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Alaska is trouble. Stevens is not strong, is steeped in corruption associated with the "bridge to nowhere." Colorado is NOT trending our way. That could be changed by the right candidate---but as of now, I don't see him. Oregon???? Yeah, that's a conservative basion. I already said Maine would stay with Snowe, which is in essence a Dem vote.

So right there, you have three more "leans Dem" seats (56) and that depends on Landrieu not losing, or it's 57 with Collins and Snow and Voinovich among the "Rebpublicans." That's 60. No, it's not all that tough for the Dems---and we haven't even hit the recession talk yet, nor the utter absence of McCain "coattails" as a candidate, or the "Obama factor."

Better brace yourself.

So Gordon Smith, who has been elected and reelected by fairly comfortable margins, will lose in OR because the state is too liberal (only 47.19% for Bush), but SD (only 38.44% for Kerry) isn’t too conservative for Tim Johnson, who was reelected by only a couple of hundred (illegal) votes in 2002?

And Colorado is trending away from us, despite giving the GOP presidential candidates 53.06% in 1988 (below Bush’s national average), 35.87% in 1992 (again below Bush’s national average), 45.805 in 1996 (above Dole’s national average), 50.75% in 2000 (above Bush’s national average) and 51.69% in 2004 (again above Bush’s national average)? The GOP had a terrible 2006 in Colorado, but that was mainly because the GOP had a terrible 2006 in just about every state. I think that Colorado is a competitive state that leans GOP and which likely will vote for McCain over Obama or Hillary by a larger percentage than it voted for Bush over Kerry. In an open seat race between a liberal Democrat such as Udall and a conservative Republican such as Schaffer, my money is on the conservative Republican.

If 2008 is a repeat of 2006, then you’re right and we’ll lose all of the states that you mentioned, but I see no reason to believe that it will be another 2006. If I had to predict right now, I would guess that only two or three of VA, NM, CO, NH, MN, AK and OR will go Democrat (I listed them in order of Dem odds), and that only one or two of LA, SD, IA and NJ will go Republican. That would be a net pickup of between 0 and 2 seats for the Democrats.

If we all believe that we will lose, then we will lose. It’s one of the main reasons why we lost so big in 2006, when conservatives “stayed home in droves.”