Political Horse Race Season Opens

The campaign season never really ends. Both parties are busy counting competitive races in the House and Senate, recruiting candidates and raising money for next year's midterms elections.

Democrats are looking to next year's contests to break a streak that has seen them lose ground in the last two congressional elections. Republicans are looking to break a longer historical trend of the president's party almost always losing seats in Congress in the middle of the president's second term.

Bush's popularity is suffering, with an approval rating in the mid-40s, a very low number for a president just 100 days or so into his second term. The GOP-led Congress is less popular, with a 35 percent approval rating, according to a recent CBS News poll. The nation is still very evenly divided politically. Rhodes Cook, the nonpartisan elections analyst, reports on his Web site that Bush's 2.5-percentage point advantage over Kerry in the popular vote last year was the narrowest margin for a re-elected president in the history of the American presidency.

Democrats won't say it publicly, but some boast privately that they have an outside chance of winning back majorities in the House and Senate.

Republicans in Washington argue that the results of the 2002 and 2004 elections suggest a historic political re-alignment. However unhappy the electorate may be with some of the GOP's stands on issues such as Social Security, at least the party has taken a stand, Republicans say, leaving Democrats as nothing more than the party of "no."

Against that backdrop of the national political climate and historical trends, here's a brief look at specific seats that might be in play for next year's election. For this column, I talked to both the Republican and Democratic Senate campaign committees and reviewed recent analyses by three nonpartisan elections analysts -- Charlie Cook, Stuart Rothenberg and the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato.

The Senate

Democrats argue that last year's four-seat Republican gain was an anomaly. Five Democrats from the South -- the GOP's strongest region -- just happened to retire in the same year. Republicans won each of those seats. Without the South, Republicans would have lost a seat to the Democrats.

This year, the playing field is more evenly distributed. And Republicans are at a slight disadvantage, defending 18 seats compared to the 15 that Democrats are defending.

The most competitive seats next year likely will be two currently held by Democrats and two currently held by Republicans.

First-term Democrat Bill Nelson from Florida is seen as vulnerable because his state has trended Republican. In Minnesota, Democrat Mark Dayton is retiring after one term. His seat is considered competitive, with a number of strong candidates from both parties mulling the race.

On the GOP side, incumbent Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania will probably have a tough race against Democratic state Treasurer Robert Casey Jr., a moderate who opposes abortion and advocates the rights of gun-owners. Casey has polled favorably against Santorum.