Nate Silver of the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog writes:
“The retirement of Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine is about as damaging to a party’s electoral prospects as these things get, turning a seat that Republicans were very likely to retain into one they will probably lose.”
The wind is most certainly in our sails, but there are a few pitfalls that still lay ahead.
As Silver references in his post, the likelihood of a third party candidate joining the race and dividing the Democratic vote is still fairly great. Some point to Maine’s 2010 gubernatorial race – which hoisted Republican Paul LePage to the top of state government – as an example of just how unpredictable a three-way race can be with an “idiosyncratic” and independent electorate.
Most troubling (but by this point, fairly obvious), is the fact that corporations and other Republican-backed financial interests are going to outspend us. It’s not even a question of if they’ll spend more cash to buy their Party Senate seats, it’s a question of by what factor they’ll out-fund Democrats.
Which is why we need to run smarter, more strategic campaigns and fight to elect better candidates than theirs. Period.
