Nationalizing the Race

At the time, a lot of people thought that Elizabeth Warren's fairly prime-time speaking role at the Democratic National Convention may have been designed to nationalize her race, to reduce the number of Massachusetts voters supporting both Barack Obama and Scott Brown. It appears to have worked, with essentially every post-convention poll has shown Warren with a non-trivial lead, despite the fact that Brown's approval and favorability numbers haven't really deteriorated and Warren's favorables haven't really improved. But a pretty solid majority of Massachusetts voters want Democrats to control the Senate going forward, so they're voting for Warren. Likewise, a recent PublicPolicyPolling survey of Connecticut shows the not-very-popular Chris Murphy (D) leading the not-very-popular Linda McMahon (R), basically because as with their northern neighbors, Connecticut voters want a Democratic Senate.

As someone who remembers being gleeful when Lincoln Chafee, the last Republican one could make a plausible case for calling liberal rather than just moderate, lost his 2006 re-election campaign to Sheldon Whitehouse, and who then also voted for Chafee for Governor of Rhode Island four years later, I find this trend very encouraging. Senate and Congressional elections are conducted locally, but they concern national governance, so voters ought to behave less idiosyncratically in them than in, say, gubernatorial races. At the end of the day, the single most important fact about a candidate to the national legislature is which party they'll caucus with, and which leadership slate they'll support. So it's nice to see these blue-state Democrats becoming more willing to vote blind partisanship, whether that means resisting the charms of an oft-moderate Republican incumbent in Massachusetts or holding their nose to vote for a somewhat scandal-tarred Democrat in Connecticut.

Of course, the flip side is that we've got several important Senate contests in Republican-leaning states like North Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and--particularly after the recent deadline for Todd Akin to depart--Missouri. There's been less polling in these red-state races than in the blue-state ones of late, I think, and there's a much less solid sense of where they stand. If the race is getting nationalized all around, one might expect to see Republicans moving into the lead. Of course, if what's really going on is just a generalized Republican collapse, that might not be the case. It'll be interesting to see, as it looks to me like these races are the ones that might let Democrats expand on their current Senate majority, rather than merely holding their position.