No matter how you look at it tough year for Democrats.
By Charlie Cook
Texas Insider Report: Washington D.C. There has been a growing sense in recent weeks that
the odds of Republicans picking up a Senate majority in November are not only growing but may well have tipped over to better than 50-50. The numbers geography and timing for Senate Democrats have been challenging from the beginning.
Even worse the exposure comes in tough places for Democrats who have four seats up in states that Mitt Romney carried by 15 or more two in states that he won by 14 and another in a state Romney took by 2.
They have greater exposure defending 21 seats compared with only 15 for the GOP. The timing is particularly bad in that the partys exposure comes during a midterm election when the electorate is usually older whiter and more conservative than during presidential election years when turnout is more diverse.
Finally the political environment for Democrats is bad; the party currently has a president with a national job-approval numbers averaging in the low 40s and considerably worse in at least half the Senate battleground states.
Plus the Affordable Care Act his signature legislative accomplishment is distinctly unpopular.
All in all its not a good situation for Democrats.
Republicans have helped themselves with a strong recruiting year. The GOP expanded the playing field in recent weeks with former Sen. Scott Browns decision to challenge incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in
New Hampshire. The party has also traded up candidates in
Colorado replacing problematic 2010 Senate nominee Ken Buck for Rep. Cory Gardner.
If you had to bet today on the outcome the odds would strongly favor Republicans getting halfway to their goal of a net gain of six seats in Democratic open seats:
- GOP candidates are favorites in South Dakota West Virginia and to a slightly lesser extent Montana.
- 4 Democratic incumbents are embroiled in very tough races: Mark Begich in Alaska Mark Pryor in Arkansas Mary Landrieu in Louisiana and Kay Hagan in North Carolina.
- All are running roughly even slightly ahead or even behind their GOP rivals. The races in our view are absolutely in the Toss-Up column.
Conventional wisdom has labeled Pryor as the walking dead even though multiple private Democratic polls (by different pollsters) have never showed him down as much as a single point. The one high-quality public poll where all the details are available conducted by the Democratic polling firm of Hickman Analytics for an energy-industry group had Pryor ahead of Rep. Tom Cotton by 3 points among all likely voters and 2
points behind among definite voters; both are margin-of-error variances.
This is an example how the perception of a race often can be driven by sketchy polling.
After those four Democratic Senate incumbents (in
Alaska Arkansas Louisiana and
North Carolina) we still have an open seat in
Michigan where two little-known candidates are battling in a very close race.
Yes the
Iowa open seat is worth watching specifically because the odds of the convoluted GOP nominating process picking an exotic and potentially problematic candidate for the general election are good.
Democrats dispute our Toss-Up designation of the race in
Michigan but current polling suggests that is indeed where things stand.
In the two new races"
Colorado and
New Hampshire one or both could end up in the Toss-Up category though not enough numbers have been released to justify that in the former and numbers in the latter currently show Shaheen with a lead well beyond the margin.
Then there is the matter of the two vulnerable GOP seats. The conventional wisdom in
Kentucky continues to discount the magnitude of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnells peril. His poor favorability ratings in the state should disabuse anyone of that notion but apparently they havent. The perception of his tenacity is given greater credence than that the data indicate.
My good friend and competitor Stu Rothenberg (right) puts the broad range of potential outcomes at four to eight seats gained by the GOP numbers that make sense to me. Narrowing it down a bit to a five-to-seven-seat gain while riskier is probably an equally logical conclusion.
Nate Silvers terrific website FiveThirtyEight puts the broad range of GOP victory from plus one for Republicans to plus 11 with a net gain of six seats the most likely. While I can quibble with some of the odds that Nate puts on individual races just as Stu and I disagree here and there we are all in the same ballpark.
The disagreements with FiveThirtyEight are in some cases the difference between looking at things purely quantitatively as Nate does or a bit more subjectively as Rothenberg and I do. Larry Sabatos Crystal Ball is a little less explicit in its weighting of qualitative versus quantitative analysis but overall looks to be in about the same ballpark as well.
Some people ask if there is room for a Charlie Stu or Larry in a world with Nates quantitative approach. It is a legitimate question and I confess to being a big fan of Silvers even if we sometimes disagree on the details. But as the terrific book and movie Moneyball suggests while there is not
a Major League Baseball team that does not employ statisticians using sabermetrics neither is there one that has fired all of its scouts.
Smart teams employ both.
Charlie Cook is a political analyst for National Journal NBC News and is Editor & Publisher of The Cook Political Report. He appears regularly on the ABC CBS and NBC news programs as well as on Good Morning America.
