by Damozel | Here's a trend that should give some comfort to Democrats who are still recovering, or who haven't yet recovered, from the painful battle for the presidential nomination.
Democrats are running strong Senate campaigns in states such as Mississippi, Alaska and North Carolina that Republicans have long taken for granted.
The outlook for the GOP is so grim that party leaders have readily conceded there is no chance they can regain control of the Senate in 2008, even though Democrats' current majority is slim, 51-49.
"If you have an R in front of your name, you better run scared," said Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who says the party will do well if it holds its losses to three or four seats. (HuffPost)
The reasons are interesting, and some of the credit goes to Sen. Obama's presidential campaign, which increased registration among African Americans in states such as Mississippi that used to be solidly in the grip of the GOP. (HuffPost) And some of the ethics scandals aren't helping Republicans.(HuffPost) A number of Republicans are finally, at long last, retiring. (HuffPost) In a fund-raising letter, Orrin Hatch said it was the toughest election he'd seen in 32 years.
Seven GOP Senate seats are now at risk. And this is good news for Obama and bad for McCain.
The stakes for Obama in the Senate races are high. If he is elected president, the biggest obstacle to his goals could be in the Senate, where parliamentary rules mean that it can take 60 votes to approve legislation. The Senate currently includes 49 Democrats and two independents who are aligned with the Democratic caucus.
"Big changes don't happen without big Senate majorities," Obama wrote in a recent letter urging Democrats to contribute to Senate campaign coffers.
Furthermore, if the Dems picked up 60 seats and McCain got elected --- which God forbid --- the Congress would serve as a reliable check on his aspirations. Though people like to say that we've had a 'Democratic Congress' since 2006, the reality is that the measly majority in the Senate --- well, that and a certain spinelessness and venality among certain of our representatives --- hasn't given Congressional Dems as much traction as some of us would like to see.
For now, most political analysts are predicting a Democratic gain of four to eight seats, which would leave the party short of the 60-vote threshold. But Republicans are worried, because bigger gains are not out of the question: Democratic fundraising is strong and the battlefield is heavily tilted against the GOP.(HuffPost)
Of course, the best of all possible worlds for those who think the GOP has done quite enough for awhile for the nation, thanks, would be an Obama presidency with a Democratic Congress. I know that this prospect strikes fear into the heart of those who fear that an unchecked Democrat would be as bad as an unchecked Republican.
To those people I can only offer the consolation that Republican is, in the words of John Cole, 'a centrist-pragmatist' (I like this phrase) --- a different breed of Democrat than, say, John Edwards.
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