MarkWarner08
Junior Chimp
Posts: 5,812
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« on: August 06, 2006, 07:47:12 PM » |
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By most accounts, Senator Chuck Schumer is a not a man cowed by a challenge. At the age of 23, just months out of Harvard Law, Schumer was elected to the State Legislature. He quickly rose to the US Congress and in 1998 he defeated entrenched Republican Senator Al D’Amato in one of the nastiest Senate races in NY political history. Schumer now faces an even more daunting challenge -- taking back the US Senate.
The reason why Democratic hopes for taking back the Senate are so slim rests on the DSCC’s success in 2000, failure in 2002 and its abject failure in winning races in 2004.
What many people forget about the 2000 election cycle is that despite the relative closeness of it overall, the Democrats unseated five Republican Senators. On election day 2000, Republican Senate seats in Delaware, Washington, Michigan, Missouri and Minnesota all went down to defeat and the Dems took back a seat in Florida. Were it not for Republican pickups in Virginia and Nevada and Bush’s coattails in Montana the GOP would have lost the Senate. Remarkably, the pundits in 1999 seemed convinced that the Democrats had a better shot of winning the House and the Presidency than even gaining one or two Senate seats. Ironically this good news for the Democrats is would is holding them back today. Their 2000 victory shifted that cycle’s political composition from 20 Republicans to 15, thus lowering the number of target for Democrats in 2006
In 2002, the Democrats were sunk by the 9-11 effect, Bush’s popularity, the Wellstone funeral and a backlash in Georgia. Democratic Senators Max Cleland, and Jean Carnahan lost and Norm Coleman defeated Walter Mondale to steal a Senate seat. The Democrats only major victory came in Arkansas thanks to an imploding incumbent.
Two years later, the Democrats lost all five open seats in the South and watched their former leader go down in flames. Their victories in Colorado and Illinois were barely solace for distraught Democrats. Were it not for the gay marriage ban in Kentucky and the smearing of Democratic Senate candidate’s sexual orientation, senile Jim Bunning would rightfully have lost and the Senate would have been 54-45-1, a near carbon copy of where it was after Republican Senator Paul Coverdell’s death in 1999.
This would have made it so for Democrats to take back the Senate in 2006 all they had to do was sweep “Big Five” vulnerable GOP Senate seats. But it wasn’t to be. Now, even if Schumer can lead his party to victory in Ohio, Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island and hold off any losses in Washington, Maryland and Minnesota, the Democrats will still be one seat short of the majority.
This leaves the Volunteer State as the Democrats last major target.
The only way Harold Ford, Jr. wins the open Tennessee Senate seat is by smearing Bob Corker’s record. Simply put Ford needs a Hail Mary miracle to win this seat. Luckily, his opponent has a pro-abortion, tax-hiking, big-government supporting past. Ford and the DSCC’s only chance for victory is if they have effectively destroyed Corker’s character, ran a flurry of pro-Ford ads, run an amazing GOTV effort and nationally there is a massive Democratic wave. The worst news for Dems is that this is their BEST tier two pickup opportunity.
It is becoming more and more likely the Democrats will sweep into the majority in the lower House, but their colleagues in the Upper Chamber will still be waiting for another cycle.
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