On November 8th, 2006, from what I can tell, in all likelihood Republicans will continue to control the Senate. No doubt, the Republican Noise Machine will use this to try and mute the size of the Democratic victory in the elections. However, while we are nowhere near as likely to take control of the Senate as we are of the House, it is actually a very simple case to make that we are doing better in the Senate elections than we are in House elections. The basic problem is that the Senate only elects one-third of its members every tow years, and we were in just too big a hole in the Senate entering the 2006 elections to have a reasonable chance for control.
Here is the perspective I would urge: look at the performance of Democrats and Republicans in all thirty three Senate elections this year. We are absolutely kicking their ass. Here is the nationwide picture across all thirty-three campaigns, based on
Pollster.com's five poll averages:
- Strong Democratic: 18
- Lean Democratic: 2
- Toss-up: 4
- Lean Republican: 2
- Strong Republican: 7
Now that is an absolute butt-whooping that we won't see replicated in the House. We already have more than half of the thirty-three races, 18, in the "strong Democratic" column. By contrast, Republicans have less than one-quarter of the races, 7, in the "strong Republican" category. A quick glimpse at the state of the thirty-three elections is that the absolute best-case scenario for Republicans is to lose the Senate races 20-13. The absolutely best case for Democrats would appear to be to win the Senate races 24-9. That is a real throttling, a true thrashing, no matter what way you look at it.
My final senate forecast will probably project Democrats picking up four seats, which will mean a victory of 22-11 across the thirty-three campaigns. That will actually be one better than Republicans managed in 1994, when they won the same thirty-three campaigns 21-12. What this means is that Republicans should thanks their lucky stars that all 100 Senate seats were not up for re-election this year, ala all 435 seats in the House of Representatives. If they were, Democrats would not be talking about an outside chance at a majority, but whether or not we would win 60 seats. We opened up a pretty big can of whoop-ass on Republicans in the Senate this year, it just would have taken an all-timer, galactic landslide for Democrats to retake control in 2006.
