The Cleveland Plains Dealer posted this article today claiming the Democrats are improving their chances of retaining control of the Senate. I don’t know diddly about any of this so I’ll let the article speak for itself:
In the past few days, a number of the major election forecasting models have lurched back toward the Democrats.
According to Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times Upshot model now judges the race for the Senate to be a tossup, with a 51 percent chance Republicans will win a majority, and a 49 percent chance for Democrats. […]
The Christian Science Monitor reported missteps haven’t caused Republican chances of winning the Senate to decline from 65+ percent plus to a toss-up, but a change in the models themselves: As the election nears, they begin to place more emphasis on poll results in individual races, as opposed to underlying political fundamentals.
The author of the piece, Ray Jablonski, identifies the Senate races in Colorado, Iowa and Kansas as being three key states for Democrats. I have no idea why he thinks that those three in particular are critical, though I certainly agree it would be important to win all three (yeah, I am Mr. Obvious), so my questions for you are as follows:
Which state races do you feel the Dems must win to keep control of the Senate?
Which Senate races not mentioned above do you feel the Democrats are at risk of losing, and why?
Finally, a personal story: my son, reasonably up to speed on politics because, well I talk to him all the time, surprised me yesterday, when he told me he didn’t think mid-terms were that big a deal. I had to go to great lengths to explain to him the significance of losing the Senate. He gave me the impression that most of his friends share a similar mindset, though he promised to let me drag him to the polls in November. I know this is anecdotal, but it bothered me that even someone who is committed to voting for Democrats and supports a progressive agenda, would express such sentiments about the upcoming election.
So:
How concerned are you about turnout in a non-presidential year election among young people and other groups which generally support Democratic candidates?
The Senate races that are most interesting to me are KY, NC, GA and AR. WV is lost, so are MT and SD. CO, IA and KN are all winnable races, as is NC. Pryor seems to be doing well in AR and if Landrieu can hold on in LA, that would show the ability of Dems to win in red states, whereas we know Republicans simply can’t win in blue states. Which is nice.
If they can pick off McConnell or turn GA purple…that bodes well for the future in all sorts of ways.
There is a Minimum Wage increase on the ballot in AR, as I recall. That has the potential to bring a few more souls to the polls than might be typical on an off-year election, and might benefit Pryor.
Might bring more Republicans to vote against it.
Nah, rank and file conservatives love handouts — which according to their billionaire pimpmasters, is anything that pushes the United States away from a Dickensian hellscape. They’ll be completely fucking ungrateful for the ones they get and they’ll be hypocritical up until the last moment for proposed ones, but when the moment of truth comes they won’t turn them down.
Montana was lost because the dude was a plagarizer. I still chalk it up to White Privilege, because I don’t know a Black candidate allowed to get that far up the food chain without everything in his background having been combed over with a fine-toothed comb.
I still believe Grimes is a sucky candidate, and that a real candidate should be beating the Turtle’s ass.
I’d like to win Georgia – just ’cause.
I don’t think we’re seeing gains, per se, but a correction in models that rely on “fundamentals”, which Sam Wang has steadfastly (and probably justifiably) claimed is a bad practice. As we get closer to the election, everyone is converging on polling-based data, which means nothing for models like Wang’s but a lot for the NYT model.
why is everyone ruling out Montana? the candidate is good
The race seems not to have been polled since August 18, when nobody had ever heard of her and she was losing 53 to 35 or worse. And they keep publishing the same numbers as if the polls were new (Stupid Media Tricks). So who knows. Among people who read newspapers she’s doing really well!
Aug 18 is pretty much the time Amanda Gayle Curtis stepped in for Mr. Plagiarist. Also, she’s a math and physics teacher. DFA is supporting her. I guess they’ll wait a while to release another poll. But Montana doesn’t have a large population. she can probably meet every voter personally provided she has $ to get around the vast state. She was elected to the House, so she’s already won statewide once.
we are winning Ky or GA. Have to win 2 of 4:
AK, LA, NC and Ark
Hold Iowa, NH and MI
It’s unlikely, but we can win.
If Democrats lose the Senate this year, the party only has itself to blame because the map for 2014 has long been known to be ugly for them and they didn’t get on top of it early. Didn’t even bother to try to increase the vulnerability of the one GOP Senator in a state that has preferred every DEM POTUS nominee since 1992.
Picking off a Senate majority or minority leader, even when that Senator doesn’t enjoy high favorable tratings, is far easier said than done. Yes, Daschle went down in 2004, but by less than 1% in a POTUS election year when GWB won SD by 20 points. Reid easily survived that year as GWB narrowly won NV and won again in the year of the teabag revolt. Grimes is a much better DEM candidate than Angle was a GOP candidate, but KY is red and NV is purple. DEM money might have been better spent on WV.
Democrats are stuck playing defense in several “red” states, but even that’s better than conceding seats before the election cycle began. Cheap seats at that: SD, MT, WV. However, still not seeing three other incumbents or two incumbents plus flipping the IA DEM seat while also holding onto KS, KY, and GA that the GOP needs to gain control of the Senate. Not going to happen. Entirely possible that only KS flips out of AK, AR, GA, IA, KY, and LA.
Here in Oregon, I’m not too worried about Sen Merkely’s prospects (Oregon has become pretty consistently blue for statewide races over the past decade or so…). We have a couple of ballot measures that will help drive young/liberal turnout as well – marijuana legalization and gmo labeling. Vote-by-mail helps too…