GOP warns of one-party power

“But the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had enormous resources to put into races, including this one, very early,” he adds. “They went on the attack and really shaped the perceptions of Dole in the state. That’s a lot easier to do if the senator doesn’t have a strong presence.”

By contrast, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, once viewed as one of the most vulnerable Republican senators this cycle, appears to have sheltered her campaign from national storms by her relatively independent voting record and closely maintained relations with constituents.

Until recently, political handicappers put Democrats just out of range of 60 seats. But the deepening mortgage and credit crisis is changing that calculus.
If current trends hold, Democrats are on track to win Senate seats in Virginia, Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. Four other races – in North Carolina, Oregon, Mississippi, and Minnesota – are in statistical dead heats. And, in recent weeks, Democrats have mounted strong challenges in GOP strongholds in Kentucky and Georgia.

“Democrats are in range of winning seven to nine seats,” says Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the Cook Political Report in Washington.

“From the beginning, Democrats had a lot of cookie-cutter messages, such as the ‘Bush-Dole’ economy, but the message got a lot more powerful when the markets started to go south,” she adds.

In a bid to roll back that wave, Republicans are launching new ads on the dangers of unified government in Washington. In North Carolina, a 30-second ad warns that “These liberals want complete control of government in a time of crisis.... If she wins, they get a blank check.”
While polls in recent campaign cycles signaled that the public did value divided government, it’s not clear that will be a convincing argument in the current political climate.

“There’s probably some sentiment that we want our government checked, but we’ve had a long period of divided government since the 1960s,” says Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. “More urgent is the idea of change and responding to the economic crisis, which doesn’t lend itself to divided government. That leads to gridlock in the minds of the public.”

“I don’t hear Americans saying, make sure you have balanced government, although they might believe that,” says Sen. Charles Schumer (D) of New York, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “They say, get something done to help me and stop the partisan gridlock.”

Previous

1 | 2