Sorry, but McConnell is not vulnerable. No conservative senator is vulnerable in 2012. In fact, I feel I can confidently predict that the only way the GOP loses ANY seats in 2014 is if the Tea Party sabotages moderates in Republican primaries. Assuming the Tea Party wises up (after Akin, Mourdock, O’Donnell, Angle, and Milller; and after alienating Olympia Snowe, God knows they should be a bit wiser, now), the GOP can only gain seats in the midterm.
I think it’s unwise to say this kind of thing almost two years before people go to the polls. A lot can happen.
That’s a tremendous assumption, and it has little basis in reality. Tea Party Republicans bungled away several Senate seats in 2010 and that didn’t deter them at all in 2012.
I think icowrich is saying that no currently sitting GOP Senator will lose his seat to a democrat in 2014. The Tea-Party might primary out an incumbant GOP Senator (Lindsey Graham, maybe) and then go on to lose the Seat to a Dem, or a sitting GOP senator might retire, and have his seat picked up by the Dems, but its pretty hard to see any of the current GOP incumbents whose seats will be up in 2014 losing if they run.
I don’t think its really too early to say that.
Five Thirty Eight projections on the 2014 Senate races out: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/can-republicans-win-the-senate-in-2014/?hp
The projections, while tentative, indicate that the GOP will pick up four to five seats. One of the more interesting trivia mentioned in that Liz Cheney may be running for a Wyoming Senate seat.
GOP +4 sounds about right at this point to me. I’d probably bet the under.
I think at this point even 538 is running on speculation, not because Nate’s making wild guesses, but because there’s no way that polls this far out are anything near an accurate snapshot of public opinion on ANYTHING. I’m not going to either panic or relax until at least May or June of next year, because that’s the soonest we’re really going to see anything like settled opinions, and probably not even then yet. But that’s about the earliest.
Not that she couldn’t win, but she hasn’t exactly shown a great knowledge of world affairs. On ABC’s “This Week” in September, she offered up this gem:
Yes, I’m sure she’d do wonders for relations with Czechoslovakia, if that nation indeed existed.
Back to the matter of 2014. It’s too early. We’ll see how voters react to two more years of knee-jerk Republican opposition to Obama. If Obama said he liked puppies, Mitch McConnell would start throwing them into wood chippers. If the economy improves despite every Republican attempt to sabotage it, Democratic losses will be minimized.
2010 was a bit of a fluke. Republicans were highly motivated, particularly the teabag faction. This after hearing about a year and a half of unchallenged lies about Obamacare. My guess is that the Republican turnout won’t quite match 2010, and the Democratic turnout won’t quite match 2012. What I see in the cards are modest GOP gains in the Senate (I’ll say 2-3 seats) and little change in the House.
Forget about public opinion; the significant thing about that list of Senate seats up for grabs in 2014 is the states that the GOP-held seats are in.
Other than Maine, we’re definitely playing on heavily GOP turf in every one of those states: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho.
And the Maine seat is not exactly an easy target: Susan Collins won comfortably against a very good Dem candidate in a very Democratic year back in 2008.
Well, I’ve been saying for years that while 2012 would be a tough year to pick up seats, 2014 would be practically impossible. It’s largely a by-product of our remarkable success in 2008, when we picked up pretty much every reasonable opportunity that was out there, excepting Maine.
In 2016, though, the map hugely favors Democrats, after good GOP years in both 2010 and 2004. If the Dems can hold their losses to 2-3 seats in 2014, the economy picks up in 2016, and if we have a good Presidential candidate, we could get that filibuster-proof Senate majority in 2016.
Is that true? It seems a lot more likely to me that it is the parties that swing back and forth every few years. The party that wins takes it as validation and swings to their side, vacating the center and allowing the other party to make a comeback.
The party that will win is the one that goes beyond looking at polls, analyzing, and predicting, and remakes the landscape. You gotta build your own victory.
If that doesn’t guarantee a win, what would? Seriously, this is about like an NFL team hiring a pee wee league coach.
The GOP isn’t going to lose the house, esp not in a midterm. Historically the demographic trends in midterms work for the GOP. Older white people vote in midterms while young people, poor people and non-whites (aka democrats) do not.
Add in how gerrymandered the house is, and I don’t know if I see it happening. The dems won the popular vote in the house by about 1 million votes in 2012 and the GOP still has a 30 seat majority. The dems would need a 2+ million vote majority just to break even I would assume.
The reality is the GOP going extreme works well in the house, where seats are safe and the big threat is a primary. In many elections (mostly house but some senate too) on both sides the real competition isn’t the general election (where victory is largely guaranteed) it is the primary. So have more ideological purity and you win the primary and sail through the general. It fails in many seats in the senate and the presidency because the voter bloc is larger and it alienates people. So it seems like the GOP has a lot of incentive to continue the far right agenda, at least when it comes to the house. If you move to the right you might win the primary in a safe GOP seat.
The GOP strategy will be to repress democratic voters, gerrymander districts and hope that by saying things which appear more inclusive and tolerant people won’t notice that their actions haven’t changed. Will it work? Maybe in the short term, but as a 10+ year strategy I don’t think it will.
Or like a current senator hiring the person who last ran a winning senatorial campaign in his state.
Yeah but it doesn’t matter, it isn’t like the dems are doing amazing things with 55 senators and a GOP house but will lose that power with only 51 or 50 plus Biden. So them losing it isn’t a big deal.
If anything, I think it would be good if the GOP won 4-5 seats in 2014. It will reinvigorate the tea party, and make them think moving further to the right is a good idea. Then when 2016 rolls around it will bite them in the ass again.
Wes-The POTUS’s party also tend to do poorly in off years, regardless of who’s in power.
The significant aspect of the midterms I see now is the lack of a bogeyman for the GOP to base their campaign on. They’ve lost the cultural war, and the tax war, and the immigration war, and the terrorism war, and they’re trying now to tank the economy to bring that back to the forefront. Now they are a house divided, engage in a great civil war, for control of their party. The Democratic party would be in the cat bird’s seat, except that the congressional districts are mostly locked in. The change will be in the representation of the Republicans, either toward the Tea Party side, or the neo-country club side.
But, not Clinton’s in 1998.
Or Bush in 2002. I think before that you have to go back to the 30’s to find a third example though.
Was that the same wisdom that told us a president couldn’t be re-elected with 7.8% unemployment?
'98 and '02 were special cases:
'98-Impeachment backlash
'02-9/11