Always Look On The Bright Side of Life

Several new polls out of Alaska show all three Senate candidates within a five-point spread. A "very smart person in a position to know" says internal Pennsylvania polls really are tightening. Illinois shows good movement toward the Democrat. Connecticut, Washington and California look nearly out of play for Republicans. Kentucky remains competitive. Colorado's a nail-biter.

I'm looking at a Senate map and seeing an interesting optimistic scenario unfold. At the beginning of this cycle, it looked like the big contests would be places like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, maybe Indiana, and then Florida after Crist's switch. But my optimistic scenario now shows us losing all but one of these (Pennsylvania), and in most cases, it's not a close case. But we could still end up with 57 Senators. Forty hold-over Democrats. Ten races I consider fairly likely to go our way (the West Coast, Hawaii, and the Northeast minus Pennsylvania and New Hampshire). That's fifty. Then add three contests that are basically dead heats right now, Nevada, Illinois, and Colorado. We could lose all of them, but we could just as easily win them all, or perhaps more easily. That's 53. It's tightening in Pennsylvania, and really, Toomey just shouldn't be able to win that state, now or ever. 54. In both Kentucky and Alaska, we have candidates positioned really, really close in races with a fair amount of volatility, in one case matched against the world's most boring fringe nutter and in another case matched against two conservatives, one of whom is sustaining herself with the votes of Democrats. That's a potential 56 Senators. The 57th is the race I am in a sense least happy to talk about, since it's Wisconsin. The numbers there look really, really bad, but it's Russ Feingold, and he's practically essence of Wisconsin politically speaking, and I just have trouble believing that he's really going to lose.

Things could go badly, and we could wind up with 50 Democrats, of whom one Lieberman will defect and give the Republicans the majority. But they could also go well, and we could wind up with 55-57 seats, without even winning any of the originally most promising pick-up opportunities. And if that happens, we just might have a more functional governing majority in the Senate next term than we had this term. Here's hoping.