Within the Margin

Overview – The Competitive Seats

+1 net gain for the Republicans; Democrats projected to maintain control of Senate

In our first batch of Senate ratings, we see Dems holding on to their majority. Reps need to pick up 3 (if Romney wins the presidency) or 4 seats (if Obama is reelected) in order to control the Senate in January. At is stands now, this appears unlikely. We have the Reps gaining a net of one seat, or two if Maine’s Angus King caucuses with them, which seems unlikely.

Democrats picked up six seats in their 2006 wave, meaning that a number of freshman are facing their first attempt at re-election – including some in classic swing states. Five of those 2006 pickups are indeed hotly contested seats again this time around. One of those purple-state freshmen, Jim Webb of Virginia, is retiring. Two others, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jon Tester of Montana, are facing extremely tight re-election contests. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania seem more secure, but they’re not out of the woods yet. Additionally, Democrats face difficulties in holding open seats in Nebraska and North Dakota, where incumbents are retiring and Democrats rarely face an easy path to victory. Dems have to work to hold a number of other seats in Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but right now they hold the edge. At this time, we see the Republicans picking up the Montana, Nebraska and North Dakota seats – and the latter just barely.

But while the Republicans have many more targets, they’re playing defense in a few places, and we have them losing a pair of seats in Maine (to an independent who is more likely to caucus with Democrats than Republicans) and Massachusetts. That gives Republicans a net gain of a single seat, allowing Democrats to maintain control of the Senate in 2013.

What follows below is a description of the state of play in each competitive senate race – each race is rated as Tilt, Lean, Likely or Safe; the safe seats will be summarized in a future post. We don’t do tossups: if it’s that close, we try anyway, rating it as a Tilt to one party or the other. Anyone can tell you Montana’s  tough to call; someone has to go out on a limb and make their best guess, and that’s what we’re doing. Charlie Cook and Stu Rothenberg and Larry Sabato can play it safe, but that’s not our way.

• If a race is Tilt Dem or Tilt Rep, it’s on a knife’s edge. We’re looking at all the usual candidate factors, state political fundamentals, national influences and polling to predict a winner, but those things are either all very close or are working at crosswinds to muddy the outcome. These are the races most likely to see a rating change between now and November, and we won’t be shy about updating accordingly. The idea is to be right, not to hedge.

• If a race is Lean Dem or Lean Rep, we feel one party has the advantage as the race stands now, but that the race is still fluid.

• If a race is Likely Dem or Likely Rep, we feel one party has a strong advantage and the trailing candidate will need something unexpected to happen, or a wave election to occur that currently no one sees coming.

• If a race is Safe Dem or Safe Rep, then the fundamentals are just too strongly in favor of the leading party. Something dramatic needs to happen for the favored candidate to lose. We’re talking arrests or enormous gaffes, not just an unexpectedly close poll or a tough new attack ad.

We’ll update the Senate ratings as events warrant between now and November.

Arizona

Incumbent three-term Republican Jon Kyl opted not to run for reelection this year. Mesa-area Congressman Jeff Flake won the Republican primary to succeed Kyl. Flake won all of his general elections fairly easily in his deep-red House district, and hasn’t had a tough election since his first House primary in 2000. Flake is a libertarian-flavored conservative, with strong opposition to federal spending of almost any kind but support for comprehensive immigration reform rather than the hardline policies his home state has become known for. He has a mixed record on social issues, voting to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell but also voting twice for a Federal Marriage Amendment. By one statistical reckoning, Flake’s record is the most conservative in the House; others find him a bit closer to the middle depending on how some of his “lone wolf” votes are calculated – a similar phenomenon to Ron Paul.

Democrats made the most of a limited bench, nominating former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona. Having served in the Bush administration gives Carmona some bipartisan credibility, while having done so in what was primarily a non-controversial post gives him none of the lingering taint of the Bush years. But forget that stuff: Carmona has a fascinating background, as a high school dropout who enlisted in the Army at 16, served in Vietnam, and became a physician before holding public office. That narrative can appeal across party lines and demographic groups.

Public polling consistently shows a tight race, with Flake slightly ahead. The campaigns have spent recent weeks releasing dueling internal polling, each showing their man with a lead. On balance, the numbers tilt this race slightly toward Flake’s favor. But we’re only now starting to see a pivot to a really aggressive attack strategy from Flake, one designed to not only damage Carmona, but to do so among women by painting him as a raging man who made life difficult for a female boss. Democrats obviously have to perform well among women to win just about any race so this could effectively disqualify their candidate. If Carmona weathers this storm with convincing denials and an effective return salvo, we could be looking at a change to Tilt Democratic; if not, we’ll be changing this to Lean Republican before long. Also helpful for Carmona would be if the Obama campaign actually targeted the state; that possibility was still being floated at the start of the month. But that seems increasingly unlikely now that Obama is on the defensive in the narrower band of must-win swing states. Close polling keeps our rating at Tilt for the moment

Rating: Tilt Republican

 

Connecticut

Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with Democrats but has technically been an “Independent Democrat” since his 2006 reelection victory, is retiring after four terms in the Senate. That creates an open seat race in a state which has been increasingly blue over the last 20-25 years, but which has shown substantially weaker polling numbers for President Obama than he had four years ago.

At the start of the year, few expected this Senate race to be particularly close. The Republican frontunner, Linda McMahon, had lost by almost 12 points in the deep-red year of 2010…after spending $50 million from her personal WWE fortune.  She then spent primary season positioning herself to the right in order to defeat former representative Chris Shays. As long as Democrats put forth a reasonable candidate, they should win easily, right?  That was our expectation, and they seemed to have that candidate in the form of Representative Chris Murphy, a three-term Congressman from the 5th district in the northwest portion of the state. Murphy had beaten a popular incumbent in a swing district in 2006 and held the seat fairly easily against a pair of sitting state senators in 2008 and 2010.  He dispatched the laughable CT Secretary of State, Susan Bysiewicz, in the  Democratic primary (laughable because she wasn’t very good at her primary job – overseeing elections – which is something I happen to know a bit about from a bureaucratic perspective). It was all falling into place for Murphy.

But McMahon wasn’t done. She had many more of her millions to spend, and spend she has: $11M as of the pre-primary filing over the summer; she has signaled that she’ll pour much, much more than that into the race by the time she’s done. Some of that has been spent crafting a more positive image for herself after the ugliness of 2010; the rest has been spent beating up Murphy for problems with late rent and property tax payments.  Murphy’s financial woes were fairly standard-issue stuff and he paid up. But the sheer volume of hits, as much as the content, it took its toll-  McMahon took the lead in a number of polls, and Democrats started talking about shifting money into a race they figured Murphy could win on his own.

Yet it turns out McMahon had similar tax payment  issues – along with a 1976 personal bankruptcy that cost her creditors more than a million dollars – which she says she will repay (no word on whether she’ll include interest). The result is that Murphy seems to have righted the ship somewhat. The narrative has been reset – they’re talking more about social issues lately, on which there’s not as much difference between them as on fiscal matters.  And Murphy hit 51% in a recent Rasmussen poll, turning around that outfit’s previous three-point McMahon lead.

Both Murphy and McMahon have weaknesses, but Murphy come with a smaller sticker shock, and he has proven to be a closer in his career. It might not be as blue as 2008, but Connecticut will still give Obama a win this year, probably in the high single-digits. Pending further developments, that should add up to a Dem victory here.

Rating: Lean Democratic

 

Florida

Senator Bill Nelson picked up this seat for Democrats in 2000, succeeding Connie Mack III (that’s Cornelius McGillicuddy III, grandson of the Hall of Fame manager of the Philadelphia A’s). He obliterated the infamous Katherine Harris – yes, the one who wasn’t very good at overseeing elections in Florida – in 2006 but brought middling approval ratings into this year’s bid for a third term. The Republican establishment was faced with plenty of candidates but none they liked, so they flailed about in search of a savior before finally settling on Connie Mack IV, because Americans love a political dynasty no matter how much we say otherwise. Mack, a four-term representative from the Fort Myers area, had a tragicomic entrance into the race: he has enough shenanigans in his past that a GOP primary rival called him “the Charlie Sheen of Florida politics.” Maybe a stretch, but Mack certainly comes across as something of an entitled political scion. A thin legislative record and bland campaign do nothing to overcome that image, and no one seems to think he can win this race. Nelson won’t skate by as easily as he did in 2006.  But most polling shows a double-digit lead for the incumbent, and that feels about right.

Rating: Likely Democratic

 

Indiana

Longtime Republican Senator Dick Lugar was known as a foreign policy expert and a statesman committed to establishing bipartisan support for arms reduction treaties. That involved working with President Obama rather than criticizing him at every turn. It also involved a focus on the arcana of international diplomacy rather than Indiana-centric matters. Perhaps unsurprising for a man who hadn’t faced a tough race in 30 years, Lugar no longer keeps an actual physical residence in Indiana. All of that combined to provide an opening for state treasurer Richard Mourdock to primary Lugar from the right. Lugar is widely adored in Indiana, but it soon became clear that the Republican base had grown tired of him. Mourdock ended up winning the primary comfortably, and has made little to no effort to pivot back to the center for the general election.

Republicans controlled redistricting in Indiana, and drastically altered three-term Representative Joe Donnelly’s South Bend-area district. Faced with a much redder House race or a shot at the Senate – and possibly Mourdock rather than the beloved Lugar – he chose to run statewide. With a moderate record in the House and and a much more centrist tone than Mourdock, Donnelly represents the Democrats’ second-best chance at a Senate pickup this cycle (third, if you count the tricky Maine race). Polling has borne this out: in eight polls since the start of summer, each candidate has led in four, and never by more than three points.  The Obama campaign has effectively conceded Indiana, his most surprising 2008 win. Will Romney coattails carry Mourdock to victory? They’ll be worth something. It’s a given that some longtime Lugar voters will not vote for the sharply partisan Mourdock – but the question is whether the skip this race, or go with Donnelly. In a race that sits on a knife’s edge, with no momentum for either man, the state’s partisan fundamentals seem likely to give Mourdock a narrow edge. This is one of the hardest Senate races to call this year, meaning we could change our minds a few times in the coming weeks…or that no further clues will appear, and we’ll be especially eager to see how this one plays out on Election Night.

Rating: Tilt Republican

 

Maine

Here’s an interesting one. Moderate Republican senator Olympia Snowe is retiring after three terms. Republicans nominated Secretary of State Charlie Summers; he was also a state senator in the early ’90s. Democrats nominated Cynthia Dill, a state senator who happens to have been born in my native Hudson Valley (Carmel, specifically).

And neither the Republican nor the Democrat will be elected. That’s because independent former governor Angus King will win, and probably in a walk. King ran the state from 1995-2003, after a career as a lawyer, public television host and an alternative energy developer.  He generally stakes out liberal positions on social issues and more moderate stances on fiscal matters. He certainly tilts left-of-center, and endorsed Obama for president in 2008 and again this year. The assumption is that King will ultimately caucus with Democrats in the Senate, but he refuses to commit to one or the other, and has in fact intimated that he could operate independent of both. If so, he won’t have any committee assignments and he’ll find it’s hard to get work done – that being said, it’s not like a lot of work gets done in the senate anymore as it is.

King has led polling since Snowe announced her retirement. The margins jump around – sometimes his leads approach 30 points over Summers; some Republican polls have shown a single-digit race – as did one surprising survey from PPP in mid-September. Dill has always placed third in polls, because King draws so much support from Democrats who see him as their de facto candidate.

While indies usually poll better than they actually perform on Election Day, in King’s case we’re talking about a well-known quantity – a two-term governor who has been the established frontrunner since entering the race. His lead is real. The only reason we’re going Likely Independent here, and not Safe, is that Republican-affiliated groups continue to spend money on this race, and King has been out of office long enough that he could be rusty if the unexpected occurs. But it’s hard to find anyone who thinks that will happen. We’ll probably change this to Safe Independent in the coming weeks. Afterwards, this blog will be intrigued to cover his approach to Senate business and see how this independent navigates a hyper-partisan DC landscape.

Rating: Likely Independent

 

Massachusetts

AKA: The Big One. For Democrats to hold the Senate, they probably need a pickup or two to offset likely losses elsewhere. In a cycle where most of the seats up for reelection are held by Democrats, many of them in reddish states, Massachusetts is a rarity: Scott Brown is a Republican, elected in January 2010, who is trying to hold in a state Obama will carry by roughly 20 points next month. But Brown breaks party lines relatively often for the modern era, maintains a centrist demeanor, largely avoids gaffes, and has as much money as any candidate could need. He plays the pickup truck card as well as any candidate we’ve seen.

His opponent makes no bones about being a progressive flag-bearer. Elizabeth Warren is a lawyer and academic whose publications include the prescient The Two-Income Trap, co-authored with her daughter. More recently she led the fight to create the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which – if allowed to do its job – will regulate financial products and services and in theory avoid a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. Beloved by grassroots activists, Warren has oodles of campaign money and favorable state dynamics. She also is an uneasy campaigner at times; the Cherokee heritage issue never goes away. Brown also taps into America’s strong anti-intellectual currents by mocking her for being a Harvard professor. For some, the fact that Warren grew up in a working-class, hard-luck family in Oklahoma insulates her from that attack. But for others, Brown has staked a claim to blue-collar affiliation since his first campaign.

Brown led polling for most of the summer, and before the Democratic convention this race was Tilt Rep or maybe even Lean Rep in my mind. But in early September, Warren started moving ahead, and she has led in 11 of 15 post-convention polls. Maybe coattail effects are baked into that, in which case this is probably a turnout battle – and it’s a state where the presidential outcome is a given, so the ground game of the respective senate candidates will be important. We know Brown is a good closer from his 2010 win, but we also know that Warren is a stronger campaigner than Martha Coakley, who Brown defeated that year. That adds up to a Warren edge, but not a large one.

Rating: Tilt Democratic

 

Michigan

Second-term Democrat Debbie Stabenow faces off with former Republican Representative Pete Hoekstra. There’s not a lot to say about this race, whose only exciting moment came during the Super Bowl when Hoekstra ran a bizarre ad starring overt racism. Hoekstra took some heat for that, fell back in the polls, and hasn’t really recovered. Michigan was a swing state in 2000 and 2004, but McCain bailed early in autumn ’08 and Romney has never appeared particularly close in his native state this time around. We’re leaving it Likely Dem rather than Safe, simply because a national collapse on Obama’s part could put the state back in play down the stretch. But even then Stabenow would probably win…we’ll probably be adjusting this call to Safe Dem in the coming weeks.

Rating: Likely Democratic

 

Missouri

Freshman Democrat Claire McCaskill won a tough race in 2006 but entered this cycle as her party’s weakest incumbent senator: her reddish state just didn’t care for the job she was doing in DC. Not helping matters were revelations that she had failed to pay property taxes on a private jet her family owns. “Air Claire” spent most of the spring trailing in hypothetical polls against each of the three Republicans seeking to replace her.

But Republicans didn’t have a slam-dunk challenger to take her on. The three-way primary was closely contested, and Representative Todd Akin emerged as the winner. Then he told the world how little he knew about human reproduction. Then he refused to leave the race, no matter how much Republicans begged him too. Then, given a real drop-dead date to exit, he refused again. And then he said more dumb things about abortion. Meanwhile, state and national Republicans have gradually gotten behind him again, because they know this seat is nearly a must-win if they want to take back control of the Senate with this election.

So McCaskill now leads in most polling, usually by 6-7 points, and Democrats might end up holding a seat they had started to figure was gone. Akin is a national joke. But I’m reluctant to bet on an incumbent who is as strongly disliked as  McCaskill. I wouldn’t be shocked to see Akin chip away and keep this race competitive, especially if national Republicans blink and reopen an advertising barrage.

Rating: Tilt Democratic

 

Montana

Jon Tester is another freshman Dem who won a tight race in a reddish state in 2006. He’s a rural farmer who brings a moderate voting record and has retained a folksy charm. Republicans are running their best potential challenger: wealthy rancher and at-large representative Denny Rehberg. He has also hewed to the center, standing out as one of the few Republicans in Congress to vote against the Ryan budget.

This is one of our tougher races to call, and it would probably a be a legitimate tossup if we were inclined to include those. It’s been largely drama-free, and the perpetually-close polling reflects that neither candidate has been able to open a big advantage or generate significant momentum. Rehberg has lead more often, so we have to give him the edge, especially with the advantage he holds in the state’s fundamentals: Democrats had a lot of momentum here in the last decade, electing a Democratic governor twice and controlling the state legislature for a few years. Obama only narrowly losing the state four years ago. But that momentum has dissipated. Tester will outpoll the president, but will that be enough? Republicans fared well here in 2010, and Romney is expected to carry Montana more easily than McCain did. That should only help Rehberg.

Rating: Tilt Republican

 

Nevada

The wretched and scandal-plagued Republican John Ensign resigned in 2011 in the middle of an ethics investigation. Republican Congressman Dean Heller was appointed to serve the remainder of that term and now faces reelection. This shapes up as one of the few Democratic pickup opportunities of the cycle, and longtime Las Vegas Representative Shelley Berkley stepped up to carry the blue flag.

Heller has hammered Berkley on the ethics investigations she’s undergoing – she sought federal funds to keep a kidney transplant center open; her husband is a physician in the employ of this center. It looks dodgy on paper, but less so when you realize that the services provided by this center are scarce in Nevada, meaning that the facility is critical for the care of many Nevada residents. FactCheck.org echoed the sentiments of many in concluding that she was trying to help her constituents, not herself. Heller knows this; he also advocated on behalf of the same center! But appearances matter in politics, and one can always do more to inoculate oneself against these types of charges. And having the phrase “ethics investigation” in every discussion about you makes it hard to win an election. Accordingly, Heller has led almost every poll of this race.

Obama won big here in 2008; this time around, the presidential outcome is in doubt in this high-unemployment state. Heller has largely kept the pressure on Berkley and Romney may yet squeeze out a win…but at the same time, we saw that 2010 polling consistently underestimated Harry Reid’s eventual margin of victory. An incredible Democratic turnout machine fueled that surprising Reid triumph after the majority leader was left for dead by many pundits earlier in the year. But he was also helped by the fact that his opponent was a right-winger far, far from the mainstream. Dean Heller is not Sharron Angle, and appears positioned to hold this seat. It’s more likely that we shift the race in his favor than in Berkley’s in future updates.

Rating: Tilt Republican

 

North Dakota

Democrats held both of North Dakota’s senate seats from 1986 to 2010. But then Byron Dorgan retired, and ultra-popular Democratic-turned-Republican governor John Hoeven cruised to an easy pickup of his seat, winning a ridiculous 76% in the 2010 GOP landslide. Kent Conrad is joining his old friend Dorgan in the ranks of the retired, opening up another open seat in this usually red state. But the pickup won’t come so easily this time. Democrats nominated former attorney general Heidi Heitkamp, a proven vote-getter who was running basically even with Hoeven back in 2000, when he first sought the governorship. But Heitkamp left the campaign trail that year after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Having successfully vanquished that scourge, she’s mounting a political comeback. Her common touch is playing well on the campaign trail; she is not viewed as an ultra-partisan. Freshman Representative Rick Berg, on the other hand, contrasts with both her and Hoeven in that he is a down-the-line conservative whose campaign seems predicated on linking Heitkamp to Obama. It should be noted that Obama contested North Dakota in 2008 and received 45% of the vote, the best showing for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades. This time around, polling shows that he is unlikely to keep Romney’s margin below twenty, making Heitkamp’s road that much tougher.

The question here really is whether North Dakota will adhere to a long history of ticket-splitting that saw many Democrats reelected to Congress even as Republican presidential candidates generally won the state with ease, or if enough North Dakotans want unified Republican control of Washington that they elect both Romney and Berg. North Dakota is a lightly-polled state, with only seven published surveys for the senate race this cycle. Heitkamp has led in five, Berg in one, and they were tied in the other. Most of those Heitkamp leads came from Dem internals, which gives pause…but not as much as it would give if Berg ever responded with his own internals. He never does, so either he has an unconventional approach to these things and doesn’t like to tell people he’s actually winning…or he’s not actually winning.

Republicans have recently shifted resources to North Dakota from other senate races, signalling that they know Berg needs help to get over the top. Let’s see how that help plays out – right now we’re weighing North Dakota’s GOP-friendly fundamentals over Heitkamp’s polling advantage, but I’m looking for a narrative shift. If none appears, and Heitkamp’s performance on the trail continues to win praise, this might end up tilting to the Dems.

Rating: Tilt Republican

 

Ohio

Sherrod Brown is a freshman Democrat running in a classic swing state after decisively dispatching incumbent Mike DeWine in 2006. Brown’s record is of a pretty liberal, labor-friendly bent, meaning he has plenty of grassroots manpower in his corner. He also has what has turned out to be a fairly weak opponent in Iraq War veteran and Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel. The young, smooth-talking Mandel has quite a resume at an early age, but he has shown much arrogance and very little in the way of policy specifics; he makes dodging questions into something of an art form. He’s getting hit for it now, as Politifact and various Ohio media outlets are getting tired of his games.

Various SuperPACs have spent enormous sums trying to make this race competitive. They have succeeded, insofar as polling has Mandel still within low double-digits of the incumbent despite being an abysmal candidate. But Brown has hit back on Mandel’s absenteeism in doing the job he was elected to and some dodgy appointments of his buddies to state posts. The momentum seems to be with Brown, even as Romney is tightening the presidential race once again in the Buckeye state. It’s getting hard to see a path to victory for Mandel. It’s also hard to see any Senate challenger his year who is less deserving than Mandel of being in a close race.

Rating: Likely Democratic

 

Pennsylvania

Before Rick Santorum was making Mitt Romney sweat a bit in the GOP primaries earlier this year, he was an ex-senator from Pennsylvania. State Treasurer Bob Casey destroyed two-term incumbent Santorum in 2006, coupling liberal issues on spending and taxes with a pro-life and pro-gun positions on cultural issues. Casey’s a good fit for Pennsylvania, able to perform well in the blue-collar Anthracite Kingdom, Lehigh Valley and Pittsburgh metro areas. Those advantages gave him huge leads all year over coal executive Tom Smith, despite Casey’s weak job approval ratings. Smith is a long-ago Democratic township supervisor and now running as a hardcore across-the-board conservative who makes strange abortion analogies. But as October dawned, Smith started surging even before Romney did, and polls now show a lead of only 2-3 points for Casey.

One assumes that Casey has material waiting in the wings to create some separation with Smith, but the incumbent has little ground game of his own and possesses a general blandness that doesn’t generate much enthusiasm among the Democratic base. Unions will be there for him, and Pennsylvania will go for Obama again, barring a total collapse of the president’s campaign. But Casey seems to be fumbling on the goal line, and it’s an open question how well he’ll respond to the first real challenge he’s faced in his two senate campaigns.

Rating: Lean Democratic

 

Virginia

Jim Webb narrowly picked this seat up for Democrats in 2006, but didn’t find Washington politics much to his liking. He’s retiring after one term, and former governor and DNC chairman Tim Kaine is the Democrat looking to succeed him. Kaine is no Mark Warner, but he was still generally popular when he was running the state. The man opposing him is the man Webb beat six years ago: former governor and senator George Allen.

Allen was undone by the infamous “macaca moment” in 2006 but people forget how strong a resume Webb had, and how forcefully his message resonated in the darkest days of the Iraq War. Allen has avoided anything as destructive this time around, while Kaine has hewed to the center and run a largely mistake-free campaign. In purple Virginia, that has meant a race that was basically even all year, with virtually every poll showing a tie or a margin within two points in either direction. Kaine appeared to be opening a lead in late September, finally posting a handful of polls with leads ranging from 5-10 points. Then came the Romney surge, and now the race appears to be reset at its previous even state.  As a result, forecasting it is is nigh-impossible: both will be funded as much as needed, and both will be hoping their party’s presidential nominee helps nudge them to victory. Virginia probably won’t be as blue as it was in 2008 when Obama won by a decent margin and Warner trounced his way to a Senate victory, but it doesn’t need to be. Going back to Allen would seem strange for the “new Virginia” but not shocking; Bob McDonnell is arguable more stridently conservative than Allen’s Bush-era orthodoxy. In a race that is seemingly tied in every way, we’ll give the edge to the only candidate who has shown the ability to open a lead – however fleeting that was. For the moment, this tilts to Kaine.

Rating: Tilt Democratic

 

Wisconsin

A month or two ago, this seemed like one of the Republicans’ best pickup opportunities. They had nominated the once-popular four-term former governor Tommy Thompson. Democrats had nominated Tammy Baldwin, a very liberal congresswoman from a safely-Democratic Madison-based district – in other words, little experience chasing independent and Republican voters. In my mind, this race was at least Lean Rep in late August.

But after the primary, Thompson did…nothing. He barely made any public appearances, ostensibly rebuilding his warchest and “resting” after a difficult primary that at one time seemed poised to be won by upstart businessman Eric Hovde. He’s back on the trail, but he’s making mistakes, like forgetting how many houses he owns. It increasingly feels like Thompson got into this race thinking it would be easier, and that now he doesn’t feel like fighting for it. Accordingly, Baldwin has led in every poll but two in the past month – usually by 2-4 points, but occasionally by significantly more.

Should Baldwin emerge victorious, she will be the first openly lesbian senator in the United States. It’s not the outcome I expected six weeks ago, and she surely hasn’t seen the last of negative advertising barrages. But Thompson, as popular as he once was, is yesterday’s news and his last public service was in the Bush administration – not a winning resume item in his home state. If Romney can pull ahead in Wisconsin as he occasionally threatens to do, that will help Thompson to muddle through. But right now, the advantage is with Baldwin.

Rating: Tilt Democratic