Is Reid Better Off Than He Was a Week Ago?

By Stuart Rothenberg

The post-Nevada primary chorus was loud and clear last week after former state Assemblywoman Sharron Angle won the GOP Senate primary and the right to face Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) in November.

Everyone seems to think that Reid is measurably better off now than he was before the primary and that he now has a 50-50 chance of winning another term. Everyone but me.

Unfortunately for me, it looks as if my opinion of Reid has changed because my newsletter now has the race rated as Tossup/Tilt Republican instead of Lean Takeover, which it was previously.

But until this week, we used a Tossup/Tilt category only in rating House races, not Senate contests. In choosing to make the Rothenberg Political Report House and Senate rating categories identical, we adopted the House categories for Senate races as well, which means introducing Tossups that tilt to each party as well.

Had we had a Tossup/Tilt Republican category available to us six months ago, we probably would have had Reid in that category rather than putting him in Lean Takeover. But we didn’t have that option, and we didn’t think he had anything close to an even chance of being re-elected, so we had to move him to Lean Takeover. So that’s where he landed.

In putting Reid into the new Tossup/Tilt Republican category, we are reiterating our view that the Senate Majority Leader is in a very competitive contest and that he is more likely than not to lose his bid for a fifth term.

But Reid obviously has the resources — and now a potentially vulnerable target in Angle — to change the likely outcome of the race, so it bears watching.

Still, I don’t believe that last week’s primary fundamentally changes the Nevada Senate race. I don’t believe that the race is a pure Tossup.

It was clear even before the Senate primary rolled around that Silver State Republicans wouldn’t be nominating a tested, charismatic, politically safe candidate against Reid.

None of the three “top” Republicans — Angle, former state Republican Party Chairwoman Sue Lowden and two-time unsuccessful candidate Danny Tarkanian — had the kind of profile, experience and obvious savvy to compete against Reid in a neutral environment.

Lowden, who was once thought to be the GOP’s “best” candidate, turned out to be less than compelling. And, as national Republican strategists point out quite fairly, if she couldn’t beat Angle for the nomination, how was she going to beat Reid?

If Angle wins, she wouldn’t be the first flawed hopeful to make it to the Senate, even from Nevada. In 1982, Chic Hecht (R) defeated Sen. Howard Cannon (D), even though the Almanac of American Politics described Hecht as “short, speaks with a squeaky voice and a lisp, and is anything but a brilliant phrasemaker.”

Given all of these considerations, Angle’s primary victory doesn’t dramatically alter Reid’s prospects for the fall.

Reid continues to run poorly in polling, and as long as the general election is about him, President Barack Obama and jobs, the Senate Majority Leader will be in deep trouble.

Polling for the past year has generally shown Angle and Lowden running about equally well against Reid. In a June 1-3 Mason-Dixon poll for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Angle (and Tarkanian) actually led Reid while Lowden trailed.

Two surveys conducted right before the Nevada primary showed Reid ahead of Angle: a May 31-June 2 Research 2000 poll for the liberal website Daily Kos and a May 24-26 Mason-Dixon poll for the Review-Journal. Assuming that those surveys are accurate, they may well have reflected the attacks of each of the candidates against the others — and the short-term fallout that occurred from them.

But as readers of this column know, it’s Reid’s numbers that matter most, not Angle’s. And Reid’s numbers still look terrible to any dispassionate observer.

Reid has been drawing 38 percent to 43 percent on the ballot test against Angle for months, and he has been in that range in ballot tests against almost any of his possible GOP opponents.

In the June Review-Journal Senate poll, Reid’s name identification was 35 percent favorable/52 percent unfavorable — about where it has been for months, and roughly where then-New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D) was six months before he was defeated for re-election.

The chances of Reid improving his own standing are small. He’s simply been around too long to do that, especially given his recent position as Senate Majority Leader and his role in advancing the president’s agenda in a midterm election year.

That means Reid’s only alternative is to drive up Angle’s negatives, ultimately making her unacceptable and sneaking to victory as the lesser of two evils (or three, given the presence of a tea party candidate on the ballot).

That’s definitely possible (North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms did that in his comeback victory over Democratic challenger Jim Hunt in 1984, though Helms started making his move on TV and in the polls in 1983 and had pulled ahead by the fall of 1984). But there are far more examples of that strategy failing.

It will be difficult for Reid to make the election about Angle, whose demeanor doesn’t seem scary to voters, than about Obama, the unpopular Congress, the economy and the Democratic agenda. And that’s why Harry Reid is still more likely than not to lose.

This column first appeared in Roll Call and on CQPolitics.com on June 15, 2010. 2010 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved.

New 2010 Senate Ratings

Realistically, Republicans are still short of the 10-seat gain they would need to flip the Senate in November. For now, we see no reason to revise our earlier outlook. The GOP is most likely to net 5 to7 Senate seats, with an 8-seat gain certainly possible. Additional Democratic losses would depend on whether Washington, Wisconsin and California become more competitive. This means Democrats would retain control of the Senate, but at a dramatically reduced level.

NOTE: We have revised our categories to give readers a better idea where races stand.

Here are our latest Senate ratings.
#- Moved benefiting Democrats
*- Moved benefiting Republicans
Takeovers in Italics

Pure Toss-Up (1 R, 2 )
Bennet (D-CO)
OH Open (Voinovich, R)
PA Open (Specter, D)

Toss-Up/Tilt Republican (3 R, 3 D)
Reid (D-NV)
FL Open (Martinez, R)
IL Open (Burris, D)
IN Open (Bayh, D)
KY Open (Bunning, R)
MO Open (Bond, R)

Toss-Up/Tilt Democrat
--- none ---

Lean Republican (2 R, 2 D)
Burr (R-NC)
Lincoln (D-AR)
DE Open (Kaufman, D)
NH Open (Gregg, R)

Lean Democrat (0 R, 2 D)
Boxer (D-CA)
Murray (D-WA)

Republican Favored (1 R, 0 D)
Vitter (R-LA)

Democrat Favored (0 R, 2 D)
Feingold (D-WI)
CT Open (Dodd, D)

Safe Republican (11 R, 1 D)
Coburn (R-OK)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Isakson (R-GA)
McCain (R-AZ)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
KS Open (Brownback, R)
ND Open (Dorgan, D)
UT Open (Bennett, R)

Safe Democrat (0 R, 6 D)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Inouye (D-HI)
Leahy (D-VT)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Schumer (D-NY)
Wyden (D-OR)

New Print Edition: Senate Overview

Subscribers already have the April 11, 2010 print edition of the Rothenberg Political Report, but here is the introduction to this issue:

Senate Overview – The Lay of the Land

Democrats and Republicans are each defending 18 seats going into the fall elections, but the national landscape has tilted the battlefield dramatically to the Republicans’ advantage. If the focus in November is on unemployment and the failure of the Obama Administration to handle big issues (e.g., the economy, the Gulf oil leak and foreign policy problems), Democrats will find their Senate seats falling like dominoes. If they can turn these races into local contests and choices between the lesser of two evils, they can minimize their losses.

Republican prospects in two or three states seem to be improving enough so that party strategists can argue that at least ten Democratic seats are in play. Realistically, however, Republicans are still short of the 10-seat gain they would need to flip the Senate in November. For now, we see no reason to revise our earlier outlook. The GOP is most likely to net 5 to7 Senate seats, with an 8-seat gain certainly possible. Additional Democratic losses would depend on whether Washington, Wisconsin and California become more competitive. This means Democrats would retain control of the Senate, but at a dramatically reduced level.


Subscribers get state-by-state analysis and recent polling for each race.

The print edition of the Report comes out every two weeks. Subscribers get in-depth analysis of the most competitive races in the country, as well as updated House and Senate ratings, and coverage of the gubernatorial races nationwide. To subscribe, simply click on the Google checkout button on the website or send a check.

There Are Democrats Who May Survive a Wave

By Stuart Rothenberg

Check my House race ratings, and you’ll find about two dozen Democratic seats at great risk. But the truth of the matter is that early ratings are based more heavily than I’d like on district fundamentals than on actual developments in races.

Midterms usually cost the president’s party House seats, so Democrats in the most Republican and conservative districts are particularly vulnerable this cycle. But challenger quality and incumbent records differ from district to district, and those factors certainly affect vulnerability.

Later in the cycle, voters will start paying serious attention to campaigns, and polls will measure voter sentiment about the candidates and about how and why voters plan to cast their votes.

But even now, campaign developments can matter, and some Democratic House incumbents who deserved to be listed among the most vulnerable Democrats of the cycle are looking a little less vulnerable now than they were even a few months ago.

For months now, my colleague Nathan Gonzales has been repeating the same mantra: One or two of the most vulnerable House Democrats are likely to survive anything but the biggest of waves — we just don’t know who they are.

Perhaps it’s time to take a first stab at figuring out who they might be.

While many Democrats running in conservative districts in 2006 and 2008 ran as “independent” candidates, only to later support their party on controversial issues (Reps. Betsy Markey of Colorado and Suzanne Kosmas of Florida are obvious examples), Idaho Rep. Walt Minnick actually has gone out of his way to reject Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (Calif.) agenda on the stimulus, health care reform and cap-and-trade legislation.

Still, it isn’t clear that even his voting record — or his endorsement by the Tea Party Express — will entirely mollify conservative (and reliably Republican) voters in his district, which gave Barack Obama 36 percent of the vote in 2008 and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) only 30 percent four years earlier.

Minnick won the district in 2008 only because the sitting Republican incumbent, Bill Sali, was so personally unpopular that voters apparently were willing to vote for any alternative — even a Democrat.

But Minnick’s re-election prospects have brightened with the nomination of state Rep. Raul Labrador, who defeated Iraq vet Vaughn Ward in the recent GOP primary.

Labrador showed $174,000 raised in his pre-primary report, so while he defeated a much better-funded candidate in the primary and can likely count on support in the general election from the National Republican Congressional Committee in a cheap media market, his weak fundraising numbers raise questions about the quality of his candidacy.

The last Democrat to represent Idaho’s 1st in Congress was Larry LaRocco, who won in an upset in 1990. While it is true that LaRocco was defeated when he ran for a third term in 1994, it’s also true that he won re-election to a second term in 1992. That should give Democrats reason to hope that Minnick can hold on in November.

Alabama Rep. Bobby Bright is another Democrat who would seem to have a decent chance of surviving a good national year for Republicans.

Bright, who spent a decade as mayor of the state capital of Montgomery, won an open seat in a squeaker in 2008, in part because the losing candidate in a tight GOP primary endorsed him.

Like Minnick’s Idaho district, Bright’s 2nd district went heavily for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the last presidential race. Obama received 37 percent in the district in 2008, slightly better than Kerry’s 33 percent in 2004.

In Congress, Bright has established his political independence by voting against the stimulus bill, the health care reform bill and cap-and-trade legislation, though critics note that he held his vote back on the climate change bill until it was clear that the Democratic leadership had the votes that it needed without Bright’s.

Democrats argue that Bright is defined in voters’ minds more as the nonpartisan mayor that he was than as a Member of Congress.

Bright’s Republican opponent likely will be Montgomery City Councilwoman Martha Roby. But Roby was barely forced into a July 13 runoff against self-described tea party activist/businessman Rick Barber, so she’ll have to spend another month fighting for her party’s nomination.

Roby’s May 12 pre-primary FEC report showed she raised just under $440,000, a little less than half of what Bright did.

Even though an early Bright poll showed him well-liked and running far ahead of Roby, Democratic insiders will acknowledge privately that the outcome will be close. The district and national mood remain problems for Bright.

But it’s also true that Bright has steered the right course to have a chance at re-election, and that’s really all that his admirers can expect.


This column first appeared in Roll Call and CQPolitics.com on June 10, 2010. 2010 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.