With last night’s Alaska primary, the much-heralded Republican Senate primary cycle came to a close (unless someone to Bill Cassidy’s right upsets him in Louisiana’s “jungle primary” on November 4). And with the victory of every Beltway Republican’s favorite to take on Mark Begich, former Natural Resources Commissioner Dan Sullivan (pictured), the GOP can congratulate itself on failing to nominate any blatantly self-destructive yahoos for competitive seats, and for not making any safe seats suddenly vulnerable — though that very nearly happened in Mississippi.
But if there are no Christine O’Donnells or Todd Akins on the general election ballot, it’s not clear yet Republicans are going to take control of the Senate. Yes, Montana, South Dakota and probably West Virginia appear to be in the bag unless something surprising happens; the two vulnerable GOP seats in Kentucky and Georgia look a mite safer lately; and you’d have to figure that among Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan and North Carolina, winning three is not much of a stretch in a midterm election with the president’s approval ratings low and the economy still troubled if improving. (Republicans once dreamed of winning in Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Oregon, but that ain’t happening).
Yet there are no signs of a Republican “wave” election; most of the positive trajectory remain attributable to a lucky Senate landscape this particular cycle and to the turnout advantages the older and whiter GOP automatically enjoys in midterms these days. So the assumption many Republicans seem to have that they’ll get all the “late breaks” in close races isn’t really warranted at this point. Nor is the much-discussed “enthusiasm gap” a reliable indicator. As Republican pollster Neil Newhouse warned recently (per the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza), the same “gap” existed in 2012:
“The enthusiasm gap was taken to the woodshed by the Obama team’s [get out the vote] efforts,” writes Newhouse. “In a nutshell, the Democrats turned out voters who were ‘unenthusiastic,’ ‘unexcited’ and not ‘energized’ to vote, rendering the ‘enthusiasm gap’ meaningless.”
We don’t know yet whether the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee’s “Bannock Street Project” — a heavy investment in turning the Obama ‘12 campaign’s voter targeting and mobilization techniques into a disruption of past midterm turnout patterns — is going to pay off. The impression I get, however, is that it’s a deadly serious enterprise, and potentially crucial in, for example, Arkansas, where African-American turnout has been abnormally low in recent elections. We also don’t know if Republican “independent” groups are going to be as feckless as they generally were in 2012 in spending their considerable resources.
Beyond that, there are obviously idiosyncrasies in individual contests that are difficult to predict but could change everything. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis is uniquely tied to a deeply unpopular state legislature that’s generated as many negative headlines in the state as Congress. Both he and Joni Ernst took dangerously extremist positions in the course of winning their primaries. Tom Cotton didn’t even need a primary to create ideological peril for himself. Ernst and Georgia’s David Perdue have been gaffe-prone. Mitch McConnell, never a beloved figure at home, is a highly visible officer in a despised congressional status quo. Cory Gardner is the rare Republican Senate candidate for whom a strong Latino backlash against the recent upsurge in GOP nativist sentiment could prove a catastrophe.
On the Democratic side, Mary Landrieu has already in her career accomplished something thought near-impossible for a Democrat by winning a post-general-election runoff. And Mark Pryor’s reservoirs of support are such that he didn’t even draw a Republican opponent last time he ran.
So while Republicans can rightly be pleased that they avoided disaster during the Senate primary cycle, it’s far too early for gloating. And if the imponderables between now and November 4 aren’t sobering enough, they can look ahead to the 2016 Senate elections, when the landscape shifts sharply in the opposite direction and a far less favorable presidential electorate shows up at the polls.
Ed Kilgore is the principal blogger for Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Managing Editor of The Democratic Strategist, and a Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. Earlier he worked for three governors and a U.S. Senator. He can be followed on Twitter at @ed_kilgore.
TP’ers kinda like getting wanked. But more to the point, they never compromise. Ask John Boehner if he is allowed to say that word. Nope. If they do not get the candidate they want they will likely as not stay home or vote independent just to teach the party a lesson.
Kinda like the far-left wing of the Democratic party who handed the presidency to The Shrub in 2000 by voting for the idiot narcissist Ralph Nader.
I expect 2016 to be a splinter year where Rand Paul is denied the nomination by the Corporate Wing of the GOP (even though he will do well in the Primaries) and then is drafted for an independent run by the Ayn Rand acolytes, John Birchers, and New Confederacy groups that make up the Tea-Party.
My Prediction is a 3-way race between: Hillary, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul.
I may just move to Canada.
CAN they win the Senate? Of course. This is a bad demographic year for Democrats – a sixth-year midterm, a fairly unpopular president, a very polarized electorate, and worst of all, a quirk by which many Democratic seats are in red-to-very-red states.
WILL they, though? Well, they seem to have overcome the first hurdle – don’t put the Tea Boobs out front where they can (and usually will) fuck the whole thing up.
But they’re still trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, considering they’re running guys like Scott Brown in NH.
And, people are starting to see that Tea Party Policies are bad at a state level. Consider that, in blood-red Kansas, Brownback and the baggers have fucked shit up so badly that now even Pat Roberts is in trouble (he has other issues as well):
But I think in the end, the odds are more likely than not that they will swing the chamber to the GOP, with a majority of 1 to 2…and then, we will truly see disgusting politics in action, as Boner’s Bozos and Mitch’s Bitches conspire to bring down “The Other”. I will work diligently to prevent that from happening, but looking at the situation impartially you can’t fail to observe that their chances this year are pretty good.
Which plays right into the Democrats running the table on them in 2016.![:smiley: :smiley:](https://forums.talkingpointsmemo.com/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=9)
So please, Republicans – do your worst. Obi-Wan Commonsense commands you!
“You can’t win, Darth – If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine…”
Was that headline intentional? If so, huge kudos for hilarity.
Well, I hope the Tea Partiers are…ummm…satisfied.
Was there a fee involved?