Tom Schaller over at Five Thirty Eight takes a long look at the possibility of a Republican taking the Senate seat previously held by Barack Obama. He cites an article written over at the Rothenberg Political Report notes that a seat held by someone who has gone to the White House (either President or VP) has flipped 50% of the time, but since the numbers involved are pretty small it is hard to know what that means. But before he gets to looking at the landscape of the Senate race in IL, he stops in Delaware first:
Let’s start with Delaware. As Gonzales points out, the only real possibility for a Republican winning there is if the state’s at-large congressman, Mike Castle, decides to risk his House seat to take on Vice President Biden’s son and current attorney general, Beau. But even that would be a tough challenge for Castle, because the young Biden will have not only the family name and the White House to bank on, but he will be a returning Iraq vet. If Castle runs, whatever happens you’d have to give him props for having the guts to take on the Bidens.
Am I the only one who is tired of hearing this story? Castle hasn’t decided on anything, and if Beau is to be in play here, the thing he needs to decide first is that he is going all in on the family business. A decision that it is nowhere clear to me (or some others I’ve spoken to) that he has made. Nor does this take into account that the political landscape here frequently is Castle vs Biden, if only by proxy. But I think that the thing that makes me really tired of hearing this over and over is the astonishing lack of any other names in the ring for this Senate seat for Delaware. I suspect the lack of other names is both about “whose turn is it now” AND that there may not be anyone beyond Beau who could credibly run for this seat.
There is nothing here that advances the story, and it is interesting that for one of the few Senate seats a R could win in 2010 that we’ve been stuck with the same narrative for so long.