With the 2008 cycle already seemingly in full swing, at least on the presidential level, the race for control of the Senate in the 111th Congress appears to be getting under way. According to the New York Daily News' Ben Smith, the second-term chairman of the Demcoratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Chuck Schumer of New York, is now laying out his outlook for the 22 months to come.
Schumer has also begun to assemble candidates for the 33 Senate seats that will be contested in 2008. It's seen as a year that favors Democrats, with 12 Democratic incumbents up for reelection compared with 21 Republicans.His first goal is ensuring that no Democrat retires.
"We have now gotten 11 of the 12 Democrats to commit to running again. [Iowa Sen.] Tom Harkin is still making up his mind," Schumer said, going on to lavish praise on the 67-year-old Democrat. "He's a great senator. He does more in a couple of years than many senators have done in a lifetime."
Schumer said the three most vulnerable Republicans are Colorado Sen. Wayne Allard, New Hampshire's John Sununu and Minnesota's Norm Coleman - who went to high school with Schumer in Brooklyn. He said a Democrat, Rep. Mark Udall, had already stepped forward to challenge Allard, but that he hasn't yet recruited challengers for the other two seats.
Schumer cautioned that despite the Democrats' apparent edge, most of the year's contests are in Republican-leaning states.
"It's a very tough map," he said.
While at least some of Schumer's talk amounts to playing the expectations game, it is true that the Democrats don't go into this cycle necessarily predicting gains along the lines seen in 2006. That said, Senate Democrats do have more prime targets than their Republican colleagues, not only among the three mentioned above by Schumer -- Colorado, New Hamphsire and Minnesota -- but also blue states with supposedly moderate Republican sophomores (Maine and Oregon) as well as red states in which the GOP incumbent is or may be contemplating retirement (Mississippi, New Mexico and North Carolina). As a point of reference, Chris Cillizza over at The Fix lists seven Republican-held seats among his top-10 most likely to switch hands in 2008; The Cook Political Report (.pdf) lists six Republican-held seats as competitive or potentially competitive and five Democratic seats as such.
(Details on the Alabama Senate race below the fold)
One seat not mentioned by Cillizza or Cook -- or Schumer, for that matter -- is that of Jeff Sessions in Alabama, an extremely conservative Republican Senator who, among other recent actions, has once again taken to calling for the partial privatization of Social Security. More than a month ago Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, a centrist African-American who represents part of Birmingham as well as Selma, began looking at a potential challenge to Sessions. But according to Mary Orndorff of The Birmingham News, Davis has decided against it.
U.S. Rep. Artur Davis said he will not run for the Senate in 2008, but his ambition for statewide office remains, making a 2010 campaign the next possibility.Davis, a Birmingham Democrat starting his third term in Congress, had considered challenging U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions next year, especially after the midterm election success by Democrats nationally. But after several weeks of internal discussions and polling plus his new assignment to a key House committee, Davis opted out.
[...]
Davis said he is interested in running for governor when the office comes open in 2010, or for the Senate the same year if Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican, were to decide not to run for a fifth term. Shelby has said he intends to seek re-election.
There was no question that this would be a difficult race for Davis -- or any other Democrat interested. Sessions nearly outspent his Democratic challenger by a 2-to-1 margin en route to a 19-point reelection victory in 2002, 2006 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Lucy Baxley garnered just 42 percent of the vote, and John Kerry only received 37 percent of the vote in the state in 2004. Yet Kerry ran only two points stronger in Montana in November 2004, and we all know how the Senate election in that state turned out last fall. And even if the Democrats don't have much of a chance of taking down Sessions in 2008, forcing him to spend five or ten million dollars over the course of a reelection bid will mean that much less money can be spent defending the likes of Sununu or Coleman, let alone going after Democratic incumbents, so it would greatly behoove Schumer and Alabama Democrats to find a candidate -- be it Baxley or someone else -- to take up the task of going against Sessions this cycle.
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