Transcript
Thomas Mann: I have one bottom-line message for you today, which is that we are likely to see very little change in the composition of the House and the Senate, unless something interesting develops in the Presidential race, in which we get, instead of a dead-heat finish, a la 2000, a comfortable victory for Senator Kerry or President Bush.
I think it's possible that one of these candidates could win by two, three or four percentage points of the popular vote, and that could be enough to tip a couple of Senate seats and either produce, in the case of a Kerry victory, a Democratic Senate; or, in the case of a Bush victory, a somewhat larger Republican majority.
As you know, the territory on which Democrats are fighting in the Senate is hostile to their political interests. It's really quite striking, if you really examine these competitive races, you will find that in all of the tossups, Bush won in 2000 in all of those states. Of course, a number of them are clustered in the South -- Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina. There is also the border state of Oklahoma.
But then, the other states potentially up for grabs -- Alaska, Colorado, and importantly, South Dakota -- these are all states in which President Bush did well and did rather comfortably. It is Republican real estate the Democrats are struggling on in hopes of winning this election.
The only other two seats really potentially competitive are Washington and Wisconsin, and both of those were Gore states in 2000. That's Senators Patty Murray and Russ Feingold, and the one seat that is already conceded as a Democratic pickup, Illinois, to Barak Obama, was also a strong Bush -- Gore state in 2000. And the one seat virtually conceded to the Republicans, Zell Miller's open seat in Georgia, again, is a state that went comfortably for George Bush.
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