While most of the Election Night attention will likely be on the presidential results, equally as consequential are the results in the U.S. House and Senate races.
Few expect the House of Representatives to switch from Republican to Democratic control, but the fate of the Senate, where Republicans hold a 54-seat majority, is much less certain, given at least seven seats which, leading up to Election Day, ABC categorized as pure tossups: Indiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, Democrats would have to net four new seats in order to regain the Senate majority, with a Vice President Tim Kaine, in his constitutional role as head of the Senate, providing the tie-breaking vote when needed.
At least two expert electoral prognosticators, nonpartisans Charlie Cook and Larry Sabato, have predicted exactly that scenario, in which Election Night ends with a Clinton victory and the Senate map split down the middle, 50-50.
“We’re forecasting Democrats to win control of the Senate, but only by the slimmest of margins,” Sabato wrote.
Republicans have had to play defense in more than twice the number of states Democrats have: 24 states to Democrats’ 10.
But as the clock ticked toward the closing of polls, both the Democratic and Republican Senate campaign committees expressed confidence that they’d taste victory by the end of the night.
One of the big questions is how candidates will fare with two historically unpopular presidential candidates-- Clinton for the Democrats and Donald Trump for the Republican -- at the top of the ticket. Neither side was willing to concede that the top of the ticket would affect their races.
“Our campaigns and allies didn’t just rely on Trump bringing down the party. We made strong cases to disqualify our opponents on their own records – defunding Planned Parenthood, supporting outsourcers, opposing student loan relief and much more. The result was remarkable stability in our races,” Sadie Weiner, the communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in an email.
Andrea Bozek, the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said, “Democrats had a fatal and fundamental flaw in their plan to take control of the Senate: their efforts did not rely on having better candidates running better races than their opponents. While Republicans have worked nonstop since day one of this campaign to build nimble, data-driven campaigns, Democrats have relied on political gravity from the presidential race to carry them across the finish line.”
from ABC News: Politics http://ift.tt/2eJro3O
0 Response to "Inside the Battle for the US Senate"
Posting Komentar