A Bluffers’ Guide To the Midterms : The New Yorker

The Big Picture: Thirty-six Senate seats will be contested on Tuesday, November 4th. Thirty-three of them are on the normal six-year reëlection cycle, and there are special elections in Hawaii, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. Almost all of the political professionals—the strategists, campaign officials, pollsters, and pundits who feed handsomely off all the cash that gets burned in political campaigns—believe that the basic story line has already been set. This is going to be a bad year for Democrats. The only question is: how bad?

Midterms usually turn out unfavorably for the incumbent party, and this year there are two time-specific factors favoring the Republican challengers: a friendly political map and an unpopular President with an approval rating in the low forties. As recently as last fall, when the G.O.P. was languishing in the polls following the government shutdown, some Democrats dared to dream that they could pick up the seventeen seats they need to take control of the House of Representatives. But the troubled rollout of Obamacare dashed these hopes, and Democrats are now fighting a rearguard action to hold on to the Senate, where they currently have a majority of fifty-five votes to forty-five. To take control, the Republicans need a net gain of just six seats.

Greatly aiding the G.O.P.’s prospects is the fact that this is 2014. This means that almost all of the Senate candidates seeking reëlection were voted in in 2008, when there was a big swing to the Democrats; a number of their candidates were victorious in states that traditionally vote Republican. Consequently, there are now seven Democratic seats being contested in states that went for Mitt Romney in 2012: Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia. The only Republican senator facing reëlection in a state that voted for President Obama over Romney is Susan Collins, of Maine, and her popularity is such that she is almost certain to win.

This imbalance augurs poorly for Democrats. The Party is facing serious challenges in Iowa and Michigan, where Tom Harkin and Carl Levin, two stalwarts, are retiring, and in Colorado, where Senator Mark Udall is up for reëlection. The Democrats’ best hopes of picking up one or two Republican seats appear to be in Georgia, where Nunn, the daughter of Sam Nunn, the longtime Peach State senator, is their candidate, and in Kentucky, where McConnell is up for reëlection and facing a strong challenge.

The Individual Races: When you put all of these races together, you get the dozen battleground states for 2014: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia. Election day is still a long way off, and most voters aren’t paying much attention. But this hasn’t stopped the political admen from bombarding them with television and radio spots or the pollsters from doing their surveys. Here, then, is how the individual races look:

Georgia: The race to replace Republican Saxby Chambliss, who announced his resignation from the Senate last year, is a doozy. On the Republican side, at least four candidates still to have a chance in a crowded primary, set for May 20th: the conservative businessman David Perdue; Paul Broun, a congressman who has described evolution and the Big Bang theory as “lies straight from the pit of hell”; Jack Kingston, a somewhat more moderate congressman; and Karen Handel, a former senior state official. Michelle Nunn, the Democratic candidate, has run a number of voluntary organizations, including Points of Light, which has ties to the Bush family. This is her first political campaign, and she’s already been subjected to negative ads from Republican groups. The latest polls show her tightly matched against the G.O.P. candidates.

via A Bluffers’ Guide To the Midterms : The New Yorker.