Anyone with a map handy can see how fragile the Democrats’ eight-seat Senate majority actually is. (In two months, when Newark Mayor Cory Booker most likely becomes a Democratic senator from New Jersey, it’ll be a 10-vote margin.
For now it’s eight.) In the 2008 Democratic rout, the party managed to scare off challengers in West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, and Arkansas, to defeat a scandalized incumbent in Alaska, and to upset Republican incumbents in Oregon, Minnesota, and North Carolina.
The map will never look like that again.
In West Virginia, South Dakota, and Montana, which haven’t voted for a Democratic president since 1996, 1964, and 1964, long-time Democratic incumbents are retiring.
In the first two, Republicans have already recruited Rep. Shelley Moore Capito and former Gov. Mike Rounds, candidates with moderate profiles and avert-your-eyes poll leads. Democrats haven’t recruited anyone, though according to Bennet they’re still doing so “aggressively.”
In Montana, Democrats expected to run former Gov. Brian Schweitzer, until he surprised everyone and said “no.” That decision inspired a Nate Silver post about how “Senate control in 2014 increasingly looks like a tossup,” which in turn inspired a wave of that most renewable resource: Democratic panic.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...hances_in_2014.html?google_editors_picks=true
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