If you’re a Democratic incumbent and you think you’re safe in 2010, you’re probably wrong. That was the message delivered at a reporter’s roundtable held by RNC political director Gentry Collins this afternoon at the party’s annual meeting of state party chairs in Maryland. As things stand today, Collins said there are 122 House seats currently held by Democrats the GOP thinks it could potentially flip this year.
Though Collins said he expects that number to “shrink dramatically” as the clock ticks down to November and races tighten, the sheer total of Democratic seats the party currently views as competitive suggests how confident Republicans are this year.
“A year ago, Democrats thought they could pickup 10 seats in California,” Collins said, illustrating the change in the political winds he sees this year. “Now we’re talking about picking up seats in Pennsylvania, New York and places like that.”
Republicans say they’re preparing to go to battle all across the country — even places viewed as off-limits just a few months ago. Collins was joined by two state party chairs — Doyle Webb of Arkansas and Ron Nehring of California — who said that voters in their states are ready for a new Republican Revolution like the one that swept the party to power in Congress in 1994. Nehring said his party is laying the groundwork to be competitive all across California, but said as long as the election remains focused on the Democratic majority, it’s the GOP’s to lose.
“We didn’t win in 1994 because of infrastructure,” he said. “We won in 1994 because we had a nationalized election with a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress that overreached.”
Nehring said conditions today might be even better that they were back then.
“I thank God every day that Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton,” he said. Nehering said that Clinton had cast himself as a “new Democrat” who was different from the more liberal Democrats like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Obama, Nehering, has never made similar aspersions about himself, leaving Republicans wide open to attack him as a radical.
After the roundtable, I asked Collins about recent public polling showing the public is slowly growing more confident in the economy, which could bode well for any incumbent politician. Polls have also shown that the public still puts more of the blame for the bad economy on President George W. Bush’s shoulders, which could bode well for Democrats who plan to cast the GOP as the party of Bush this fall.
Collins dismissed the idea. He pointed to high unemployment numbers and slow economic growth as evidence that the economy is still a problem for the party in power. As for running on Bush, Collins said he didn’t expect that message to make much of a dent in the big gains he sees coming the GOP’s way.
“I think the public is tired of it,” he said. But he said that with the economy the way it is, Democrats might be running out of options.
“What else are they going do say?” when I asked him what he thought of the Democratic plan to raise Bush in the fall. “They failed!”
