Updated March 4, 2010
If the election were held today: + 7 Republican seats
See our 2010 primary and filing deadline calendar here.
Only major candidates, as determined by the Crystal Ball, are listed below. Candidates are listed in order of their primary chances, with frontrunners at top. Probable candidates who have yet to announce are listed in italics and incumbents seeking reelection are listed in bold.
Note on TX-S: Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison ran for Governor and has said she will resign her Senate seat but has not announced when and may still change her mind. The race Leans R if it happens.
March 4th, 2010
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The 2010 primary season is under way, which at the congressional and gubernatorial levels is often no more than a quiet backwater in America’s electoral process. In recent years, only a few such incumbents have lost their bids for renomination, and only a handful more have had to break a sweat.
No sitting senator or governor [...]
February 15th, 2010
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Anybody who says Evan Bayh is retiring because he feared being defeated by ex-Sen. Dan Coats is dead wrong. Bayh was the clear favorite in that match-up, and Coats has been damaged by the lobbying and residency revelations about him over the last couple of weeks.
And that’s why this is such a setback for [...]
February 4th, 2010
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The Crystal Ball was the first to project that Republicans had a good chance to pull Democrats all the way down to 52 Senate seats in November. (See our latest Senate article here). So we’re certainly not hesitant to predict big Republican gains. But any serious suggestion that the GOP can win outright the 51 [...]
January 28th, 2010
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For Democrats, it is officially time to worry. The party’s gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey last fall could be partially explained away as the states’ usual off-year swing to the “out” party.
But Republican Scott Brown’s come-from-behind victory last week in the special Massachusetts Senate election for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat is something else [...]
January 25th, 2010
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With the decision by Attorney General Beau Biden (D) not to run, the Crystal Ball has just changed its rating on the Delaware Senate race from Toss-Up to Leans Republican. Congressman Mike Castle (R) is now the favorite to win the seat of interim Sen. Ted Kaufman, formerly held by Vice President Joe Biden. This [...]
January 21st, 2010
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With Tuesday night’s upset by Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the GOP gained more than just a 41st vote to disrupt the Obama agenda. As attention turns to the midterm elections in November, the Republican Party has strong momentum. A few months ago, even GOP leaders said that taking over the Senate was a pipe [...]
December 3rd, 2009
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As the most recent Crystal Ball ratings showed, Democrats are benefiting from the equal split of Senate seats up in 2010. Even though Democrats have a large majority of senators, it just so happens that both Democrats and Republicans are defending 19 seats each in the upcoming midterm election, which makes it exceedingly difficult [...]
December 3rd, 2009
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Editor’s Note: Senior columnist Alan Abramowitz is concerned about the Senate from a progressive prospective. He has offered this commentary, with which liberals will surely agree and conservatives will beg to differ.
A few months ago, many progressive Democrats were elated when Al Franken was finally declared the winner of the disputed Senate [...]
November 19th, 2009
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Now that we’ve put the 2009 races to bed, we can start to focus heavily on 2010. Since our last update in June (available here), some critical Senate contests have undergone a transformation of sorts. We still don’t know the status of them all, since a few critical candidacy decisions remain to be made. [...]
October 8th, 2009
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DELAWARE- SENATE: Republicans got just the break they were hoping for in the Delaware Senate race. Republican Rep. Mike Castle will run, challenging the Vice President’s son, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden (D). Biden would have defeated any other Republican, but Castle is leading Biden in early polls. The Vice President has great sway, [...]
August 13th, 2009
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Like almost everything else in Congress, Senate votes on Supreme Court nominations have become much more polarized along party lines in recent years. That was certainly true of the recent vote on President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. While all 59 Democrats who were present voted to confirm Sotomayor, 31 of 40 Republicans voted [...]
June 25th, 2009
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So much has happened recently in many of the 2010 Senate contests that you would think we were in the middle of the election year. We’re still seventeen months out from Election Day, yet the battles are turning white hot in many states.
Let’s take a look at [...]
February 26th, 2009
Two weeks ago we discussed the basic framework for 2010’s thirty-six Senate elections. Last week we reviewed the seventeen Democratic Senate seats that are on the ballot in the midterm year. Now let’s see how the nineteen Republican-held seats for 2010 are shaping up in the initial stages:
Robert Bennett (R-UT): Bennett should [...]
February 19th, 2009
Last week in the Crystal Ball, we looked at the historical background of off-year Senate elections and laid the groundwork for the earliest possible projection of the 36 contests on the ballot in 2010. This week we call the Senate roll among sitting Democrats to see who appears safe and who might be in [...]
February 12th, 2009
It’s never too early for the Crystal Ball to look ahead to the next election. But unlike the Wizard of Oz’s phony orb (when he’s still the Kansas medicine man who peeks into Dorothy’s purse for photos of Auntie Em), we try to run an honest Ball. That means we have to tell you [...]
Copyright (c) 2010 Larry Sabato and the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Larry J. Sabato's Crystal Ball. All rights reserved.
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