Will the border states decide control of the US Senate?
An interesting article from left-wing Democrat Chris Bowers on MyDD.
The Democrats need to gain six seats to gain a majority in the Senate. That seems a lot more possible than it did even three months ago. The Democrats now have small, but significant, leads in Montana, Ohio, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. None of those is in the bag, even Pennsylvania where slick advertising (and it really is good) has helped Rick Santorum back into contention when he had looked doomed for a long time.
Although Nevada and Arizona aren't beyond hope for the Democrats, they are long shots, even in a region like the South West which has a real possibility of long-term realignment towards the Dems.
Instead the real battle for control of the Senate will be in three old border states - Virginia, Missouri and Tennessee. In all of these, Democrats are narrowly behind Republicans on current polling, but Republicans in turn are below the perilous 50% mark for incumbents.
Virginia is the most unlikely of these. This is another state where demographics are trending Democratic, and Virginia is a state the Democrats must contest to win presidential elections now - along with Florida, probably the only one in the South. Ex-Reagan Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb is an unlikely netroots darling, being well to the right of the party, but such he is. Webb's defection to challenge millionaire sitting Senator George Allen looked rather quixotic a while ago, but a serious incident of foot-in-mouth disease has helped Webb back into contention. And now Chuck Schumer seems ready to lavish serious money on the race.
Tennessee is in many ways the reverse - its strong industrial and union base once looked like making it the last competitive state for Dems in presidential elections the real South. Even that seems to have gone. Congressman Harold Ford is a right-wing Congressman from an old Black machine politics family in Memphis. Bob Corker was by all accounts a good Mayor of Chatanooga and has deep pockets. However, Corker has serious ethical problems which are coming back to haunt him and, shall we say, a tendency to be a little windy on policy positions when challenged. (He was pro-abortion when he ran for the Senate in 1994. He's against now. In my experience, people rarely change their position on abortion in mid-life. Ford has no ethical problems himself, but a lot of his relations do. At the minute, Corker is wallowed in scandal after scandal, and Ford is running some brilliant ads, even if they are a little authoritarian for my taste. He now has a real chance of being the fist Black Senator elected from the South since Reconstruction. Both candidates have money to burn.
Missouri is also trending Republican, but slowly, and as long as there are such places as St. Louis and Kansas City, it will always be competitive. This race has two top-tier candidates - sitting Senator and narrowly defeated 2000 gubernatorial candidate Jim Talent faces experienced state Attorney General Claire McCaskill. Talent has more money, and has been using it to place some good, though not great, TV advertising which has reversed McCaskill's previous narrow lead. Unlike the other two battlegrounds, this one was always predicted to go down to the wire. And it looks like it will.
A very, very interesting set of US elections this year.
The Democrats need to gain six seats to gain a majority in the Senate. That seems a lot more possible than it did even three months ago. The Democrats now have small, but significant, leads in Montana, Ohio, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. None of those is in the bag, even Pennsylvania where slick advertising (and it really is good) has helped Rick Santorum back into contention when he had looked doomed for a long time.
Although Nevada and Arizona aren't beyond hope for the Democrats, they are long shots, even in a region like the South West which has a real possibility of long-term realignment towards the Dems.
Instead the real battle for control of the Senate will be in three old border states - Virginia, Missouri and Tennessee. In all of these, Democrats are narrowly behind Republicans on current polling, but Republicans in turn are below the perilous 50% mark for incumbents.
Virginia is the most unlikely of these. This is another state where demographics are trending Democratic, and Virginia is a state the Democrats must contest to win presidential elections now - along with Florida, probably the only one in the South. Ex-Reagan Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb is an unlikely netroots darling, being well to the right of the party, but such he is. Webb's defection to challenge millionaire sitting Senator George Allen looked rather quixotic a while ago, but a serious incident of foot-in-mouth disease has helped Webb back into contention. And now Chuck Schumer seems ready to lavish serious money on the race.
Tennessee is in many ways the reverse - its strong industrial and union base once looked like making it the last competitive state for Dems in presidential elections the real South. Even that seems to have gone. Congressman Harold Ford is a right-wing Congressman from an old Black machine politics family in Memphis. Bob Corker was by all accounts a good Mayor of Chatanooga and has deep pockets. However, Corker has serious ethical problems which are coming back to haunt him and, shall we say, a tendency to be a little windy on policy positions when challenged. (He was pro-abortion when he ran for the Senate in 1994. He's against now. In my experience, people rarely change their position on abortion in mid-life. Ford has no ethical problems himself, but a lot of his relations do. At the minute, Corker is wallowed in scandal after scandal, and Ford is running some brilliant ads, even if they are a little authoritarian for my taste. He now has a real chance of being the fist Black Senator elected from the South since Reconstruction. Both candidates have money to burn.
Missouri is also trending Republican, but slowly, and as long as there are such places as St. Louis and Kansas City, it will always be competitive. This race has two top-tier candidates - sitting Senator and narrowly defeated 2000 gubernatorial candidate Jim Talent faces experienced state Attorney General Claire McCaskill. Talent has more money, and has been using it to place some good, though not great, TV advertising which has reversed McCaskill's previous narrow lead. Unlike the other two battlegrounds, this one was always predicted to go down to the wire. And it looks like it will.
A very, very interesting set of US elections this year.