With Tuesday night’s upset by Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the GOP gained more than just a 41st vote to disrupt the Obama agenda. As attention turns to the midterm elections in November, the Republican Party has strong momentum. A few months ago, even GOP leaders said that taking over...
As the most recent Crystal Ball ratings showed, Democrats are benefiting from the equal split of Senate seats up in 2010. Even though Democrats have a large majority of senators, it just so happens that both Democrats and Republicans are defending 19 seats each in the upcoming midterm election, which...
Editor's Note: Senior columnist Alan Abramowitz is concerned about the Senate from a progressive prospective. He has offered this commentary, with which liberals will surely agree and conservatives will beg to differ. A few months ago, many progressive Democrats were elated when Al Franken was finally declared the winner of...
Now that we've put the 2009 races to bed, we can start to focus heavily on 2010. Since our last update in June (available here), some critical Senate contests have undergone a transformation of sorts. We still don't know the status of them all, since a few critical candidacy decisions...
DELAWARE- SENATE: Republicans got just the break they were hoping for in the Delaware Senate race. Republican Rep. Mike Castle will run, challenging the Vice President's son, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden (D). Biden would have defeated any other Republican, but Castle is leading Biden in early polls. The Vice...
Like almost everything else in Congress, Senate votes on Supreme Court nominations have become much more polarized along party lines in recent years. That was certainly true of the recent vote on President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. While all 59 Democrats who were present voted to confirm Sotomayor, 31...
Follow Larry Sabato on Twitter. So much has happened recently in many of the 2010 Senate contests that you would think we were in the middle of the election year. We're still seventeen months out from Election Day, yet the battles are turning white hot in many states. Let's take...
Two weeks ago we discussed the basic framework for 2010's thirty-six Senate elections. Last week we reviewed the seventeen Democratic Senate seats that are on the ballot in the midterm year. Now let's see how the nineteen Republican-held seats for 2010 are shaping up in the initial stages: Robert Bennett...
Last week in the Crystal Ball, we looked at the historical background of off-year Senate elections and laid the groundwork for the earliest possible projection of the 36 contests on the ballot in 2010. This week we call the Senate roll among sitting Democrats to see who appears safe and...
It's never too early for the Crystal Ball to look ahead to the next election. But unlike the Wizard of Oz's phony orb (when he's still the Kansas medicine man who peeks into Dorothy's purse for photos of Auntie Em), we try to run an honest Ball. That means we...
