Who will be the next new Senator in each state?

[Brittain33]

SC - probably still in utero

[Brittain33]

This is a fun exercise, but think of it this way, how many of the senators elected since 1999 would have been on our lists if we'd done it then? Not many, I think. Lindsey Graham, yes, perhaps Mark Pryor and John Cornyn, but what about Martinez, Dole, Chambliss, Tester, McCaskill, Klobuchar...?

Either we hadn't heard about them, or we'd have thought the seat would have gone to the other party (Mark Kennedy?), or they seemed on a different trajectory.  Bush recruited a lot of unlikely candidates who are now senators.

[Brittain33]

That is just absurd on so many levels.  How can running ads make up 11 points by itself?

Well, if you believed the polls showing Hagen and Dole closely matched and swapping leads right before Liddy started a barrage of ads leading to the current situation...

[Brittain33]

He wasn't popular any more in 2005, either.

This is where the quality of the Democrat becomes an issue--Feinstein vs. the two guys who tore each other to shreds in the primary in '06--and the divergence between federal and state voting patterns.

[Brittain33]

I recognize the folly in predicting these things, since often candidates come out of nowhere, and in other cases it may be decades before either of the state's incumbents are gone, but:

AL - Troy King

Wasn't he involved in a gay sex scandal? Or is that going away?

[Brittain33]

Jo Ann Emerson is the GOP's obvious choice in Missouri, don't you think?

If Bond retires, she'd probably be the GOP's first pick for that seat. If she doesn't run, they can always ask Matt Blunt.

She always struck me as a bit of a lightweight.

[Brittain33]

If she looked like Barbara Mikulski, would you say the same thing? On the basis of her body of work as a legislator, I'd say she's been very effective. IIRC, she was one of the legislators who balked at the Medicare expansion boondoggle.

It's a reaction to two things: her awkward self-aggrandizement in press releases (she talked a little too effusively about how people loved her where she was) and the trend among Congressional widows who then rise to their husband's seats. It's guilt by association with Mary Bono Mack, if anything. I admit that the first is just pique on my part.

[Brittain33]

Note that both Lois Capps and Doris Matsui can be included in that category.  And Niki Tsongas can probably also be included.

Indeed they can, and in the case of Capps and Tsongas, I had them in mind.