WASHINGTON – Republicans’ prospects in the Senate in next year’s midterm elections look bleak, with nearly a half-dozen seats on the critical ballot and Democrats projecting their majority will grow to more than 60 seats. The source of their greatest weakness is a wave of Republican retirements – four so far – which increases Democrats’ chances of picking up some of these more vulnerable open seats. At this point, no Democrat has said they will step down.
Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio was the latest to announce his departure at the end of next year, following exit announcements made by Kit Bond of Missouri, Mel Martinez of Florida and Sam Brownback of Kansas.
Several other Republicans are also on the endangered species list, including Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, who admitted to having a relationship with a high-end prostitute, and Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, who barely won a narrow victory in 2004 and where the GOP is surviving challenging times lately.
Currently, the political makeup of the upper house is 58 Democrats and 41 Republicans, and the vote-counting dispute in Minnesota between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken has landed in court for what will likely be a protracted legal battle that will last a month or two.
But after their stunning gains last November, Democrats now have even more opportunities this cycle and “a good chance of reaching or exceeding 60 seats in 2010.” – election veteran Stuart Rothenberg told his newsletter subscribers last week.
“Given the numbers and the states involved, Democrats once again have the advantage,” he said. “But a lot depends on retirements, candidate recruitment, party fundraising, the health of the GOP brand and voter reaction to the Obama administration.”
Writing a GOP obituary at this stage would be premature. Republicans have a lot of political talent to draw on in these and other races, and there is widespread belief among party professionals that the latest wave of retirements will bring a lot of needed modern blood to their ranks.
In Ohio, for example, former Bush administration budget director Rob Portman, a rising GOP star, has already announced his candidacy for Voinovich’s seat. The former six-term congressman was also Bush’s U.S. trade negotiator and one of the party’s talented political leaders.
Still, he will face an uphill challenge in a state whose economy has been in recession for much, if not most, of this decade and has been trending Democratic in recent elections. Democrats hold every top elected office in the state, and Barack Obama carried Ohio by more than 200,000 votes.
In Florida, adolescent Cuban-American Marco Rubio, a former House speaker, is preparing to run for Martinez’s vacant seat and has a solid chance against an unexciting, heated Democratic field.
In Missouri, former Sen. Jim Talent is at the top of most of the GOP lists, helping Bond keep his spot in the GOP column.
But Republicans may have something else on their minds this election cycle: a rarely broken historical trend line in which the party in power tends to lose seats in the first midterm elections.
Former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, who chaired the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, believes in this historic trend line. It has only been broken twice in American political history – once by FDR and most recently by President Bush in 2002.
“Everyone forgets that the party out of power usually wins seats in midterm elections. Where will this trend line be in two years? If you look at it historically, it’s unlikely it will be where it is right now,” Davis told me in an interview.
“Democrats now have the burden of governing and will have to make very difficult choices that will disappoint some elements of their coalition. The question for Republicans is: Can we absorb elements of this coalition?” he said.
The very high levels of energy during last year’s campaign fueled Obama’s Democrats, but Davis believes that, according to the physical principles of political alchemy, “that energy has peaked for Obama.” Now he’s coming in, so a lot of that energy is going away.”
The man who helped boost GOP numbers in the House during its comeback believes that “if you look at it historically, Republicans will come back to some extent” next year. But Davis is brutally realistic about the enormous challenges and obstacles his party faces at this critical moment. “They have a forceful composition in the Senate. It’s looking pretty bad at the moment,” he said.
But certain things happen in the first two years of a adolescent administration – unintended and unforeseen things that drag down the polls and convince some voters that this isn’t the change they expected.
Obama and the Democrats are on track right now, but it remains to be seen how their big-spending, big-government, big-debt policies will fare in the face of what promises to be an election cycle of increasing economic and political turmoil.
