Congressional Democrats Confident of November Gains
By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff
This Sunday will mark exactly 100 days until Election Day on Nov. 4 — a political milestone of sorts that gave the leaders of the campaign organizations of House and Senate Democrats a pretext Wednesday to put an optimistic face on their prospects.
Charles E. Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), both said that their party was positioned to increase its numbers in November — and augment the significant gains that Democrats made two years ago in capturing legislative majorities.
“We expect to pick up a whole bunch of seats,” Schumer said of an election cycle in which the seats of 23 Republican senators, including five who are retiring, and just 12 Democratic senators are being contested.
Though Democrats now control both chambers of a Congress that most of the voting public views unfavorably, Schumer pointed to polling data that show more voters presently prefer a Democratic-run Congress to one headed by Republicans.
Schumer arranged 16 Republican-held Senate seats into three rough categories of competitiveness: five contests in which he said the Democratic candidates are ahead; six in which Democrats are “even or close”; and five that “not close yet, but they’re getting there.”
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