Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics has two nice charts of the
36 Gubernatorial and 33 Senate races on the ballot in 2006. He also has a few useful paragraphs on which party is at an advantage or disadvantage (GOP advantage for the Senate races, and slight disadvantage for gubernatorial races). He writes: "All in all it should be a very entertaining midterm, especially given what happened last Tuesday and knowing that, at least for those incumbents in the Senate [Mark Dayton in Minnesota, Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, Maria Cantwell in Washington, Bill Nelson in Florida]. This will be their first time standing for election after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001."
At first glance, an unpromising target list on the Senate side (gubernatorial races are much harder to predict this far out). Whether the GOP gains any seats at all will probably depend wholly on recruitment. There are no obvious Dem. retirements other than Byrd, and don’t count on that. And the more likely retirements are in Democratic states. As for recruitment, we didn’t do a great job in 2004. Why would things be different in ’06, with Bush running out of steam? ’04 was our big chance, and we didn’t do badly -- but due to recruitment failures, we certainly failed to maximize.
More interesting will be the governor’s races. Both parties have several governorships that they shouldn’t.