The Weekend Political Thread

I'm trying something new: An omnibus political thread with some analysis of the week's horse race news. Ninety-nine percent of the important stuff is (still!) contained in the Evans-Novak report, but hey, this is an open thread.

Democrats On The March: The Democrats were pummelled on the national stage all week, and yet they end Friday in position to expand their majority in the Senate. (Note that I just said "Senate." More on that later.) On Monday Sen. Chuck Hagel up and quit, making former Sen. Bob Kerrey—a pro-war Democrat, the anti-Hagel—the frontrunner to replace him. On Thursday former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner entered that state's open Senate race with polls giving him massive, groaning leads over well-known Republican candidates. And today former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen entered the race against Sen. John Sununu. He beat her narrowly in 2002; she leads him by 22 points now.

I wrote in late 2005 that the GOP's failure to recruit good candidates in most of that year's most promising Senate races, especially North Dakota and West Virginia, indicated a fatigue and a pessimism beyond what showed up in public polls. We're seeing the same thing now, although Republicans (*cough* Newt Gingrich *cough*) are far more open about their pessimism. Robert Novak reports that the GOP is prepping for a five-seat Senate loss: Colorado, Virginia, and New Hampshire look gone, Oregon, Maine, and Minnesota look dicey, Nebraska could fall if Kerrey jumps in. How many bright spots do Republicans have? One: Louisiana. And that's only because tens of thousands of black Democrats have left the state. New Jersey's octogenarian Sen. Frank Lautenberg would be a prime target for a confident party, but after debacles in 2005 and 2006 the GOP's only been able to recruit a state legislator from the Assembly. And he's on the fence.

Democrats In Retreat: The picture for the House of Representatives? Less clear. Massachusetts' Lowell-centered Fifth District is holding a special election that should be a sure thing for Democrat Niki Tsongas, the wife of the late senator Paul Tsongas. Yet the first poll in the race shows Republican Jim Ogonowski, the brother of one of the pilots killed on 9/11, only ten points behind her.

Smart lefty blogger Matt Stoller calls shenanigans: Ogonowski isn't even running as a Republican, but as a non-politician who muddies his stance on the Iraq War (stay there forever) and bemoans partisanship. But compare the Ogonowski ad to the chintzy ad Tsongas ran in the primary. Every local Democrat has endorsed Tsongas, but all the energy is with the desparate Republicans (who hold no federal or statewide office).

An Ogonowksi victory isn't likely, but it's not impossible, and it would dramatically change the political debate. A proud pro-war Republican will have won by attacking both Bush and the congressional Democrats. Independents will have swung back to the GOP. The Democratic aura of inevitability would be battered, maybe enough to perk up Republican fundraising and keep one or two from retiring. No Republican has flipped a Democratic seat in a special election since Virginia's Michael Randy Forbes in 2001, and no Republican has flipped a seat in New England since Rob Simmons won Connecticut's second district (New London, Norwich) in 2000.

McCain's Overrated Surge: A good indicator of John McCain's new momentum, his first taste of the stuff since before summer began, was Newt Gingrich's interview with National Journal's Linda Douglass. Gingrich had been writing McCain off for months, rattling off a list of possible Republican nominees and conspicuously leaving off the Arizonan. But he told Douglass "I think there are three or four possible Republican nominees—Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, Huckabee, and, based on his recent re-energizing, McCain."

How much has McCain re-energized, and why? Second answer first: He came out swinging at the last debate and planted one on Mitt Romney's glass jaw. And a slight uptick in optimism about Iraq—which was bottoming out at around 20 percent—validated what McCain had been saying about the war since, oh, April 2003. (The stuff about how we needed more troops, not the stuff about how we were on our way to victory.) But how much? Before the debate he had slipped to high single digits and fourth place nationally, behind Mitt Romney. Now he's at 15 percent and a solid third place.

But this isn't a national primary and it didn't start a few weeks ago. It started in January when McCain was polling at double his current numbers and was signing up every smart Republican strategist and donor who wasn't already with Mitt Romney. He's shed a lot of those strategists and he shed three more low-level ones this week. And his small recovery in national polls is meaningless as long as he's not recovering in early primary states. Right now he's not leading in any of them. He's not in second place in any of them. He's 8 points behind Rudy/Thompson in South Carolina, 17 points behind Romney in New Hampshire, and 24 points behind Romney in Iowa, where he's in 5th place overall.

Some more assorted links:

– Dana Goldstein reports from that Newt Gingrich speech I went to and hones in on his worrying about Iran.

– Ryan Sager rides Fred Thompson's bus through Florida, into a 60,000-person retirement community and Disney's Celebration village, and encounters a man who won't support Rudy because "his voice is too thin… It doesn't have that deep, 'I'm sincere' feeling."

– Jonah Goldberg watches Hillary Clinton triangulating on Iraq, which looks about as comfortable as enduring the Crucio curse.