How the Recent Retirements Will Shake Things Up

Summary: As Dorgan, Dodd, and Ritter announce their plans to retire, the Democratic Party may stand to lose more races up and down the ticket


Last night it was reported that Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) will retire this year, leaving an open seat in the Roughrider State.

This was unquestionably bad news for Democrats. Dorgan was able to hold on to the seat solely based on the incumbency effect - the national Democratic Party is not very popular in North Dakota. At least it won’t be in 2010.

Two candidates have emerged to possibly run as Democrats for Dorgan’s seat: at-large Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) and MSNBC talk show host Ed Shultz. Shultz is way too liberal to be elected in North Dakota, and we’ve mentioned before how TV personalities would have a lot of difficulty running for office.

But for Democrats, the best case scenario would be a Shultz campaign and Pomeroy keeping his House seat, because that would likely turn red if he ran for Senate - and there’s no guarantee he’d win the higher office. Obviously, some Democrats disagree.

There was some light at the end of the tunnel for the Dems, though, when it was reported Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) will retire as well. Dodd was in really bad shape for a 2010 re-election and a GOP pick-up would not have been shocking. Now it will be.

Democrats have already lined-up their candidate for the Constitution State: the popular State Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal. And Blumenthal has already told the press he’s all-in, leaving little doubt that this was all planned out ahead of time.

Regardless, a Dodd loss was not inevitable, and now a Democratic loss in North Dakota may quite possibly be.

Also recently announced, Governor Bill Ritter (D-CO) may be stepping down after his term is complete. That leaves a big open-seat race in the Centennial State. However, Republicans have been campaigning in full swing already to take down the incumbent Democrat, and they have a long head start over any Democrats who would now have to step in to replace Ritter. While it could have easily been a GOP pick-up anyway, this retirement probably hurts Colorado Democrats a lot more than it helps.

Back in November, I took a look at Senate and Gubernatorial projections for this year and estimated net losses of less than 6 Senate races and less than 5 gubernatorial races for Democrats.

While these retirements don’t significantly change those figures, I think it makes the prospects for how many less a bit worse. It’s simply a bleaker picture than it was yesterday.

Nate Silver has a much more conservative estimate of Democratic losses. In a post today, he had this to say:

"If I aggregate my estimates from the individual races, I show Republicans picking up an average of 4.60 Democratic seats, but also, Democrats picking up an average of 2.65 Republican seats, for a net Republican gain of 1.95 seats…

… It also bears remembering that, although I remain quite pessimistic about what will happen to Democrats in the House, the Senate playing field is intrinsically more favorable to them. The Senators who are up for re-election this year are those who were elected in 2004 -- a good cycle for Republicans. And while Democrats were hurt by their retirements in North Dakota, Delaware, New York, Illinois and probably Colorado (they were helped by Chris Dodd's retirement in Connecticut), the Republicans have created opportunities for them with the retirements in Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and perhaps Florida (they were helped by Jim Bunning's retirement in Kentucky). If the 2006 senate class were up for re-election this year, Democrats would potentially face very substantial losses, but fortunately for Democrats they aren't."

Of course, 2010 is not only important because it is a likely backlash-year for the majority party, it’s also a critical election year at the state level. The State Legislatures will be redistricting their states after this year’s census, and Democrats were already at risk in those races.

With these retirements on the federal level, state Democrats may be feeling ambitious enough to run for higher office, leaving their seats open for competitive races (the Political Ripple Effect). Obviously, this isn’t a big deal per se in North Dakota (which isn’t big enough for 2 congressional districts) but it could be in Colorado and even possibly in Connecticut.

That could be very beneficial to the GOP for the new decade.

Campaign Updates (6/22/09)

Florida

Will Marco Rubio turn out to be the GOP’s Barack Obama? Carlos Watson of MSNBC seems to think so, and Rubio could not have asked for a better introduction to a national audience.




California

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles is expected to announce he will run for governor of California any minute now. He will soon be on CNN’s “Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. Be sure to watch it.


Connecticut

Entrenched Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) is getting help from his longtime friend, Sen. Ted Kennedy. The new ad Kennedy cut should help with Dodd’s poor standing back home.



Dodd has been speaking on Kennedy’s behalf as the healthcare debate has moved forward in Washington, and the two politicians have been good friends since they entered the Senate together as young men over 30 years ago.


Iran

Last week we speculated the likelihood that Iran’s recent elections were fraudulent. At the time we couldn’t find any definitive evidence either way. Now there are new studies out that find certain election results to be more than a little fishy.

The first comes from upcoming NYU political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco who find that the frequencies of certain digits at various polling places in Iran are extremely unlikely to be accurate. Overall, they say that the way Ahmadinejad won only has a one-in-two-hundred chance of being legitimate.

The second study comes from the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University in the UK. The most glaring problem they notice is that two entire provinces reported turnouts of over 100% - and they were both Ahmadinejad-supportive.

They also found that…

“In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.”

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com wonders if these new concessions by the Ayatollah's government about voting irregularities are the first sign that Ahmadinejad could get thrown under the bus.

New Ads, New Media, and an Old President

It’s Friday, May 29, 2009. Here’s what we’re looking at:

Two new ads are out today. The first is a radio ad for Virginia’s leading Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe. It features President Bill Clinton speaking highly of his old friend and is going to be played on black-oriented radio stations. Of course, President Clinton didn’t keep very strong ties to the black community during his attacks on Obama in the South Carolina primary last year - but perhaps by now they’ve forgiven him.

Meanwhile, one of McAuliffe’s primary opponents, Brian Moran, has posted one of McAuliffe’s new mail pieces on his website, evidently to show McAuliffe being a dirty campaigner. The piece lists four unnamed candidates for governor and lists their opinions. Then the recipient scratches off to see the candidates’ names - like a lottery ticket. Frankly, it’s a pretty innovative mail piece.

The second ad is a TV spot for at-risk Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), trying to convince voters that his work as Senate Finance Committee Chairman wasn’t all about bailouts.



Next up, the Obama Administration has been using New Media as an integral part of their transparency efforts. The Open Government Dialogue website functions as a suggestion box for citizens to brainstorm ideas to improve policy. The most supported suggestion: it comes from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH). He says the White House should give Congress a mandatory 72-hour review period before approving any spending bills - a coy protest of how Congressional Democrats pushed through the stimulus bill.

Other top suggestions include encouraging local governments to adapt such transparency efforts, prosecuting Bush-Era officials, and - you guessed it - legalizing marijuana.

Finally, the Torture Debate takes a new turn today in Michigan where President George W. Bush finally defended the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques himself at a rare public appearance. Speaking to the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan, he also noted that our national security is at risk when “Ideologues…recruit when they find hopeless people. If you’re hungry, diseased, impoverished, you’re more easy to recruit.”

Where the 2008 and 2010 Elections Overlap

It’s Thursday, April 2, 2009. Here’s what we’re looking at:

After his defeat in court on Tuesday, former Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) appears to be finished, despite his motion for appeal. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has taken up the issue of seating Democrat Al Franken once again.

In New York’s 20th Congressional District, Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by only 25 votes. With the race to be decided by absentee ballots, Michael Barone of the Thomas Jefferson Street blog analyzes what we can expect.

Meanwhile, the 2010 elections have just begun. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) - who is currently the most vulnerable incumbent according to FiveThirtyEight.com - has already released this ad criticizing his likely primary opponent, former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA).



And with the troubles in the financial industry, the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee - Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) - is at risk of losing his seat. A new Quinnipiac poll shows him 16 points behind former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-CT).