As the 2014 midterm election campaign heats up, all indications are that Democrats are headed for a trouncing at the hands of Republicans.
Most political prognosticators now give the GOP a better-than-even chance of picking up the six seats it needs to win control of the Senate, and the party is expected to expand its majority in the House.
The Republican gains may not match those of the Tea Party wave of 2010 that cost Democrats the House and their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but it likely will be enough to make President Obama's final two years in office even more of a headache than the last four have been.
There are many factors fueling the GOP's advantage, but the most striking difference between 2014 and 2010 is that the economy is not one of them. Both the unemployment rate and layoffs are way down, but Democrats by and large are not getting the credit for it.
Democrats always knew 2014 was going to be a tough Senate election for a simple reason: They have to defend a bunch of seats held in deeply red states that Obama lost in the last two presidential elections.
The three seats the party has all but conceded to Republicans are in South Dakota, West Virginia, and Montana, where the departures of long-serving Sens. Tim Johnson (S.D.), Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.) and Max Baucus (who became ambassador to China) pretty much doomed Democrats' chances of winning. Democrats initially had hopes they could hold onto Montana, but their nominee, John Walsh, withdrew from the race last month amid a plagiarism scandal.
With those three gone, Democrats have incumbents up for re-election in another four states that Mitt Romney won in 2012: Alaska (Mark Begich), Arkansas (Mark Pryor), Louisiana (Mary Landrieu), and North Carolina (Kay Hagan).
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