Dems fret: 'Every state is in play'

“If there’s anybody in this building that doesn’t tell you they’re more worried about elections today, you absolutely should slap them,” said Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

Republican Scott Brown rode a wave of voter discontent to defeat Democrat Martha Coakley in the race for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat. Republicans moved quickly to capitalize Wednesday, with National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (R-Texas) telling POLITICO that he’s approaching possible candidates who passed up his initial entreaties to join the 2010 field.

“People, I think, are going to sense opportunities that they didn’t sense” Tuesday, Cornyn said.

Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called the Massachusetts race a “wake-up call” for his party and said his colleagues were in a “reflective” mood at a private lunch Wednesday.

Several Democratic incumbents said later that none of the 19 Democratic seats up this year are safe — and that fundamental parts of the agenda need to be re-examined to win over voters back home.

“Every state is now in play,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who faces the toughest reelection battle of her career — most likely against wealthy Republican Carly Fiorina.

Boxer is pushing a cap-and-trade bill to control greenhouse gases, but her counterpart from California, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said a “large cap-and-trade bill isn’t going to go ahead at this time.”

“In my view, when people are earning, when their home is secure, when their children are going to school and they’re relatively satisfied with their life, then [when] there’s a problem like health care, they want it solved,” Feinstein said. “It doesn’t threaten them. The size of this bill threatens them, and that’s one of the problems that has to be straightened out.”

Asked if red-state Democrats up in 2010 and 2012 should be nervous about the electorate, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) told POLITICO, “Oh, yeah.”

“I think part of the problem is the agenda itself,” said Conrad, who doesn’t face voters again until 2012. Instead of spending so much time on health care reform, Conrad said Democrats should have focused first on reducing the national debt and a bipartisan energy bill — and that President Barack Obama should have done a better job of explaining that the economic situation he inherited was “far worse” than he’d originally thought.

Other Democrats argued that they mishandled the health care bill, whose prospects have been seriously diminished with Brown’s victory.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), also up in 2012, said Democrats made a mistake by allowing bipartisan negotiations in the Senate Finance Committee to extend into the fall, saying that the lag time allowed the GOP to mischaracterize Democrats’ attempts to reform the health care system.

“What we didn’t do right in the past, I want to make sure we do right in the future,” said Brown, one of the more liberal members of the Democratic Caucus. “The health care bill should have been passed in September. There was much more public support, and the slow walk of the Finance Committee caused all this opposition by all the mischaracterizations of what the bill was about.”

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the more conservative members of the caucus, said some in the Democratic Party were “overreaching” and “advocating more government” than her constituents want.

She blamed House Democrats for advancing liberal proposals that skewed the public’s perception of more moderate measures moving through the Senate.

“Senators represent broad constituencies,” she said. “With all due respect to members of the House, their constituencies are very narrow views, very homogenous usually. Mine aren’t.”

But Democratic leaders urged calm Wednesday, even as they told candidates to prepare for battle in the next 10 months.

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said a January special election in Massachusetts isn’t a “bellwether for everything.”

“We can see how the tide can turn in 10 months,” Menendez said, adding that he plans to have a “forensic exam of all our candidates and campaigns.”

Menendez said the party has already learned one lesson from Coakley’s losing campaign in Massachusetts: Democrats have got to be aggressive, defining both themselves and opponents early on — and frame the debate well before Republicans do.

Menendez also said his party has to “find a way to engage independent voters in a meaningful way,” and he suggested that a focus on Obama’s proposed “financial crisis responsibility fee” might be a way to do that.

And, he said, Democrats “cannot give up that mantle” of change.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who faces voters in the fall, said his state doesn’t take its “cue” from voters in Massachusetts. But he said that all candidates have to take their races seriously.

“Anyone that takes any race for granted shouldn’t be in politics, at any time,” Feingold said. “To me, that’s foreign language — I take every single race very seriously.

Democrats know that independents’ frustration with the economy and the lack of progress on legislative solutions are hardly limited to Massachusetts.

“People in our states want us to deal with the economy, with jobs,” said Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin. “All of us are going to be subject to that type of anger.”

And Republicans may not be protected just because they have an “R” after their names.

“I think everybody has everything to worry about,” said Arizona Sen. John McCain, who is up in 2010 and could face conservative former Rep. J.D. Hayworth in a primary this year.
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