up under legal appeal by Republican incumbent Norm Coleman, he will enter the Senate as the 59th Democrat.
The list of seats likely to be targeted by Republicans next year include three of the four held by interim members who filled vacancies resulting from Illinois Sen. Barack Obama ’s election as president and his choices of New York’s Hillary Rodham Clinton and Colorado’s Ken Salazar for his Cabinet. Appointees Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (CQ rating: Leans Democratic) and Michael Bennet of Colorado (Democrat Favored) may face tough races as they seek election in their own right; Illinois’ Roland Burris (No Clear Favorite) hasn’t announced his 2010 plans following his controversial appointment by scandal-plagued Democratic Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich , who later was removed from office by the state legislature.
The GOP also is going after long-tenured Connecticut Democrat Christopher J. Dodd (No Clear Favorite), whose chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee is more of a political albatross than asset during the ongoing crisis in the nation’s financial sector, and is sizing up a possible challenge to Nevada’s Harry Reid (Leans Democratic), whose national prominence as Senate majority leader has not helped his job approval ratings back home.
CQ Politics also gives a competitive Leans Democratic rating to Wisconsin’s iconoclastic incumbent Russ Feingold , who has won three terms, but never by overwhelming margins.
But the Republicans have a problem that is identical to one that caused them major heartburn in the 2008 elections. Just as in that round, the GOP has five seats that already have been left open by retiring incumbents.
Open seats tend to be more difficult for a party to hold than those defended by incumbents seeking re-election. This was borne out in 2008 when Democrats in Colorado, New Mexico and Virginia captured three of the five Republican open seats.
Four of this cycle’s GOP retirements — by Florida’s Mel Martinez , Missouri’s Christopher S. Bond , New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg and Ohio’s George V. Voinovich — appear certain to produce threatening Democratic takeover bids. Obama carried Florida, New Hampshire and Ohio for president in 2008. He lost to Republican John McCain by a razor-thin margin in Missouri, a partisan swing state where the Democrats already have settled on a strong contender, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, for the 2010 race to succeed Bond.
All four of these races are rated as No Clear Favorite.
The only open-seat race in which the Republicans have a clear early advantage is in the Kansas contest for the seat that incumbent Sam Brownback has left open, presumably to run in next year’s race for governor. Kansas maintains its traditional status as a Republican stronghold where McCain easily outran Obama and where no Democrat has won a U.S. Senate race since 1932.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have only one opening, in Delaware, but it appears very likely at this point to stay in the party’s hands.
The seat is held by Ted Kaufman , the fourth and final appointee resulting from Obama’s presidential victory. Kaufman, a lawyer, is a longtime associate and former top aide to longtime Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. , who was elected vice president on Obama’s ticket and vacated his Senate seat. But Kaufman announced immediately after his appointment that he would not run in the 2010 special election to fill the remaining four years of Biden’s unexpired term — an act that established him as a “placeholder” for an expected candidacy by state Attorney General Beau Biden, son of the vice president, who currently is serving in Iraq with a unit of the Delaware Army National Guard.
Along with the mother lode of Republican open seats, the Democrats see opportunities to tackle at least four GOP incumbents who have stated intentions to seek re-election. These targets are:
• Pennsylvania: Arlen Specter , a leading Republican moderate who will turn 80 next February, likely would have faced a stiff challenge under normal circumstances, given the recent Democratic voting trend in the state. But the contest has risen even higher on the Democrats’ target list because Specter faces a threatening challenge in the April 2010 Republican primary — a rematch with former Rep. Patrick J. Toomey, who held Specter to a 51 percent to 49 percent win in the 2004 primary and segued to the presidency of the conservative activist group Club for Growth, a position he recently resigned.
• Kentucky: Republican Jim Bunning , a former Hall of Fame baseball pitcher and six-term U.S. House member, eked out close Senate wins in 1998 and 2004 in Republican-trending Kentucky. But a personal manner that is often described as abrasive and temperamental has undermined Bunning’s job approval ratings and is whetting the Democrats’ appetite for a serious takeover bid. The incumbent also has thorny relationships with many of his fellow Republican senators — including fellow Kentuckian Mitch McConnell , the Senate minority leader — but hints that it’s time for Bunning to pack it in have only prompted him to dig in his heels.
• North Carolina: First-term Republican Richard M. Burr has a different kind of job approval problem than Bunning. It’s not that Burr is unpopular. It’s that he has maintained such a low profile in his first four-plus years on the job that roughly a third of respondents to state polls say they don’t know enough about him to have an opinion. Burr did receive a recent spate of attention, but it’s unlikely to help politically: During a discourse in which he argued that Obama’s policies are not producing an economic recovery, Burr threw in an anecdote about how he had responded to the near-collapse of the financial industry last September by telling his wife to make a run on the bank and pull out as much of their money as she could.
• Louisiana: No list of vulnerable senators would be complete without a little hint of scandal and Louisiana — no stranger to that — antes up. Republican incumbent David Vitter weathered the initial blast of controversy that followed revelations in 2007 that his name had turned up in the records of a Washington, D.C., escort service associated with prostitution. Vitter publicly apologized for what he described as a “very serious sin” and has sought to put the matter behind him, emerging as an outspoken conservative critic of Obama’s policies. But the Democrats hope to test whether Louisiana voters have completely forgiven him.
CQ Politics rates the first three of these races No Clear Favorite. The recent strong Republican trend in Louisiana gives a slight edge to Vitter, whose race is rated Leans Republican. Some Democrats contend they may also have a legitimate shot at South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint , who has garnered attention as a leading Senate conservative activist but whose job approval ratings at home have been somewhat short of inspiring.
For capsule summaries on each of the 36 Senate races, click on any highlighted state on CQ’s ratings map.
Comments
Burr did not call for a run on a bank. He told his wife to get cash out of the ATM, which is limited at, what, $500? Actually, Chuck Schumer caused a run on a bank. Burr did not and Benenson is being inaccurate and irresponsible to say so.
Any Republican incumbent will have survive being accused of being pro-torture. Clips of them supporting Bush, arguing for less government regulation of the Banks, Securities and Insurance Companies. Their ideology failed. All they can do is hold their heads in their hands, weep and beg America for forgiveness. They certainly can't ask for election.
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