Thursday, October 30, 2008

No Democratic Supermajority in Senate?

I don't follow individual congressional races as closely as I should (and I expect to work on that in the coming years), but I have discussed the implications of a filibuster-proof Senate majority in 2009 (which aren't good, as a President Obama would be able to ram a radical agenda right down the throat of a center-right nation).

It turns out that Dems may come up short, as
Michael Barone points out:

If, as seems likely but not quite certain, Barack Obama is elected next Tuesday, a key question for public policymaking will be how many Democrats are elected to the Senate. Currently, there are 51 Democrats there, including Joe Lieberman, but Democrats are seriously contesting 11 Republican-held seats, and there is a by-no-means-trivial chance that they could win each one...
Barone offers a state-by-state analysis after this, although the bottom line is that 5 of 11 of the seats are near-certain Democratic wins. Of the remaining 6 seats, 5 are toss-up races in which no candidate has been able to pull out a lead in public opinion - Oregon, North Carolina, Georgia, Minnesota, and Kentucky. Of these, Elisabeth Dole in North Carolina is barely hanging on, and RCP's current data looks a litte more grim for the GOP than Barone lets on.

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