Today's double dose of news out of Illinois brings the 2010 Senate race into considerably clearer relief. The two figures that had effectively frozen the U.S. Senate field in the state have come off of the fence. One (Democrat Lisa Madigan) walked away from a bid, which led the other (Republican Mark Kirk) to sprint into a bid. This affords us the opportunity to have a much better understanding of the dynamics of the 2010 U.S. Senate race in the Land of Lincoln.
Today's twin announcements, within hours of one another, confirmed one long-held piece of Illinois conventional wisdom--Kirk was clearly leery of Madigan, and was quite clearly waiting on the Attorney General to call her shot before he would call his shot.
This should not, however, lead anyone to automatically presume that Kirk is somehow a betting favorite in the Senate race. There have been two polls matching up Kirk with Democratic state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias. In one of them (a January Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll), the Democrat had an eight point advantage (38-30). In the other (an April PPP Poll), the two men were tied.
No polls have been taken in the last two months, so potential Democratic candidates like Merchandise Mart president (and RFK progeny) Chris Kennedy, as well as Chicago Urban League president Cheryle Jackson, have not been polled.
Kirk has tried very hard to cement a reputation as a "middle of the road" Republican (a political necessity, not only in his 10th Congressional District, but statewide, as well).
Sometimes, however, the performance has cut through the mythology. This year, he has established the somewhat troubling habit of having his mouth outpace his better sense. As recent war veteran and top-notch military issues Kossack Brandon Friedman noted in January, Kirk turned Bush-esque cowboy on the issue of Israel-Palestine, saying that it was "time to take out the trash."
More recently, of course, he found himself in hot water when he told China, one of our leading creditors, that they should not trust the American government as it related to economic and budgetary matters.
The Washington Post database of Congressional voting habits found that Mark Kirk voted with the majority of his Republican brethren almost 87% of the time, which also blows a hole in the "centrist" meme that Kirk has worked so hard to construct.
This was, after all, a man who was a full-fledged member of the "party of No" on issues like the stimulus and the budget, but was more than willing to go to bat for the vast majority of the economic initiatives of the Bush administration. It is hard to imagine Cook County voters, or voters ANYWHERE in the state of Illinois, preferring a candidate whose economic politics are inseparable from George W. Bush, and diametrically opposed to favorite son Barack Obama.
Needless to say, for the NRSC and the Republicans in Washington, Kirk is preferable to whatever second-string state legislator the party could have persuaded to run. But it would be foolish to presume that he is a betting favorite for 2010, especially when the Democrats will have nearly sixteen months to define Kirk, and expose a voting record that is not likely to be amenable to a state that routinely supports Democratic candidates at the federal level.