The news:
Washington’s Senate race looks increasingly like a referendum on incumbent Democrat Patty Murray with two Republican candidates edging past her this month.
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Washington State finds Republican hopefuls Dino Rossi and Clint Didier both earning 48% support in match-ups with Murray. She, in turn, picks up 45% of the vote against the two GOP challengers…
Taking down Murray would be quite a feather in the GOP cap come November – she was, it should be recalled, one of the safe Democrat seats for 2010. As in so many other Democrat seats, even a win at this point is going to be disappointing because they’ll have to do it the hard way – large expenditures of money and effort which thus cannot be used to challenge GOP seats.
The lay of the political land has decisively turned against the Democrats. The November result cannot be known at this point, but the bottom line is that Democrats will need to catch a lot of breaks just to hold on this fall.