The conventional wisdom has been that Cardin will beat Steele - but when you look at the election results, you'll see that Steele secured nearly 88% of the GOP vote, while Cardin only got 46% of the Democratic vote...the GOP is solidly behind Steele, while Cardin has to patch things up with more than half of his basic constituency.

Can Cardin do it? Can Cardin, that is, motivate Maryland's very large and usually very Democratic black community after the Democratic powers-that-be shunted aside Mfume? I'm betting that he won't be able to - at least not enough to cut in to the number of Maryland Democrats who will wind up delighted to vote for Steele.

By my caculations, the Democrats will now need to win 9 Senate seats in order to secure a majority - seeing as they are going to lose MD and NJ, CT will be a rather displeased Lieberman, and then the necessity of knocking off 6 GOPers. On the other hand, the GOP can now possibly wind up with 58 Senate seats...only two away from a filibuster-proof majority.

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