We're breathing a collective sigh of relief around here over the Delaware senate race, now that the GOP has chosen a batshit insane candidate who has no chance of winning (assuming that Chris Coons doesn't do a Coakley, that is - but he won't, because the Coakley debacle happened in this election cycle and is still fresh in everyone's mind).
Still, the cries that this makes it highly unlikely to impossible that the GOP would take over the Senate are, to my mind, misplaced. First because the GOP never really had a great shot at doing so; most projections even in the dark days of August had them coming up 2-3 seats short.
But I go to thinking this morning that there may a second reason: It's possible that the GOP would just as soon not take over the Senate this time around.
There are several reasons why I think this might be the case. The main one is that the long-term Republican strategy is to take back the White House in 2012, and everything else is secondary to that goal. For all the attacks they've made on the Democrats since Nov 2008, the focus has been on President Obama far more than on individual senators and congressmen; many of the attacks in the current campaign have been along the lines of sending Republicans to Congress so they can "stop Obama" or "reverse Obama's programs" or "Obama is a socialist/Marxist/Muslim."
So the GOP definitely wants to take over the House. With control of the House, they can stop the government (as some are already threatening to do), defund health care (or try to), and generally make all kinds of mischief with the goal in mind that El Lardo set for them in the beginning: To make Obama fail.
But if they also take over the Senate, the country will expect them to actually DO things, not just stop things. The Republicans have made such a big deal about how Congress is supposed to be in charge of the country (when a Democrat is president, that is) that the country will expect them to follow up on it. True, they can always force Obama to veto legislation and then point to that as the reason they couldn't get anything done, and therefore the country should put a Republican in the White House.
But even that requires that the Republicans actually reveal their agenda. This is something that they have, so far in this election, been reluctant to do - for the very good reason that most of the country does not agree with the things the GOP wants to do. (Keeping tax cuts for the wealthy, for example.)
In addition, compare the 2010 and 2012 Senate elections: In 2010, 37 seats are up (the higher number is because several seats are held by temporary appointees), 19 Dem and 18 GOP, an even split. In 2012, 33 seats will be decided - 23 Dem and 10 GOP. The Democrats will have many more seats to defend in 2012, and all other things being equal (which they are not), the odds are better for the GOP to take the Senate in 2012.
So it makes more sense for the GOP to devote more of its resources toward taking the House (along with state-level offices) this time, and focus on the Senate in the next election.
Still, I am sure the GOP wouldn't have minded getting the Senate in 2010 - except the Tea Party came along. O'Donnell is only the latest teabagger to knock off an establishment Republican in the primary; eight or possibly nine (NH results are still up in the air as I write this) NRSC-backed candidates have lost to the 'baggers. While the establishment has grudgingly figured it could live with a Rand Paul, the howls and the groans that greeted Sharron Angle's win over the "chicken lady," not to mention the shock over O'Donnell's win in Delaware, make clear that the GOP leadership is not thrilled with the prospect of having to work with the truly batshit insane.
Another factor that the batshit insane, should they win their Senate seats, are possibly more likely to back Jim DeMint than Mitch McConnell for the leadership. While McConnell has backed the NRSC choices, DeMint has been collecting political IOUs from the batshit crowd, leading to speculation, which DeMint has not really denied, that he might challenge McConnell for the leadership.
I am going out on a limb at this point, but I have a hunch that DeMint will not challenge McConnell this time around, if the GOP still hold a minority in the Senate. For one thing, DeMint probably wouldn't have the votes. And I think DeMint would rather wait until he can aim for majority leader and have real power.
In other words, McConnell is better off, personally, with a GOP minority in the Senate for the next two years. He postpones a challenge from DeMint, he gets to play at keeping Obama from doing anything while avoiding all responsibility for having to propose anything himself. And he expects that the GOP voters will start to realize that the batshit insane can't win elections, meaning that they will look to his candidates rather than to DeMint's.
As a practical matter, this by no means says we should relax when it comes to the Senate. Even one or two batshit senators would make an already disfunctional body that much worse. But it makes all the important to make sure we keep the House. And the state houses, of course, which determine how the House districts will be laid out for the next 10 years.