We learned, over the course of the year, that five incumbent Dem senators were not running for re-election. It appeared, instantly, that these were prime pick-up opportunities for the GOP.<\/p>\n
But the party fielded excellent candidates and ran extremely competitive campaigns. Of the five, as recently as this morning, it seemed like Dems had a realistic shot of winning at least three. Now, we’ll be lucky to get one.<\/p>\n
* Georgia — The toughest of the five for Dems. Isakson won easily.<\/p>\n
* South Carolina — Tenenbaum put up a great fight in a GOP stronghold and came up short.<\/p>\n
* North Carolina — Bowles led for the better part of the year, right up until Burr shifted into Jesse Helms, went negative, and pulled ahead. With 81% of the precincts reporting, Bowles is down 53-46.<\/p>\n
* Louisiana — An inexplicable system allowed a strong GOP Rep. to face four Dems at the same time, which naturally divided the party’s support. Dems had to hope that Vitter failed to reach 50%, so we could force him into a run-off. With 97% of the precincts reporting, Vitter has 52%.<\/p>\n
* Florida — Castor and Martinez have been trading leads as the vote totals came in, and anything can still happen in the race.<\/p>\n
Making matters worse, a surprise vulnerable southern GOP incumbent, Jim Bunning in Kentucky, became a possible pickup, only to see our man come up short. Barely.<\/p>\n
If Graham, Breaux, and Hollings hadn’t retired, we’d be looking at a far different dynamic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We learned, over the course of the year, that five incumbent Dem senators were not running for re-election. It appeared, instantly, that these were prime pick-up opportunities for the GOP. But the party fielded excellent candidates and ran extremely competitive campaigns. Of the five, as recently as this morning, it seemed like Dems had a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}