2012 Senate

As we take a fresh look at next year’s Senate races, one thing is clear: Barring an unexpected reelection landslide by President Obama, Republicans are at least slightly favored to take the Senate. It’s just a basic matter of numbers. Republicans need to pick up either three or four seats, depending on whether they have the vice president’s tie-breaking vote in 2013. North Dakota is all-but-switched to the GOP already. Besides North Dakota, the hardest states for Democrats to hold will be Nebraska, Montana and Missouri, in that order, because it’s hard to imagine Obama winning any of those states. Nebraska will probably feature a runaway GOP presidential victory, further damaging Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D) chances of reelection. It’s still early, and anything (read: scandals, a changing economy and international events) could happen to alter the basic dynamics of 2012. Yet the Republicans have so many tempting Senate targets that Mitch McConnell (R-KY) could trade “minority” for “majority” in his leadership title quite easily. Beyond ND, NE, MT and MO, Republicans have decent shots at Virginia, New Mexico and Wisconsin. These three contests appear about even right now. Virginia is likely to have a well-matched race between former governor and

Bill Clinton is far from the only “comeback kid” in American politics. As we noted last week, many presidents have experienced election losses before they reached the promised land of the White House. A similar story can be told in the U.S. Senate, with 31* senators leaving the chamber only to return at a later date, since the mandate of popular election was passed with the Seventeenth Amendment (a full list is available here). That is good news for a current Senate candidate — Virginia’s George Allen — and a prospective Senate candidate — Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold. Allen, a Republican, was defeated in 2006 and is seeking to retake the Senate seat he lost to Democrat Jim Webb, who has announced he will retire, leaving the seat open. Feingold, a Democrat, was a victim of the 2010 Republican tidal wave and seems to be mulling a shot at Wisconsin’s other Senate seat, left open by the retirement of his former colleague Herb Kohl. A third 2012 candidate who fits this category is George LeMieux, the Republican appointed in 2009 to a Florida Senate seat to replace Mel Martinez after his resignation. LeMieux chose not to run in 2010 for a

Right now, first-term Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND) looks likely to be elected to the Senate seat left open by the retirement of Kent Conrad (D) in November 2012. The Crystal Ball wondered: How rare is it for someone to get such a fast elevation from the House to the Senate? (We realize some House members will insist it is a demotion.) We’ve scoured the records and identified nine members of the Senate in this category. Only senators in office sometime in the previous 50 years were included. J. William Fulbright (D-AR) elected 1944 Roman L. Hruska (R-NE) elected 1954 Quentin Burdick (D-ND) elected 1960 Peter Dominick (R-CO) elected 1962 John Glenn Beall (R-MD) elected 1970 Lowell Weicker (R-CT) elected 1970 James Abourezk (D-SD) elected 1972 Rod Grams (R-MN) elected 1994 Sam Brownback (R-KS) elected 1996 Did we miss any? Email us and we’ll give you credit in the next Crystal Ball.

After two strong congressional cycles in 2006 and 2008, the Democrats were “shellacked” by Republicans in 2010. As the 2012 cycle approaches, uncertainty prevails for both parties: Each is trying to hold or expand its majority in one chamber while attempting to weaken and maybe topple the opposition in the other. The Democrats built their current Senate majority in 2006 on the backs of a strong class of freshmen, many of whom unseated Republicans suffering from a public backlash against President George W. Bush and the Iraq war. Bush is gone and the burdens of winding down that war now fall upon Barack Obama, whose political approval ratings have dropped significantly since taking office, notwithstanding his recent but probably temporary boost from the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden. The president’s powerful 2008 electoral tailwinds have fizzled, and some have even become headwinds. But 2012 is a presidential, not congressional cycle, and the 2008 and 2010 results demonstrated that higher turnout driven in part by nonwhite voters tends to favor Democrats in presidential years. Put another way, having Obama rather than Bush in the White House may be a liability to Harry Reid’s quest to maintain his Senate majority,

Here at the Crystal Ball we want to encourage the work of promising young political scientists. This week, we are featuring the work of Harry Enten, a student at Dartmouth College who has an interesting take on next year’s Senate elections. Perhaps Harry’s prediction is a bit too optimistic for the Republicans, but this far out from the election it is hard to rule out his model’s prediction. One thing is clear, though: We expect that readers will be hearing a lot more from Harry as time goes by, and we thank him for his contribution. ~The Editors If the recent budget debate has taught Americans anything, it is that the power of the gavel in Congress can be as powerful as the executive pen in the White House. In the blossoming 2012 campaign, we should, therefore, focus not only on the presidential election, but also the elections for Congress. Most analysts, myself included, believe that the Democrats face an uphill battle to re-capture the House. The main question is whether Republicans can pick up the necessary four (or three, if the Republicans win the presidency) seats to take control of the Senate. A model I have created suggests the

It’s time for a quick update on the 2012 Senate and Governor contests. Even though only two months have passed since our January roll-out, a surprisingly large number of shifts have occurred. Partly because Senate Democrats pushed their potential retirees to announce early in the election cycle, we have witnessed a spate of farewells by the party’s senators, and the map has changed as a result. There have been some major developments in gubernatorial battles, too. Campaigns for statewide office take a minimum of two full years now, given the massive amount of fundraising necessary to compete, so the line-ups seem to form more quickly with every new election cycle. We repeat for emphasis what we said in January: It is ridiculously premature to issue hard projections. Any analyst who would call these ratings “predictions” should just open up a palm-reading service. Instead, we choose to call them descriptive short-term forecasts. A thousand things will change along the way to November 2012. Candidates will drop in and out. Scandals will emerge. Terrorism may rear its nasty head. Other major issues will arise. And most of all, the economy will get better, stay the same, get worse, or get better and

It is already obvious that control of the Senate will be up for grabs in 2012, with Republicans needing just 3 or 4 seats to take control (depending on whether the GOP wins the presidency and, along with it, the vice president’s tie-breaking vote). How much do Senate races in presidential years depend upon which White House ticket carries a state? Without a doubt, it is the tight Senate contests that can be most affected by the top of the ticket. So let’s take a look back at all Senate races that were decided by 53-47% or less in the last eight presidential match-ups (1980-2008). Competitive Presidential-Year Senate Races, 1980-2008 *: Under Georgia election law, Senate candidates must capture a majority of the vote to win on Election Day, otherwise the top two candidates proceed to a runoff. In 1992, Wyche Fowler captured first place in the initial Election Day balloting, but lost a later runoff. Overall, a healthy 58% of the 66 truly competitive Senate battles have been won by the candidate of the presidential nominee that carried the state. Every election is different, of course, and coattails appear longer in some years (1980-Reagan vs. Carter and 2004-Bush vs.

Over the next four weeks, the Crystal Ball is going to roll out its very first look at the 2012 contests for Senate, Governor, House, and President. It is ridiculously early, of course. Any analyst who would call these ratings “predictions” should just open up a palm-reading service. Instead, we choose to call them descriptive short-term forecasts. A thousand things will change along the way to November 2012. Candidates will drop in and out. Scandals will emerge. Terrorism may rear its nasty head. Other major issues will arise. And most of all, the economy will get better, stay the same, get worse, or get better and then worse, or… The headaches are starting. But we believe that it is useful to set up a framework for analysis and comparison right at the start of the election cycle, if only to trace how drastically conditions mutate. Finally, we know our readers are busy. You don’t have endless hours to read lengthy essays about every campaign. So we’ve decided to boil it all down into some straightforward categories, with a series of charts we will alter and re-print with some frequency as events dictate. In a glance you can see which contests