SMRs and AMRs

Thursday, December 11, 2008

GOP Has a More Level Playing Field in 2010 Senate Races “Filibuster-Proof?”

By Bob Benenson, CQ Staff

There sure doesn’t seem to be any rest for weary Senate Republican strategists, who are trying to plot a comeback in 2010 for their party after two consecutive miserable election cycles.

They can take some consolation in the fact that the GOP will not have the kind of steeply slanted playing field it had to deal with this year. In the flip side of the party’s successes in its better times of 2002, the Republicans ended up defending 23 seats to the Democrats’ 12. That would have made it hard for them to hold their ground, even if the overall political atmosphere had not been so toxic.

The slate of regularly scheduled 2010 races gives the Republicans another defensive chore, though it was not nearly as big: 19 Republican-held seats are scheduled to be up that year to 15 Democratic-held seats. Special elections will narrow the margin further, to 19-17, because of picks President-elect Barack Obama has made for his White House team from among his former Democratic Senate colleagues.

But GOP officials already got their first jolt for the next Senate campaign cycle on Tuesday morning. First-term Florida Republican Sen. Mel Martinez , seen as likely to be one of the Democrats’ top targets for the elections two years hence, announced that he would not seek re-election. That leaves his party with the early prospect of a competitive and predictably expensive race to defend an open seat in nation’s fourth most-populous state.

The news came less than a month after the Nov. 4 elections, in which Democrats greatly expanded their Senate majority with a punishing gain of at least seven Republican seats, with two other Democratic takeover bids still undecided at the time of Martinez’ announcement. That was on top of the six-seat gain in 2006 that enabled the Democrats to leap-frog into the narrow majority they held for the past two years.

(More here.)

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