Terry Samuel writes that Harry Reid is experiencing an unusual emotion -- hope:
Harry Reid is optimistic, a rare state for the Democratic Senate majority leader and self-declared cynic ("It means I'm disappointed less often," he says). Given the current political mood it would be hard for him not to be.This year, voters have taken every opportunity to punish Republican candidates at the polls, most recently in Mississippi where a Democrat easily won a special election last Tuesday for a House seat in a district President Bush carried in 2004 with 62 percent of the vote. This has sent congressional Republicans into a frenzy of panic and recriminations about their prospects this fall. Reid's upbeat mood suggests how deep the GOP's troubles are. This week, he declared that Democrats will defeat popular two-term incumbent Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who today is ahead in every poll. Collins, a moderate Republican with a reputation for working across the aisle (a reputation Reid feels is undeserved), currently leads her Democratic challenger, Rep. Tom Allen, by double digits and has a favorability rating in the 70 percent range.
Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.
--The Editors
