Senate Republicans girding for losses
Posted June 12, 2008 7:30 PM
The Swamp
by Mark Silva
Sen. John Ensign of Nevada is captain of the Republican Party's campaigns for the Senate in November. The grim captain sees a best-case scenario: Three overboard.
David Cook of the Christian Science Monitor reports today on a Monitor-sponsored luncheon with reporters at which Ensign said the Senate's Republican are facing "the worst election climate since 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned as president.''
Karl Rove, the president's personal political trainer, likes to say that the GOP lost control of the Senate by few more than 3,000 votes in November, in Montana. But Ensign says it will take a miracle to regain control of the Senate in November. Ensign, a second-term senator, allowed that "there wasn't a long line of people who wanted this job this election cycle and for good reason. It is probably the toughest election cycle ... since 1974."
"The other problem has been the number of Republican seats that are up,'' he said. In this cycle, Republicans have to defend 23 seats, the Democrats only 12.
"It would be fairly miraculous for us to get back in the majority,'' Ensign said, as Cook reports for the Monitor. "We are trying to be realistic on holding ... as close to where we are today as possible.''
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