| If it's as much a Democratic year as the three special election victories and current polling suggest, the utterly unthinkable not very long ago is conceivably in range: 60 Democratic seats in the Senate. There are a lot of races in play, and with a strong wind at our back, we could have a legitimate shot at it. But the only path to getting there is that some uphill races are going to have to come through. Races in states like Alaska, Mississippi, Kansas, North Carolina and Texas- Republican states with extremely well-financed and well-established incumbents- are going to be damn tough to pull off. Sixty is potentially within reach, but we in the progressive community are going to have to invest in a variety of different uphill gambles to give ourselves a chance.
I'm going to argue here that the Scott Kleeb race is one of the places we ought to make that gamble in. Nebraska is a Republican state, for sure, but so are the others I listed above. Scott's opponent Mike Johanns is a fairly well-liked former governor, so he will be tough to beat, but he's not an incumbent and compared to the well-established incumbents referenced above, he's no more formidable than any of them, and can't point to seniority, committee chairmanships, or pork he's brought home as the incumbent to bolster his case. The fact that Johanns was Bush's Agriculture Secretary, given the messy politics of the farm bill, isn't going to help him either.
The polling on the race also shows that Scott has a shot at this thing. One private poll I'm aware of shows only a 10-point gap, which would put this closer than Slattery in Kansas, Hagen in NC, and Noriega in TX, all races that many of us think are potentially winnable. And what that poll does not reflect is that young people in NE are registering Democratic by a two-to-one margin over Republicans, and that there is some serious outside organizational money being put into youth registration and turnout in NE.
That polling also doesn't reflect the real weaknesses in Johanns' record, starting with the farm bill fiasco, or the split in NE Republican politics between the more moderate Hagel Republicans and the right-wingers. And it doesn't reflect Scott's strength as a candidate- this is a guy who ran a competitive race in the 5th-most Republican congressional district in 2006.
I would add one final note here: unlike a lot of these Senate races, Scott is a grassroots, netroots kind of guy. I hope Lunsford in Kentucky, and Shaheen in New Hampshire, and Hagen in North Carolina, just to name three examples, all win their races this fall, because they are better than their Republican rightwing opponents and get Democrats closer to 60. But they are all more conservative, establishment candidates. Taking a gamble on Scott is worth doing because he relates to our values better than those kinds of candidates.
I will admit my bias here, with NE being my home state and Scott and his wife being friends, but I am pretty hard-nosed when it comes to politics, and I hope you will give Scott some coin before the June 30th quarterly deadline passes. He's a good fundraiser and is raising some decent money, but to get any DSCC help, he's going to have to have a big quarter. I think it's a gamble worth taking. |
