We've known for some time that things have been bad for the Senate GOP. For instance, in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll (.pdf), the American public would prefer electing a Democratic Congress to a Republican one by a whopping 49 percent to 35 percent margin. But the problems for the Republicans are not limited to voter sentiments (as important as they are). A new survey shows that the party itself is not doing what it needs to in order to put itself in a position to succeed in 2008.

Republican Challengers to Incumbent Democrats Are Fewer and Less Funded Than in Recent Past Elections

[...]

CFI's analysis of 2007 and previous odd year fundraising reports by Senate candidates (See Table 1) shows that on average Democrats have strongly outraised Republicans in all three candidate categories: incumbents, challengers and open seats. This is the first time such a trifecta has appeared in this young century's four elections. Particularly notable was the relatively weak showing of Republican challengers to Democratic incumbents. Thus far, only 13 Republicans have begun to challenge the 12 Democratic Senators up for re-election. In the 2002 election -- when the same set of Senate seats were at stake -- 24 Republicans were challenging 14 Democratic incumbents at this time in the election cycle. Furthermore, the 2008 Republican challengers have raised an average of only $223,000, far below their averages of $746,000, $411,000 and $528,000 at the end of the odd-years for the 2006, 2004 and 2002 elections. Meanwhile Democratic incumbents have raised an average of $4,640,000. 1

On the other side, 35 Democrats have embarked so far on challenges to 17 Republican incumbents, significantly more challengers than in any of the previous three Senate elections. They have raised an average of $867,000 in 2007, also significantly more than before, even though the very proliferation of candidacies tends to bring down average receipts. While Republican incumbents on average are as well fortified as they were in 2006 (over $3.4 million in net receipts), some of the better-funded and more competitive Democratic challengers -- as well as competitive Democratic open seat candidates in Colorado and New Mexico -- should gain from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee's cash advantage over its Republican counterpart, which stood at $ 17.2 million as of January 31, 2008.

We already know that the National Republican Senatorial Committee trails the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee by more than $16 million in net cash-on-hand, and that, what's more, the Republicans must defend twice as many seats as the Democrats and that among those seats there are many, many more vulnerable Republican seats than Democratic ones. But this new report underscores even more profoundly how bad of a position the Senate GOP is in right now.

In short, the Republicans have less candidates, less well funded candidates, and less well funded incumbents than they traditionally have relative to the Democrats, while in turn the Democrats look stronger in each of those areas than they normally do. Overall trends, including fundraising by the party committees, are certainly important, but when one party just isn't fielding viable candidates while the other party is, the potential for a blowout goes way up.