2010 Senate Watch Part Three

Time for the final part of my three day installment on what to expect from the 2010 midterm Senate races. If you think that the races I’ve analyzed the last few days have painted a rosy picture for Democrats, well, it has. A Pew research poll released today says the President has a 73% favorability rating. That is astronomical. If those kinds of numbers hold steady for the next year and a half, and if everything, and I mean everything, goes right, then Dems can hope to pick off these seats in a close contest. These are the Perfect Storm races:

•Tom Coburn- R- OK; Coburn recently said that he is flirting with retirement, but remains undecided as to whether he plans to run for re-election in 2010. I think it is telling, especially if fundraising figures are anything to go off of, that Coburn has only raised $17,000 for his re-election campaign this year, and has only a paltry $57,000 in his campaign account total. One would expect a Senator to have at least a couple million dollars saved up by the time primary season rolls around, Coburn would have a lot of work to do to catch up to that total. Still, Oklahoma is one of the most conservative states in the country. If any Democrat, even a well funded one with excellent name recognition, wanted to win this race, he would have to do so against an incumbent Coburn who has very little money on hand.

•Lisa Murkowski- R-AK- Murkowski was appointed to the Senate by the Governor, who just happened to be her father. This led to a scandal which promptly ended his career, but she won re-election on her own skills and is still the incumbent. That is unless the current Governor Sarah “I wanna be President someday” Palin decides to run against Murkowski in the primary. Murkowski has been threatening up a storm against Palin, who would likely have to abandon her seat in the Governor’s office to make the run (Alaska is also set for a Governors election in 2010), and it would be a tough primary for Palin to win. But if Palin did win the primary, then Democrats would put a target on her back so big that we would be able to see it from…well…Russia.

On a not wholly unrelated note, PPP just came out with a poll today that says that 20% of Republicans would rather vote for President Obama than for Sarah Palin if she became the GOP nominee in 2012. Obama would beat her in a head to head matchup 53-41%. Obama similarly beats other potential GOP nominees, Mike Huckabee, 49-42%, Newt Gingrich, 52-39%, and Mitt Romney, 50%-39%.

•Kansas (R)- Yay! Another Republican retirement. Sam Brownback was never under any serious threat to lose to any Democrat, but he will be vacating the seat to run for Governor. The Republicans are putting together a pretty tough field which includes two sitting Congressmen (Tom Tiahrt and Jerry Moran). Democrats were hoping that Kathleen Sebelius would run, but she decided to join the Obama cabinet instead. That means the next best possibility would be Nancy Boyda, who has never run for statewide office. Nonetheless, Boyda is the closes to a national presence that Kansas Democrats have following her unlikely upset in her 2006 House campaign against Jim Ryun, so she might have decent fundraising. But then again, she did lose her seat in the House after just one term, so maybe not. If everything went right for Democrats, then this seat could conceivably be possible to switch.

Ed: I’m out of town tomorrow, going to Independence Missouri to visit the archives at the President Truman Library. Should be fun.