This race is truly the republicans biggest embarrassment of the year. There are only two races that I currently have at Safe that have ever spent a day in my toss-up column. The first is Ohio Governor, which was/is a huge fail for democrats, and the other is this race......
And it's not just me..Nate Silver had Land at a 45% chance of victory in March..Sabato had this at only Leans D from the moment of Levin's retirement until this past August.
If Land had ran a good campaign, we would have a far more competitive race. Instead, she's run an absolutely terrible campaign, and a serious possibility of the race being called for Peters right at poll closing time is the punishment she'll have to endure.
With what you mentioned, I would ask you just to keep in mind that Michigan hasn't elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate since the Republicans had their "Republican Revolution" in 1994. And
that Republican pickup winner, Spencer Abraham, became unseated in 2000 by Michigan's junior U.S. senator, Debbie Stabenow (the first woman in the history of the state elected to the U.S. Senate; she won re-elections by even better margins in 2006 and 2012).
Abraham went on to become U.S. Secretary of Energy during the first term of Republican President George W. Bush. But, most interesting, is that Abraham's unseating came in a presidential election year that resulted in a Republican pickup of the White House. (A comparison is that Rick Santorum, also first elected in the midterm congressional wave of 1994, won re-election from Pennsylvania while Al Gore carried it with Election 2000.) In 2000 Michigan, Democratic presidential support was reduced by around 8 percentage points, and Republican senatorial support was reduced by about 10 percentage points.
There are some states—say, for example, which carried for 1976's incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford
and 2004's losing Democratic challenger John Kerry—which haven't elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate in a long time. Connecticut (not since 1982) and New Jersey (not since 1972) are strong examples of this. The Republican wave election catapulted their victory for the U.S. Senate seat in 1994 Michigan. Before that, it was with Robert P. Griffin's re-election in 1972, when Richard Nixon was re-elected the 37th president and won over Michigan among his 17 pickup states (after carriage of 32 from 1968). Griffin, who also a former Senate Minority Whip, ended up unseated by the soon-to-retire Carl Levin in 1978, the midterm year of 39th president Jimmy Carter's sole term in which the Democrats had a loss in seats with both houses of Congress and, yet, won a U.S. Senate pickup in Michigan.
Since Carl Levin, who is now 80, announced in 2013 that he would not seek re-election as the senior U.S. senator from Michigan, I expected the Democrats would hold this seat. And that is the case even if 2014 turns out to be a wave of a midterm.
