Weekly Open Thread: What Races Are You Interested In?

What a blockbuster week for Senate recruitment: former Governors Warner and Shaheen announcing their bids back-to-back!

Gaze into your crystal balls and tell me what the next bombshells will be.

36 thoughts on “Weekly Open Thread: What Races Are You Interested In?”

  3. We have Udall, Shaheen, Warner, Franken, Allen, and Merkley.  (Colorado, NH, Virginia, Minnesota, Maine, and Oregon.)

    What matters now is recruitment in our next six: Alaska, North Carolina, Kentucky, New Mexico, Kansas, and Tennessee.

    We’re done recruiting in Texas, Oklahoma, and Idaho, and we failed to recruit in Alabama, Georgia, and Wyoming.

    We have yet to see how Nebraska will play out, but with Kerrey in it should join our big six to make the Big Seven.

    So in all likelihood, within a couple weeks we’ll be looking at seven major races that have already crystallized, and we’ll be trying to get our second tier as large and potent as possible. 

    All six of the unrecruited second tier are important.  Success in any single one of them is significant, and success in each one amplifies the others. 

    Mark Begich, Grier Martin, anyone in Kentucky, anyone in New Mexico, anyone in Kansas, and Mike McWherter are now the most important people in the Democratic Senate universe.  (Them and Bob Kerrey, that is.)  The more of those people we catch, the better off every single one of our races will be.

    Unless we recruit so many that we scare the Establishment into bailing out John Ensign.  As we approach the conventions and it becomes obvious that a Dem will take the presidency, I fully expect the Establishment to send some serious money to the NRSC to prevent a 58-vote Democratic Senate and the powerful progressive legislation that would result from that.  We are gonna have to run some really strong standalone campaigns, because if we look like we’re headed into a second big wave in Congress, we are gonna get some serious pushback in the elite media.  The elite was more than happy to see the GOP lose Congress, I think, because a check on Bush was obviously overdue, but they are not gonna be equally amenable to massive Democratic majorities with a Democratic president. 

    The elite media chose to use the Mark Foley story to chase down and kill Denny Hastert.  This time, they will use some similar isolated incident to knock us back in September and October.  With damn good campaigns though, we’ll be able to survive that.  One of the more interesting features of recent politics is that voters are in many but not all cases tuning out elite media.  Voters were led by the nose in Campaign 2000 and in the early stages of the Iraq War, but, in the second half of the Iraq War, in the Impeachment, with Social Security, and with the Economy, voters have been utterly resistant to what the elite media has tried to tell them.  It is possible but not certain that the electorate is just going to Fucking Vote Democrat, no matter what the editors are saying in October of 2008.  We just owe it to them to make sure we have campaigns on the ground that can actually take their votes and win with them.

  4. Will this set a new precedent for women running for president?  On the one hand, if she does well, it might embolden some female governors and senators to run. On the other hand many will feel she was only elected because she schtooped a president.

    So, discussion question, come 2012, if Clinton’s the incumbent, will any republican women run?  Connecticut governor Rell, Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Kay Hutchinson (R-TX).  Or would Liddy Dole (assuming she’s re-elected) decide to run and make 2012 a Clinton vs. dole redux?

    ps.  if clinton does set a precedent for women who’ve schtooped president running for president, do we have to worry about Monica Lewinski for president?

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