Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

This final overview of the political landscape finds the Nov. 7 elections shaping up as a collision between the Republican Party's fundraising and voter turnout proficiency with an ever-expanding field of competitive seats and a consistent decline in the GOPs support among voters on issues across the board. The result is a Congress up for grabs, and an energized Democratic Party trying hard not to seem overconfident. ...

... As of Oct. 27, CQ’s individual assessments of all 435 House races showed Democrats seriously contesting Republican holds on 72 seats (31 percent of the party’s current total) with seven of those races already leaning toward a Democratic takeover and 18 more considered genuine tossups — the result of a combination of Republican political weaknesses and the Emanuel team’s success at growing the roster of competitive Democratic challengers, many in districts that the party had not contested in years. By contrast, only 21 Democratic seats were in play, and only a handful appeared seriously at risk. The bottom line is that the Republicans are now ahead at least marginally in only 207 races, meaning that even if they hold on to all of those (which won’t happen) they must win 11 of the 18 tossups to retain power. The Democrats are now ahead in 210 races — nine more than the number of seats they have now — so if they hold all those leads they will need to win just eight of the tossups to gain control.

As they have throughout the campaign, the Democrats face their more daunting task in the Senate: They must gain a net of six seats to take control — an all-the-more-unlikely prospect just two years after they lost four seats. But their quest has now put them within striking distance.

Republicans claim the immovable object: a barricade of structural political advantages that, party leaders argue, will keep their majorities intact even as the public mood toward GOP rule has soured.

The biggest such bulwark — and the one casting the most doubt over the prospect of a historic Democratic sweep — is the massive voter turnout organization that Democratic strategists lose sleep over. Spearheaded by Ken Mehlman, the Rove protégé who now chairs the Republican National Committee (RNC), the mobilization centers on a database containing the names and personal preferences, gleaned from publicly available data sources, of millions of Republican voters. Between now and Election Day they will be subjected to repeated entreaties to get out and vote. The effort will culminate with the latest iteration of the Rove-Mehlman brainchild, the 72-Hour Project, a turnout blitz over the final three days of the campaign.

Also building the barricade is the Republican Party’s mastery of fundraising: The RNC and the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House campaign arm, have both greatly outdone their partisan counterparts — the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — in overall receipts. Only the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, run by Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, has taken in more money than its GOP analog, the National Republican Senatorial Committee. ...

...Democrats, though, assert that the supposedly immovable object protecting Republican congressional majorities has been eroded and undermined by an overwhelming demand for change among the majority of Americans, who tell national pollsters they have lost faith with Washington’s ruling party.

This, Democrats say, is because of an almost-ceaseless series of failures, frustrations and foibles in the two years since Bush won re-election and declared that the victory he won with 51 percent of the popular vote was a mandate to pursue his agenda and execute his open-ended commitment of U.S. military forces to Iraq — and since the declaration of a permanent Republican majority by the man who was then House majority leader, Tom DeLay, whose own ethics morass drove him from Congress in June and continues to contribute to his party’s travails even now.

Setting the stage for all Republican problems is Iraq. With an unsubstantiated original justification for the war — deposed dictator Saddam Hussein’s supposed caches of weapons of mass destruction and ties to the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 — U.S. troops find themselves grappling with a fierce domestic insurgency, the infiltration of international jihadists and the roiling possibility of an outright civil war between sectarian factions already inflicting mind-numbing atrocities on one another. ...