As election nears, Senate control remains hazy

Just over a month before the midterm election, control of the U.S. Senate remains surprisingly up for grabs as Democrats parlay a financial edge and other advantages to battle history and a strong anti-Obama tide.

Republicans still enjoy the more secure position. The GOP is almost certain to win open-seat contests in Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia, getting them halfway to the six seats needed to win a majority and gain control.

But the party's candidates have yet to put away any of the 10 or so most competitive Senate races, buoying Democratic hopes they can hang on to at least one chamber of Congress despite what appeared, at the start of this election year, to be long odds.

In Louisiana, Arkansas and Alaska, where President Obama's approval ratings are particularly low, Democratic incumbents have kept their uphill races within striking distance. It helps that the candidates - Mary L. Landrieu, Mark Pryor, and Mark Begich - come from prominent political families, making them familiar brand names in their respective states. But even in North Carolina, first-term Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan, a prime Republican target, has clung to a small but consistent lead in recent voter surveys.

Part of the reason is money. Democrats, unexpectedly, have had more of it this year than Republicans. And part of it is mechanics - allocating resources, targeting voters, getting them to the polls - which national Democrats have excelled at over the last decade.

In that time, Democrats have defeated 12 sitting GOP senators. Republicans have ousted just three Democratic incumbents, two of them in the last midterm election under President Obama, in 2010.

Historically, the midterm vote has been a referendum on the president. There are three typical outcomes for the party in the White House, said Charlie Cook, a longtime nonpartisan campaign analyst: "Bad; really bad; and really, really bad."

To a great extent Democrats are simply fighting for the least bad result, which would be clinging to the Senate by the narrowest of margins. (Republicans are expected to modestly pad their majority in the House and could lose a handful of governor's seats.)

One time-honored tradition is candidates distancing themselves from the unpopular president of their own party; some Democrats this year have gone so far as to criticize Obama in their TV ads.

"I disagree with him on guns, coal" and the Environmental Protection Agency, says a skeet-shooting Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky's Democratic secretary of state, who faces Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a fiercely fought contest.

The GOP started the year with a distinct advantage in the Senate fight. Democrats have been forced to defend far more seats, thanks to their gains when Obama was elected in 2008, and a number of retirements in conservative-leaning states. Of the most competitive races, all but a handful are in places that Obama lost in 2012, several by landslide margins.