Blue State Special: Democrats Ready for Election Day

[ProSense]

Blue State Special: Democrats Ready for Election Day

By Bob Benenson Mon Aug 14, 9:59 AM ET

CQ Weekly has released another special report on the 2006 elections, written entirely by the staff of CQPolitics.com. The cover story, presented below, details the optimism of Democrats, though it is difficult to gauge just how victorious they will be on Election Day.

Snip...

As a result, Republicans find themselves particularly vulnerable in the Midwest and Northeast, and they even have cause for worry in their geographic strongholds of the South and West. The only thing the GOP appears to have going for it right now is the fact that most voters have yet to tune in to the details of their upcoming electoral choices. So if the Republicans can just keep their heads down, they might avert a fatal storm.

Snip...

Consider just a few of the unanticipated events that have made headlines in the past month. There was the raid on Israel by Hezbollah forces, precipitating a Middle East crisis. There was the testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee by top generals, who previously had been generally optimistic, warning that an outright sectarian civil war is getting closer in Iraq. There was the Senate’s rejection of the get-out-for-the-summer legislative deal promoted by the GOP leadership, which married an increase of the minimum wage — popular with Democrats and GOP moderates — to a cut in the estate tax that’s popular with Republicans and some Democratic moderates.

Then, last week, Republican Bob Ney gave in to pressure from GOP leaders and abandoned his bid for a seventh term in what had been a safe Ohio House seat for him — until he became a focus of the federal influence-peddling investigation spawned by lobbyist Jack Abramoff. And British authorities announced that they had broken up an advanced plot to blow up several passenger airliners on their way to the United States.

Snip...

In their view, the Republican majority is culpable for policy failures across a broad spectrum of issues, including lack of oversight of the Bush administration’s handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its foreign policy in general; a long-stalled investigation into intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq conflict; a tepid response to revelations that Bush has invoked presumed presidential powers to greatly expand domestic surveillance in the name of fighting terrorism; the failed effort to tie a minimum wage increase to yet another “tax break for the rich”; a lack of relief for the short-term pain of rising energy prices; and failing to override the first veto of the Bush presidency, by which he stopped a bill that would have loosened restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

Snip...

This is, to be sure, a rather modest record when compared with the standards the Republican majority set for itself. With Bush declaring that he’d won a mandate along with his re-election two years ago, the Republican leadership signaled their willingness to move on his top domestic priorities at the time: reconfiguring the Social Security program to include personal savings accounts and extending indefinitely the tax cuts he won in his first term. Both have failed emphatically.

more (a lot)....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/cq/20060814/pl_cq_politics/bluestatespecialdemocratsreadyforelectionday_1

[AX10]

1. If we win back just the House and have a 50/50 Senate,

Bush is done for. His entire agenda will be done with.

[ProSense]

2. Interesting stuff:

Just as worrisome for Republicans, they hardly have a lock on the 220 races now tilted in their favor. In 20 of them, the Republican has only a slight edge because of incumbency, fundraising advantages or political demographics. And so the Democrats could win any or all of them if their candidates’ strengths gain a bit of traction — or if the voters’ mood shifts much more against the GOP, or against incumbents in general.

Only 10 seats now held by Democrats, by contrast, are that closely competitive.

Beyond these races that are tossups or “leaning” to one party or the other is a third category: contests in which the front-running candidate has serious advantages that make election likely, but where other factors make an upset plausible. And here is where the partisan imbalance is greatest of all: There are 25 seats where Republicans are favored — pretty solid, but not quite safe — but only eight seats where Democrats are similarly vulnerable to an upset.

[AX10]

3. kick