Senate Dems Face Embarrassment of Riches
by Jonathan Singer, Fri Jun 22, 2007 at 07:39:19 PM EDT
It's not often that a party's greatest difficulty in mounting a bid for a Senate Majority is choosing which races not to target. But increasingly, it appears that at least one of the most important steps that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will have to take in the coming months is to figure out just which races it will focus its attention on, a task made harder by the fact that the list of potential competitive races appears to be growing.
Of course the Democrats' bid to increase their majority in the Senate has not been met with all positive news. It was just a week and a half ago, for instance, that Alabama Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks announced that he would not challenge his state's Republican Senator, Jeff Sessions, this cycle, and Democrats have yet to settle on a single strong challenger in a number of states viewed as their best pickup opportunities in 2008.
Yet at the same time, more and more of the 22 seats that the Republicans have to defend this cycle seem to be moving at least towards having a real race, and potentially even a quite competitive one.
- In Nebraska, former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey is thinking about making another run -- a move that could be helped by either a competitive Republican primary or the retirement of Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
- In Alaska, Republican Senator Ted Stevens' numbers don't look as good as those of a potential Democratic challenger, Mark Begich.
- In South Carolina, a new poll shows that freshman Republican Senator Lindsey Graham enjoys an approval rating of just 31 percent, with 40 percent disapproving.
- In Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admits that he's gearing up for what he sees as his "most difficult" reelection bid ever.
- And now in Tennessee, Democrats may have found the candidate who can knock off Lamar Alexander. Ken Whitehouse reports for the Nashville Post that Michael Ray McWherter, son of the state's popular former Democratic Governor Ned McWherter, is thinking about a Senate run this cycle.
This is just a small sampling of the Democrats' opportunities in states that traditionally been difficult for the party to carry on the federal level. Naturally, the Democrats are going to pour more of their focus on races like New Hampshire and Colorado, states that have shown good trends for Democrats in recent years, states in which they have obvious opportunities for pickups. What's more, the DSCC clearly will not be able to invest heavily (say in the multiple millions of dollars) in all 21 states in which the Republicans are on defense. They probably won't be able to put much money towards all of the five red state races listed above, or even necessarily a majority of them. But the fact that already at this still relatively early point in the cycle the Democrats have so many opporunities on the horizon cannot augur poorly for their chances to grow their majority in the Senate -- perhaps even to the point, either after this cycle or the next, where they have the 60 votes to overcome any filibuster threat from wholly within the GOP caucus.
Tags: AK-Sen, KY-Sen, ne-sen, SC-Sen, Senate 2008, Senate Democrats, TN-SEN (all tags)
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