The senate map on electoral-vote.com is deep beautiful blue

[mahina]

http://electoral-vote.com/

[neverforget]

1. Oregon barely Democratic. Lol! Merkley is going to win

re-election easily.

[sweetloukillbot]

2. And isn't Baucus retiring? Has a Dem candidate emerged in Montana? n/t

[neverforget]

5. Baucus is going to be Ambassador to China which means that the Democratic Governor

Steve Bullock is going to appoint someone to fill his seat, most likely Lt Gov John Walsh.

[doc03]

3. I sure hope they are right. Living just across the boarder from

West Virginia I find it very hard to believe WV is strongly Democratic. The people in the northern panhandle are teabagger nut jobs.

[Lasher]

7. Both of West Virginia's US Senators are Democrats.

Two out of our three House Representatives are Republicans. Our Governor is a Democrat. Both houses of our Legislature are controlled by Democratic majorities.

One of Ohio's US Senators is a Democrat. The other is a Republican. Four of Ohio's sixteen House reps are Democrats. The rest are all Republicans. Your Governor is a Republican. Both houses of your legislature are dominated by Republicans.



http://ballotpedia.org/Ohio_State_Legislature

I wish West Virginia didn't have so many teabagger nut jobs. I wish the same for Ohio.

[doc03]

9. Yes but in Presidential elections WV has become solid Republican

and Manchin is a DINO. Like I said I hope they are right but I don't see it. Oh the SE part of Ohio sure has its share of teabagger nutjobs, most of it is race in my opinion.

[BlueStreak]

4. That site is BS. They don't have any data at all.

All their "projections" are simply the results from previous elections, and they haven't even bothered to take out the candidates who are retiring.

[Lasher]

10. Sabato's Crystal Ball is a better source at this time.

We'll be lucky if we retain control of the Senate.

Sabato's Crystal Ball US Senate Projection

[BlueStreak]

11. Probably as good as any, but I don't get his rating for KY

Last edited Thu Feb 6, 2014, 01:58 AM - Edit history (1)

That race looks like a dead heat right now and he has it solid GOP.

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/ballot-2014/2014/02/03/grimes-and-mcconnell-locked-in-tie-in-kentucky-senate-race

If we can take KY, we will hold the Senate. And taking down the McConnell would send shock waves through the GOP.

[Lasher]

14. That seems about right to me.

But I don't think we can say for certain that we'll hold the Senate even if we do win in Kentucky. This will be a horse race, with the outcome depending on which way the political wind happens to be blowing on election day.

[BlueStreak]

15. To win KY, the winds have to be blowing our way

I know the senate races are somewhat independent, but Tip O'Neill's old saying "All politics is local" just isn't true anymore. I'm saying that if we win KY, that means the national climate is going our way and that will carry enough other seats to hold the 50 we need.

And the converse is that without the pick-up of KY, we probably don't hold 50 seats. That isn't the end of the world. It just means that Obama doesn't control any part of the agenda his last 2 years -- but he doesn't really have much control now. And in 2016, the Senate numbers are much better for us.

[Lasher]

19. Two years with a GOP Senate might be worse than you think.

According to conventional wisdom, we would have the filibuster to stop the most harmful legislation. But lately Democrats have moderately curtailed it, and for good reason. I believe a Republican Senate would claim this as a precedent to further limit it or even totally eliminate it in January next year.

You might think that we could count on Obama to veto bad legislation. But he is prone to compromise. And even worse, he is much further to the right on economic issues than I ever thought I'd see in a Democratic President. I've been hoping that Senate Democrats might head off some of his bad ideas such as chained CPI and the TPP. But if we lose the majority there, the next two years might be a bigger disaster than you think.

[BlueStreak]

20. I agree. In addition.

Obama would get zero of his appointments confirmed.

The GOP would head all the committees, so they would control the legislative agenda in both houses. The way this works is that they package all the evil stuff they want into bills they figure Obama couldn't politically afford to veto. A President with some stones would call them out on this and make it a major deal. Reagan always did. But Obama doesn't have the backbone for that.

So I agree that there would be a lot of harmful stuff passing into law. But at least no big items, other than things that Obama was already inclined to sell out on such as Wall Street favors and the TPP. Not too much happens legislatively in the year of a presidential election, so it would be a matter of stalling until 2016.

I don't wish for GOP control of the Senate. I agree it would make today's bad situation worse. However, the silver lining is that whenever the GOP has even the slightest opening, they overreach -- ALWAYS. And that is something that would help us sweep in 2016. It is entirely plausible that we will control the WH, Senate, AND House in January 2017. If Hillary is that President, what will she do with this historic opportunity? I don't expect her to answer that question right now, but she had better come in with a solid vision of change. There clearly are issues that need major change:

1) Take the next step on health care
2) Deal with freeloading corporations, offshoring, tax havens etc
3) Climate change, new energy, carbon footprint
4) and many more

[joshcryer]

13. Yeah, he's just basing it on the 2008 election results.

Which is sort of bad. He will add polls as they come around which should be in a few more months. But as it stands now there is no data.

He has correctly called every race since the site went up, though, so don't discount the site, in general. It's just too early and there's no real data currently.

[Historic NY]

6. Harkin is out in Iowa...

Levin in Michigan, Rockefeller in WV. Johnson in SD.

[hrmjustin]

8. The map is a feel good map for us. Not realistic.

[WhiteTara]

12. AR strong blue? Hardly

If Pryor makes it, it will be a miracle and I don't think anyone is challenging the boozeman. I'm not even sure he is running this time. Our state has been turned on its head is running red.

[Warren DeMontague]

16. Yeah, I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over Oregon.

If the GOP could get their act together and nominate someone who isn't some crazy flat-Earth creationist godbagger who wants to put women in prison for using birth control, they might stand half of half of half of a chance.

http://www.bendsource.com/TheWanderingEye/archives/2010/03/13/preparing-the-way-for-theocracy


But they won't.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. Cook Political Report has 1 current D seat to be likely R, 2 leaning R

2 current D seats and 1 current R seat as a tossup. No current R seats are leaning or likely to go Democratic.

http://cookpolitical.com/senate/charts/race-ratings

If both parties got their current 'leans' and 'likelys', and held on to their tossups, that would be 50 Dems, 2 independents, and 48 Republicans. If the Republicans took all 3 of the tossups, it'd be 48 Dems, 2 ind, and 50 Republicans. 1 Indepedent is Bernie Sanders, so he'll stick with the Dems; but Angus King of Maine is more complicated:

Pelosi has been one of the biggest defenders of programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Surprising virtually no one, Sen.-elect Angus King, I-Maine, said Wednesday that he plans to caucus with Senate Democrats, because "affiliating with the majority makes the most sense."

King won a decisive election last week to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe and throughout his yearlong campaign refused to say with which party he would caucus once he arrived in Washington.

Despite his decision, King didn't rule out joining with Republicans in two years if they retake the majority and said he had several constructive conversations with GOP senators.

"By associating myself with one side, I am not in automatic opposition to the other," King told reporters.

http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019683952_congress15.html

Which puts control of the Senate on a knife-edge.

[davidpdx]

18. Way off

Minnesota and Oregon, you got to be kidding me. That's Franken and Merkley. Both are going to retain their seats.