2012’s Senate Battle Begins…Today

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.). Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/newshour/2823165891/">NewsHour</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The 2010 midterms are barely in the rear-view, the 111th Congress’ lame-duck session just begun, but already the handicapping for the 2012 congressional races is underway. As Politico reports today, senators up for re-election in 2012 are drumming up cash, laying the groundwork for their campaigns, mulling their party affiliations, or weighing whether to even bother running again.

For instance, a pair of longtime Senate Democrats, North Dakota’s Kent Conrad and New Mexico’s Jeff Bingaman, are considering hanging up their spurs and retiring, Politico reports. Then there are Senators Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, both of whom face questions about which party they’ll run with in 2012. McCaskill’s re-election challenge is a steep one, simply because she’s a Democrat in a state that didn’t back Obama in 2008 and voted in a Republican senator in the midterms. Now, McCaskill has made no statements suggesting she’d run as an independent in 2012, but she’s definitely been playing up her independent streak. “I think that’s the message that I got to make sure that Missourians understand: that I haven’t been afraid to differ from Harry Reid; I have not been afraid to take on Nancy Pelosi; I have not been afraid to tell the president he is wrong,” McCaskill said. “And that I have been the independent that I think most Missourians want.”

Meanwhile, Lieberman’s affiliation is always up in the air. Currently an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, Lieberman said three different scenarios—a GOP candidacy, Democratic candidacy, or even retirement—”are still alive.”

The stakes for 2012 are, of course, especially high with the GOP angling to win back the Senate, and thus control the entire Congress. Here’s more from Politico:

Leaders from both parties are urging a more aggressive strategy for senators to be more visible back home and calling on senators to tout the benefits of bills they’ve pushed. They’ve also been warned not to take any challenger—whether in a primary or general election—for granted.

Democrats clearly have the more challenging playing field, defending 21 incumbents, along with two independents who caucus with them. The GOP only has nine seats to worry about…

Republicans, who watched incumbents Lisa Murkowski and Bob Bennett lose primaries, seem more concerned about intraparty challenges going into 2012. Texas Sen. John Cornyn is already warning his nine incumbents to begin preparing for an influx of candidates who may challenge them in primaries.

Already, tea party activists are making noise about taking down moderate Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe in her 2012 primary.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate