Lucky 13 in 2014? The campaign chairman for Senate Republicans floated on Friday the possibility of picking up as many as 13 seats in November, a prospect as lofty as it seems unlikely. [READ: GOP Senate Hopes Wont Be Defined Until Summer] Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., said when he became chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee more than a year ago he envisioned the party had the opportunity to take over between five and seven seats. Speaking on a conference call Friday afternoon, he upped the ante to between 10 and 13. In order to turnover more than a dozen seats, Republicans would need to convert open seat races in the red states of West Virginia, South Dakota and Montana, sweep the battlegrounds of Arkansas, Alaska, Louisiana and North Carolina, while adding the longer-shots of Michigan, Iowa, Colorado and New Hampshire. And even then they’d need to be blessed by something close to miracles in Oregon and Minnesota. That’s 13. All while holding their turf in Kentucky and Georgia, of course. Moran’s bigger number underlines the increasing amount of optimism Republicans are displaying as the Senate playing field widens seven months from the general election. “The map and opportunities have expanded dramatically in a year,” Moran said. But 13? That’d be the equivalent to batting a thousand. Not a wave, but a super tsunami, as Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus put it earlier this week. [ALSO: The 7 Senate Races That Will Determine 2014 Control] That’s also what makes it so unlikely. According to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, there’s been a double-digit seat gain by a party just eight times since 1914, the start of popular vote Senate elections. The last time was 1994, when the Republicans netted 10 Senate seats on the back of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. Republicans picked up 12 Senate seats in 1980 during the election of President Ronald Reagan. But one must go back 56 years to find the last time a party gained at least 13 Senate seats on a single night. It happened during the sixth-year itch of President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 when Democrats flipped 15 seats. Is 2014 shaping up to be as rough for Democrats as 1958 was for Republicans? “A lot of things would have to break right for the Republicans to net double-digit Senate seats,” says Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter. “At this point, I still think control of the Senate is pretty much a coin flip. While the upper range of gains for Republicans is high, I would say Republicans have really only firmly put away one seat, South Dakota.” Count it as one down, 12 to go.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 13:03:18 +0000