Donkey – Elephant Game for the Senate
In 2002, I watched the Senate results — clicking back and forth between MSNBC’s Hardball and CNN’s Crossfire gang — with pen in hand and a small piece of paper with two lists: the five Republican seats that the Democrats hope to pick up and the five Democrat seats that the Republicans hope to pick up.
In order, roughly, of how likely the pick-up was for the other side.
Arkansas voted for the Democrat. The Republican candidate was involved in a sex scandal, and the hypocrisy of his holier-than thou stance toward Clinton during Impeachment proved to be his undoing. The last of victim of “Clinton’s Revenge” — which destroyed Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingstone’s career. Anyway, he was at the top of the list of possible Democratic pick-ups, and … as it turned out… he was the only Democratic pick-up.
Other than that case… the Republican seats stayed put.
Once the second entry on that list stayed put, and the bottom one on the Democratic side was won by the Republican, early in the evening… I had a good sense that this was a Republican night.
Tim Johnson narrowly edged his way to a victory in South Dakota, by a margin of something like 300 votes… the Indian Reservations came out huge for him (prompting the National Review to do a cover story about the dangers of Tribal Socialism, and prompting the National Review to do another cover story about how Terry McAuliffe stole the South Dakota election… a story that seems to boil down to a suggestion that the Native American votes were not on the level.)
Louisiana boiled down to December. On that winter day, the unremarkable DLC candidate Mary Landrieu saw that she was in trouble, the poll results streaming into campaign strategy did not look good. Bill Clinton came down to save the day with a mass-calling of African American voters, leading to a dramatic late-day Democratic surge.
The other three Democrat seats were lost. The other four Republican seats were won. Today, you can wonder if things would’ve been different had Paul Wellstone not died in an airplane crash… Wellstone very easily would have chugged Ms. Carnahan to victory in Missouri, meaning the net effect of the 2002 election would have been one Republican pickup and one Democratic pickup, which would have cut the storyline of the “Poweful Bush Coat-tail Effect” down to size before it could even gain hold… the only change being in Georgia — the smearing of Max Cleland and the sudden gust of the state to Republican control and the raging state flag controversy meaning the only message coming out of the 2002 election would have been all politics is local. But, that didn’t happen.
Anyway, on the sidebar you have this year’s list. At the start of the year, the conventional wisdom was the Democrats had an uphill fight. The southerners were retiring. But, things levelled out quickly. The Illinois Republican party imploded specacularly. The candidate that jumped into the race to take over John Edwards’s seat — Erskine Bowles got on a roll (when he ran for the Senate in 2002, his campaign ad featured Erskine Bowles… BOWLING. Good thing his name’s not “Erskine Crapshispants”.). The Colorado Democratic Party seems to have gotten its mojo back. And strong candidates entered the fray in Oklahoma and Alaska — while Oklahoma’s Republicans nominated a candidate a bit too extreme — whom the National Republican Party is a little weary of overtly connecting themselves to. Alaska’s Republicans nominated the candidate who received her job through nepotism. Also, in the “truth will set you free”, all pretenses that the Democrats held a seat in Georgia went out the window: so any suggestion that Majette might be closing in that race is a bonus, not a “must”.
In case the balance swayed a bit too much toward the Democrats, things evened out again: the Republican Party Hierarchy staved off the right-wing challenge to “centrist” incumbent Arlen Specter — which pretty well closed shut a prime opportunity for a Democratic pick-up. And the South Carolina Republican candidate picked up a lead, and the Republicans managed to convince their strongest potential candidate — John Thune — to take a stab against Tom Daschle.
Altogether, we can probably boil the Senate races down to six, three on each side, that could swing either way without too huge a political gust of wind… six races where it would not be a shocker if either candidate wins. Another couple of races on each side of the ledger bear a bit of watching in case political winds shift dramatically. At the moment, proving that “All Politics are local” — even as the presidential candidate flouders a bit and even as the red states get a bit redder, the Democratic candidate appears to have the slight edge in five *, and the sixth — Florida — is the mother of all toss-ups, in the mother of all swing states. (* although, Louisiana’s election is quirky as hell, adding some unpredictability… the effect being that what happens on November 2 will change the dynamics of that race.)
In that sense, the Democrats have a better chance than you would think they would have, races being in so many Republican strong-holds, of winning back the Senate. The party had a good blink of good luck.
I almost hope that Tom Daschle loses, and the other five Democratic candidates win. There’s something a bit pathetic about the persona of Tom Daschle, which shows us the true ways of the Democratic Party, and a loss would require the Democratic Party to find a new Senate leader… without being spurred on by being the “Loser Party.”