Senate Retirements Point to Dems' Uphill Election Fight

The surprise twin retirements announced this week by Democratic Senators Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota cap a dismal month for Democrats. Early in December, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved to stem the tide of lower-chamber retirements after four veteran moderate, so-called Blue Dogs announced that they would not run for re-election. Then, instead of a retirement, another Blue Dog — this time Alabama freshman Parker Griffith — jumped ship to the Republican Party. Only a year after celebrating an expected six GOP Senate retirements in 2010 and nearly a dozen in the House (that number is now up to 14), Democrats suddenly find themselves increasingly on the defensive.

And the stakes couldn't be much higher. If you thought health care reform and climate change legislation were tough to get through with a 60-40 advantage in the Senate, the emerging electoral landscape pretty much guarantees that the Dems will lose their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and see their 41-seat majority in the House significantly narrowed. Of course, with 10 months to go before Election Day, Democrats can at least hope that by then the bitter fight over health care will be a distant memory and the economy will have rebounded. Republicans are betting that both issues, along with the growth in the size of the Federal Government and deficit, will still very much be liabilities for Dems, and so far polling shows that independents are more inclined to believe the Republicans.

In the eyes of many political observers, Dorgan and Dodd were simply bowing to reality. They faced long odds of winning re-election in their home states — though Dems believe they now have a much better chance at holding on to Connecticut than North Dakota. Dodd, as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, had unpopular bailouts to contend with and a scandal over allegedly special treatment on his mortgage; Dorgan likely faced a tough battle against a popular GOP governor in a Republican-leaning state that disapproves of his vote for health care reform by a 2-to-1 margin. But there's little doubt that each had also tired of the partisan sniping that has come to dominate Capitol Hill. According to CongressDaily, one of the reasons that Dorgan, who ranked sixth in the Democratic leadership, decided to leave is that he was unhappy with how the Senate was being run and "how it's just not the same."

Certainly, Congress is as polarized now as it has ever been. With the retirements last year of longtime Republicans John Warner of Virginia, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Mississippi's Trent Lott, there's hardly a Republican left who is willing to reach out across the aisle. The punishment for such comity is tea-party declarations of being a traitor: witness Lindsey Graham's second censure this week by a South Carolina County Republican Party for his bipartisan work on climate change. On the Democratic side, the death of Massachusetts' Ted Kennedy, the retirement of John Breaux of Louisiana and the loss of South Dakota's Tom Daschle, along with the bitter wounds from years of being in the minority, has left the party less open to cooperation. "The Senate is a nasty and brutish place now compared to anything I've seen in 40 years, and it's still better than the House," says Norm Ornstein, author of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track. "We see more and more people in their late 50s early 60s, who in years past would've been moving into the prime of their careers, decide to leave."

Even relations within the parties have gotten testy of late. On Tuesday, Pelosi, in answering a question about President Obama's unfulfilled promise to open up health reform negotiations to a new level of transparency, took a swipe at the "number of things that [Obama] was for on the campaign trail" that have been left undone. Senator Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, ripped into her colleague Ben Nelson of Nebraska for "horse-trading" his vote on health care and called for the special Medicaid funding provisions he won in return for his support to be removed from the final legislation.

The best-case scenario for the Democrats in the fall is that they keep all five vulnerable seats in the Senate and lose only 15 seats in the House. There may even be a shot at picking up a couple of new seats to help offset any losses. After all, House Republicans are defending nine open seats (which John McCain either lost or won with less than 60% of the vote in 2008), while Democrats are defending seven seats (which Obama either lost or won with less than 60% of the vote). And in the Senate, Dems have strong candidates for the open GOP seats in Ohio, New Hampshire, Missouri and Kentucky.

The most that Republicans can hope for is to regain control of the House and pick up a net gain of five seats in the Senate. But in order to achieve this, Republicans must unify their fractured party, and given the spate of conservative primary challenges, from Mark Rubio in Florida to Rand Paul in Kentucky, this will be no easy task. The tea-party movement is also making life difficult for new recruits like Griffith, who after switching parties now faces a tough primary. And the GOP is plagued by cash woes. After spending heavily in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races last November, the Republican National Committee has $8.7 million left in the bank — the worst balance in a decade — compared with the Democratic National Committee's $13 million. The National Republican Campaign Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the House, was in even worse shape, with just $4.3 million on hand at the end of November and more than $2 million in debt (their Democratic counterparts ended November with a net of $12.7 million). In the Senate, Republicans ended the third quarter with $7.3 million, compared with $11.9 million for the Dems.

Yet for all the talk of polarization in Washington, a bad 2010 cycle could actually hasten the return of the center, says Stu Rothenberg, editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report, which tracks congressional races. Senate Republican victories in Illinois, North Dakota and Delaware could usher in three new GOP moderates. And the enormous Democratic classes of 2006 and 2008 will be up for re-election in 2012 and 2014. "If 2010 is a bad year, they're going to look at that," Rothenberg says, "and they're going to go, 'This is not the image of the Democratic Party I want to run on,' which could help move the party to the center."