The campaign arm for Senate Democrats have a new memo out carefully pushing back against polling guru Nate Silver’s recent analysis that Senate Republicans are looking more likely to take control of the chamber in 2014.
The Monday memo, written by Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee executive director Guy Cecil, is full of praise for Silver but also picks out four Senate races where Democrats won even though Silver said Republicans would claim the seats: Montana and North Dakota in 2012 and Colorado and Nevada in 2010.
Cecil writes:
All four are senators today because they were superior candidates running superior campaign organizations who made their elections a choice between the two candidates on the ballot. Only three Democratic incumbent senators have lost reelection in the last ten years, and our incumbents are once again prepared and ready
We don’t minimize the challenges ahead. Rather, we view the latest projection as a reminder that we have a challenging map and important work still to do in order to preserve our majority.
A day earlier Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com released a new forecast saying that Republicans had a roughly 60 percent chance of winning the six seats they need to take control of the chamber.
It’s still early in the election cycle but Republicans feel that President Barack Obama’s approval ratings, Democrats up for re-election in red states, and serious spending by conservative-leaning outside groups will tip the scales in their favor. According to National Journal, Democratic strategists have privately been saying that there’s a serious possibility Democrats could lose control of the Senate in 2014.
