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. 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.
"I believe that Maine is going to be our Rhode Island this time," Reid said, referring to the 2006 race in which Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse beat incumbent Republican Lincoln Chafee, who had a favorability rating above 60 percent in Election Day exit polls. Voters decided that, even though they liked Chafee, they would not help President Bush and other Republicans by re-electing him.
By itself, a Collins loss in Maine would be a GOP disaster, but in all likelihood it would also signal a Democratic landslide across the country.
"We're going to pick up some seats," says Reid, who counts 11 competitive races in which Democrats have a chance to pick up ground (Arkansas, Colorado, Texas, New Hampshire, Maine, New Mexico, Minnesota, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, and Oregon). Reid, seeking to keep expectations in check, would predict only moderate gains. "I think we'll pick up four seats, five seats." You can tell from talking to him, though, that he hopes, and believes, it'll be more.
Republicans tend to agree. "We're not winning in places we ought to win just by being Republicans," lamented Tom Cole, the Oklahoma congressman who heads the National Republican Campaign Committee, the House GOP's campaign organization. The GOP worries that its loss of three seats in three special elections this year could spell doom in November.
After the 8-point loss in Mississippi on Tuesday, another top House Republican compared the party to bad dog food: "The Republican brand is in the trash can," wrote Rep. Tom Davis in a memo to his colleagues. "If we were dog food, they would take us off the shelf."
This year is not 2006, when voters sought to punish President Bush for having duped or disappointed them on Iraq. With Bush off the stage, you'd think voters' anger would have diminished. But so far it hasn't. Perhaps that's because voters still do not trust Republicans on all the issues most important to them.
The result is opportunities for Democrats in places where GOP incumbents should be cruising to re-election. In North Carolina and Texas, for example, Sens. Elizabeth Dole and John Cornyn, both Republicans, were thought to be in no danger of defeat. But a recent poll has Dole trailing state Sen.
Kay Hagan by one point after being up by 13 a month ago while another has Cornyn up by only four percentage points, 47 percent to 43 percent, over Rick Noriega, the Democratic state representative. History shows it is a very bad sign for an incumbent to poll below 50 percent against an opponent with such little name recognition.
For months, Reid has echoed the conventional wisdom that Democrats will pick up Senate seats this November -- a hard proposition to refute given the strong poll numbers of Democratic Senate candidates seeking currently Republican seats in Virginia, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Alaska, Colorado, and elsewhere.
But if Reid is right about Maine, his previous assessment will have been overly pessimistic. Democrats could even win the nine seats they need for a filibuster-proof majority.
Republicans have been assuming that is impossible. Last week, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, told The Wall Street Journal that, after his party lost control of the Senate in 2006, "I realized I was going to be the Republican leader and not the majority leader. That was the bad news. ... The good news is that 49 is not a bad number in a body that requires 60. The United States Senate is the only legislative body in the world where a majority is not enough."
McConnell seems confident that his party can survive even a bad election year with enough votes to obstruct Democrats. "We believe that when the dust settles, we'll have enough Republican United States senators to continue to block and shape in the best interest of the country," he told the Journal.
Maybe. But if Tom Davis is right about the dog food and Harry Reid is right about Susan Collins, maybe not.
