Gaze Into the Future with Aaron

Bringing the curtain down on the Alaskan Senate race puts the attention back on the Minnesota recount and the Georgia run-off. Martin is unlikely to triumph in the run-off, I think, but you never know, and Franken is going into the recount officially behind by two hundred or so votes. Anything could happen there, but I’m not getting my expectations up. Still, two things worth watching for the next couple of weeks. Realistically, though, I think we can expect the senate to have fifty-six Democrats, fifty-eight with Bernie Saunders and Joe Lieberman. So what about 2010?

It’s impossible to predict what will happen, obviously – too much depends upon President Obama’s performance and how the economy is doing in the lead up to the election. That being said, there are a number of Senators running for reelection who are already over seventy years old: McCain, obviously, but Mikulski, Shelby, Grassley, Bunning, Specter, Bennett and Voinovich are all older than dirt, too, and the election is still two years away.

Since I’m an Ohioan, I’m especially curious about what Voinovich is going to do. Mike DeWine was defeated in 2006 by Sherrod Brown, and Voinovich has long been one of the Republican caucus’s few remaining moderates. If the economy does turn around, he’ll be stuck between a rock and a hard place: going against the Republican party line will invite a primary challenge from the right, while not working with Democrats could endanger his chances if Ohio continues it’s progressive turn. Does Voinovich want to be vote number sixty that puts Obama’s Supreme Court picks on the bench? Or does he want to go back to Cleveland with his hat in his hand, explaining why he’s been preventing a popular president from enacting his agenda?

All of that, of course, supposes that Obama still is a popular president in 2010. If I had to guess, I’d say Republican gains are likely. The idea of a sixty plus Democratic majority in the Senate strikes me as tremendously unlikely. We’ll see.