http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
In those eight elections, there were 112 Senate contests in which a member of the non-wave party sought reelection. It breaks down like this. (We excluded people who'd been appointed to seats and people who retired, and we included 2014 for reference.)60 wins and 23 losses. Not bad. Now The Fix goes on to show how incumbents in opposing states have a history of holding on:As is the way with Senate races, most of those incumbents won reelection. Only in 1980 was there anything close to a 50-50 win/loss split. Of the 112 races, only 29 times did the incumbent lose -- and these were incumbents from the party that lost the wave!Many of those races, though, were in states friendly to the incumbent's party or, as was the case with three races in 1966, the incumbent was running unopposed. To figure out how easy or difficult a state was for the incumbent, we looked at how it had voted in the previous two presidential elections. (Or the election that year if it was a presidential year.) As is the norm for us, we didn't do a straight party split. We looked at how the state's vote compared to the national vote. So, for example, North Carolina backed Obama in 2008, but by a smaller margin than the rest of the country. This allows us a better sense of how liberal or conservative a state is. - Washington Post, 10/17/14
The Fix also notes that they tracked the 2014 election alongside history because it's not that there will be a Republican wave or that these Democrats can beat their challengers because of the recent poll numbers. But what The Fix is saying is that anything can happen in Alaska, Arkansas and Louisiana so none of these races should be written off for either side. Plus here are some other factors:OK, but some of those winners also won by wide margins in states that showed only a slight preference for the opposing party. So we created a criterion to denote elections that really bucked the wave: The winner is from the non-wave party, wins by fewer than 10 points in a state that was more supportive of the opposing party by 10 points on average over the two preceding elections.Even that has happened -- five times. Namely: Sens. Fred Harris (D-Okla.) in 1966, Gary Hart (D-Colo.) in 1980, David Durenberger (R-Minn.) and John Chafee (R-R.I.) in 1982, and Chuck Robb (D-Va.) in 1994. There are none since then, in part because there are fewer candidates facing waves in unfriendly states -- which is itself perhaps thanks to our increasingly polarized Senate/country.
- Washington Post, 10/16/14
Begich has a better ground game than Dan Sullivan (R. AK):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The Arkansas Supreme Court striking down the voter ID law gives Pryor some hope:
And Bill Cassidy (R. LA) handed Landrieu a gift calling to raise the Social Security age to 70 and Landrieu wasted no time going after him on this issue:
With that said, if you would like to donate and get involved with Begich, Pryor and Landrieu's campaigns, you can do so here:
