Chris Cillizza at WaPo’s The Fix asks Is the Senate majority now in play?
Pursuant to the previous post, Cillizza notes that Illinois Republicans are pleased with the Giannoulias nomination, as they think his linkage to his family’s bank (and alleged mafia ties, apparently) will raise the whole “corrupt Chicago politician” line of attack that will give Kirk a serious chance. No doubt, it will be a campaign to watch.
Beyond that, Cillizza writes that while it is a “longshot” that the Republicans will win the ten seats needed to recapture the Senate, he looks at the Cook Report classification compared to the last two cycles and see a possibility.
My sense at the moment is that the Republicans are likely to pick up at least four seats at this point (Arkansas, Delaware, Nevada, and North Dakota) and at least one more (maybe Colorado or Pennsylvania).
Cillizza notes California, Connecticut and Indiana (along with the aforementioned Illinois) as possibilities. It strikes me that the Dems losing all those seats to be rather unlikely (but then again, I thought it rather unlikely that the Reps would win Massachusetts).
Beyond the question of whether Republicans can win ten seats is the question of whether there are vulnerable GOP seats/how competitive open seats being vacated by Republicans (Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio) will be. As I have noted before, I would assume that Kentucky would stay in Republican hands, but that the other states are less settled. At a minimum, any analysis of potential partisan shifts in the Senate need to take all of those seats into account, since any flip in partisan control requires the Republicans winning ten seats and losing none.
And a final caveat frequently missing in press-based discussions: we do not even know who all the candidates will be in most of these contests, making solid prognostication rather difficult.
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February 4th, 2024 at 12:10 pm
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