Gambling on US Senate Races: An Exercise in Futility

It seems Barack Obama’s love-affair with the media is having a collateral effect on a smattering of US Senate races. The media seems to have written a number of Senate seats off to Democrats before the race for those seats has begun.

This isn't the first time the media has predicted the outcomes of races, and it wouldn't be the first time if those predictions turned out to be false.

While some Democratic victories were expected, no one could have predicted how anti-Republican sentiment in the wake of Watergate would propel 75 new Democrats into seats in 1974 and only two Democrats were defeated in 1976. By 1980, however, the public’s anti-Republican bitterness had waned considerably in the face of economic failures and foreign policy embarrassments directly related to Democratic policies. These factors, not media pundits, propelled Republicans into office that year.

Although it might appear so, political coattails often don’t mean much, either. Yes, Reagan swept a lot of Republicans into office when he won in 1980, but when he crushed Mondale in 1984, Senate Republicans actually lost two seats. Democrats suffered the same fate in 1996, when incumbent Bill Clinton crushed Bob Dole in 1996.

Polls mean even less.

Michael Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by 13 points with four months to go before the general election. After the Democratic National Convention, he led by 17. But when the world saw him sitting in that tank on Labor Day, Dukakis’ chances of winning in 1988 soon became as flat as Howard Dean’s screech in 2000. Bush won the election, and the late Republican surge reduced the anticipated Democratic sweep to just one seat.

It was widely predicted by the media in 1998 that 11 seats in play, but when the final numbers came in, not much had changed. Three incumbent seats were lost, but there were no net gains on either side. Conversely, no one expected much to happen in 2006, but the GOP lost six seats and the majority, despite a George W. Bush victory just two years earlier.

As the Nov. 4 election approaches, there are 14 seats that Democrats and Republicans have targeted as the key races to winning control of the Senate in 2009. The mainstream media has anointed Democrats with the advantage because they need to defend only 12 seats, while Republicans must defend 23. The Dems also are ahead of the game, pundits say, because five Republicans are retiring at the end of 2008, compared to zero Democrats. While this marks the largest open seat gap between the parties in 50 years, control of the senate is going to boil down to these 14 races, which are currently split right down the middle -- despite what polls and pundits might say.