Bill Clinton said Friday that Republicans hoping to retake the Senate in November might come close, but no cigar.
“I think we have a slightly better than 50 percent chance to hold the Congress. I still think we’ve got a chance win in Georgia and Kentucky. We’re now competitive in Kansas. And we have to, I think, we’ve got a great chance to win in North Carolina,” the former president said on PBS’s NewsHour.
That puts him marginally at odds with the New York Times’ predictive model, LEO, which has the Republicans at slightly better than 50 percent.
But the Times’ Nate Cohn does say that the Democrats may have an increasingly clear path to victory.
Democrats need to take five competitive seats, and they are ahead in three of them: Colorado, North Carolina and Iowa.
That seems like good news for the Democrats, except that even if they are more likely than not to win each individual race, the odds are significantly less that they draw a straight flush and win all of them.
For his part, Cohn says that saving grace could come in the form of the mysteries of the frozen tundra. Though Democrats are behind in Alaska, polling is “notoriously difficult” in that state, so it’s possible Sen. Mark Begich, D-Ala., is actually ahead.
