But, in the bigger picture, this only delays the inevitable: By the end of this year, Reid will be done – both as leader and as a senator.

That’s what history says, at least.

Since last summer, Reid has trailed his two most likely Republican opponents – Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian, neither of them a top-tier recruit – in every poll that’s been conducted, sometimes by double-digits. As Chuck Todd noted on NBC this week, “The only winner I can think of in a generation who was down by more than this to come back win was Jesse Helms in ’84 against Jim Hunt, North Carolina – and that was on the back of the Reagan landslide.”

Todd’s point is basically correct. When an incumbent senator – especially one who’s been around as long as Reid has – falls this far behind this close to the next election, he or she is just about always assured of losing. And usually, the underdog incumbent is unable even to make it much of a race – something that Rick Santorum discovered when, after campaigning tirelessly to save his seat for nearly two years, he nonetheless lost to Bob Casey by 18 points in 2006. This is the grim reality that prompted Chris Dodd – who faced Reid-like deficits against his likely GOP foes – to hang it up in Connecticut last week.

So does history offer any hope for Reid? Here’s a look at the three most dramatic comebacks for Senate incumbents in the (relatively) recent past – and whether they provide a 2010 blueprint for Reid.

* Helms-Hunt (North Carolina, 1984): The race Todd mentioned represents – by far – the most stunning comeback for an incumbent senator since modern polling began.

In early 1983, the stars seemed aligned for Helms, then in his second term, to lose in 1984. Because of his polarizing nature, 40 percent of the electorate was already against him, and his prominent role in national politics – his “Congressional Club” raised millions through direct mail and doled it out to right-wing candidates around the country – had opened him to additional criticism that he was neglecting his home state. Plus, the electoral climate was bleak for Republicans, who had just been drubbed in the 1982 midterms. And then there was his Democratic opponent: Jim Hunt, the state’s popular two-term Democratic governor.

A June ’83 poll gave Hunt a 22-point lead over Helms – 54 to 32 percent. “If we can’t win this one,” Mo Udall, the old Arizona Democratic congressman said at a Hunt fundraiser, “we can’t win anything.”

Helms’ comeback was keyed by several factors. One was money – his right-wing direct mail network helped him raise around $14 million, a stunning amount back then. In the end, Helms outspent Hunt by roughly a two-to-one margin in what was (at the time) the most expensive Senate race ever. Helms also began spending early, launching a television ad blitz 20 months before the election (one of the spots featured football coach Lou Holtz, who had previously coached at NC State – and who spent the rest of his career apologizing for it).

Far more important, though, was the cultural resentment that Helms fomented and turned to his advantage. In the fall of ’83, he emerged as the chief Senate opponent of a Martin Luther King holiday (the civil rights leader was “a Communist,” in Helms’ view), drawing ire from Democrats, the media and even moderate Republicans – the very enemies that Helms relied on to rally his rural white base. His campaign itself was pure venom, and he summed up his case against Hunt thusly: “Let’s talk about the homosexuals who support Governor Hunt, the labor union bosses, the crooks who support him.”

And then there were Reagan’s coattails. The president won North Carolina over Walter Mondale by 24 points, providing a significant boost to Helms on Election Day (even though many in the Reagan White House were quietly hoping for a Helms defeat).

By the summer of ’84, Helms had caught Hunt in polls, and by the end of the campaign, he led by a few points. The final margin was 52 to 48 percent – with Hunt grabbing 95 percent of the black vote and Helms claiming 60 percent of the white vote.

Is it a blueprint for Reid? Hardly. Reid will be running in a midterm, not a presidential year, and so the climate will be working against his party, not for it. He will have lots of money (and a lot more than his opponents), but money was only a minor factor in Helms’ comeback. And playing to racism is – thankfully – not in Reid’s playbook.

* Al D’Amato-Robert Abrams (New York, 1992): Al D’Amato, a.k.a. “Senator Pothole,” looked like a dead senator walking as 1992 began. A long ethics investigation into whether he’d used his office to improperly aid supporters and relatives had wrecked his popularity and New Yorkers had grown tired of his outspoken antics. Polls showed him losing to his most likely Democratic opponents – state Attorney General Robert Abrams and former Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro – by margins in the high single digits and lo double-digits.

But D’Amato caught two big breaks. First, Abrams had to get dirty – very dirty – to win the September Democratic primary, forging an informal alliance with a third candidate (Liz Holtzman) to attack Ferraro over her finances. The attacks succeeded just enough o life Abrams past Ferraro in the primary, but left her supporters furious – a sentiment that D’Amato spent the next six weeks exploiting.

Then, in mid-October, Abrams called the senator “a fascist” at a rally, a remark that then dominated the campaign for a week. D’Amato was able to play the victim (and to link the comment to Abrams’ earlier attacks on Ferraro) and Abrams finally offered an apology. As a result, several Democrats – mostly Italian-Americans – offered public endorsements of D’Amato.

D’Amato also had significantly more money than Abrams, another consequence of the Democratic primary, in which Abrams exhausted much of his treasury. And he benefited from 1992′s three-way presidential race, which limited the boost Abrams received from running on the same ticket as Bill Clinton (who won the state with just under 50 percent of the vote – much less than he would have received in a two-way race).

Is it a blueprint for Reid? Sort of. Luck had an awful lot to do with D’Amato’s comeback. Perhaps the Nevada Republican primary will prove as divisive as the Abrams-Ferraro fight, but that doesn’t seem likely, for numerous reasons. Plus, the gaffe that “fascist” gaffe that tripped Abrams up was a product of New York’s unique media and political culture, where everything is magnified and where ethnic politics loom large.

* Bob Dole-Bill Roy (Kansas, 1974): Polling wasn’t nearly as perfected or widespread in ’74 as it is today, but surveys conducted early that summer showed Dole running slightly behind Dr. Bill Roy, the two-term Democratic congressman running against him. The margin was primarily a result of anger at Richard Nixon, who was then in the dying days so his presidency and whom Dole had served loyally as the Republican national chairman a few years earlier.

Then, when Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford issued his wildly unpopular pardon of him, Dole’s numbers collapsed. By the end of September, he trailed Roy by between ten and 15 points and seemed destined to be one of many Republican casualties of Watergate.

In desperation, Dole latched on to an explosive weapon – abortion, which had suddenly emerged as a major issue after the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Roy supported the right to abortion and, as an obstetrician, had actually performed the procedure. Public opinion in Kansas, probably even more than today, was squarely against legal abortion.

Dole became one of the first politicians to exploit the issue. At the end of a debate a month before the election, he demanded of Roy, “I want to know how many of them you’ve performed!” Anti-abortion picketers – then a new phenomenon – began showing up at Roy rallies and voters were flooded with vicious anti-Roy literature from anti-abortion organizations. Dole also underwrote a brutal negative television ad campaign – this long before voters had grown numb to such a thing. Dole succeeded in destroying Roy’s image and eked out a victory in what was one of the worst years for Republican candidates in the 20^th Century.

Blueprint for Reid? Basically, yes. Abortion won’t be his issue, but his only realistic path to victory is the one Dole pioneered 35 years ago – to use every means at his disposal to turn the public against his opponent. This, of course, is a common strategy today, and not just for embattled incumbents. Dole succeeded because his opponent had no idea what he was being hit with – or how to fight back. That won’t be the case for Reid’s foe. Plus, Dole’s attacks took the electorate by surprise – they’d never seen such a thing. That’s hardly the case today. Sad to say, an intensely negative campaign is probably Reid’s only hope – but it isn’t much of one.

***

There are, to the best of my knowledge, no other modern Senate incumbents who overcame deficits as large as the ones Dole, D’Amato and Helms faced. Others have fallen behind by small amounts for brief moments in campaigns and survived – but the deficits they faced weren’t as deep and enduring. If Reid somehow wins re-election this year, he really will be authoring a new chapter of political history.

One is the approach that most major news outlets seem to be favoring: to assume that because three similar-seeming things happened at once, a significant trend must be afoot. Thus, we’ve been treated to countless news stories and cable segments about how the sudden exits of Chris Dodd, Byron Dorgan and Bill Ritter represent a demoralizing blow for Democrats and worsen the party’s increasingly bleak fall outlook.

And then there’s reality: The net effect of this week’s retirements on the 2010 outlook for Democrats is, at worst, neutral – and probably slightly positive.

Let’s take them one at a time, starting with…

Connecticut: Dodd’s decision not to seek a sixth Senate term is actually the best news Democrats have gotten in a while. Partly through his own doing (and partly not), he’s morphed into Washington’s scapegoat-in-chief for the sub-prime mess. Over the last year, he’s spent enormous time and money trying to rehab his image with Connecticut voters – to absolutely no avail. As 2009 ended, his poll numbers remained stuck at toxic lows. The electorate had stopped listening to him and defeat in 2010 was certain.

That would have meant a Republican pick-up in a deeply blue state – one that last elected a Republican senator in 1982 (and a very liberal Republican, Lowell Weicker, at that) and that last sided with a GOP presidential candidate in 1988. And, as doomed as Dodd was, the protect-incumbents-first mantra of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would have nonetheless compelled the national party to expend serious money on his behalf in the fall.

But with Dodd out, Democrats are now able to swap the state’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, into the race. Blumenthal’s popularity in Connecticut, as we noted earlier this week, is astoundingly high. (A well-timed PPP poll released just after Dodd’s exit shows Blumenthal crushing the two most likely GOP nominees by more than 30 points; Dodd had been trailing for months.)

To be clear: The Blumenthal-for-Dodd substitution has long been the dream scenario for national Democrats. They just weren’t sure Dodd would play along – and they feared pressing him too hard (and too publicly) to get him out, for fear of causing him to dig in his heels. That he decided (apparently on his own) to get out, is joyous news for them. With his departure, Connecticut shifts from being a certain Republican pick-up to an easy Democratic hold – and it frees national Democrats to steer their money to races in less blue states.

North Dakota: No question about it, Dorgan’s decision to leave the Senate is a serious blow to Democrats. It’s not easy for Democrats to win in North Dakota (even if the state’s three-member congressional delegation is all-Democratic) but, at least until recently, Dorgan enjoyed strong popularity.

Very likely, he got out in anticipation of Governor John Hoeven entering the race. The three-term Republican has been looking for the right opening to run for the Senate, (wisely) passing when Ken Conrad’s seat was up in anti-GOP year of 2006. Hoeven put off a decision for all of 2009, but polls late in the year showed him opening a wide lead over Dorgan; a decision to run has increasingly seemed imminent.  

Against Hoeven, Dorgan was probably a goner. Against another Republican, victory would have been possible. But without Dorgan, Democrats have zero chance in North Dakota in 2010. So his departure takes a seat that Democrats, at least as of a few months ago, had a reasonable chance of retaining and makes it a certain GOP pick-up.

Colorado: This one is tougher to read. Ritter, the state’s first term governor, wasn’t quite as doomed as Dodd was in Connecticut, but it sure wasn’t looking good for him: a poll last month put him 8 points behind the presumptive GOP nominee, former Congressman Scott McInnis. Turning that around would have been very difficult for Ritter, given the national climate.

But his departure has raised the possibility of a return to the state by Ken Salazar, the former senator who signed on as Barack Obama’s Interior secretary last year.

At least in theory, Salazar could dramatically improve the Democrats’ chances of hanging on to the governorship. Recall that he bucked a GOP tide when he first ran for the Senate in 2004; as one toss-up Senate race after another broke to the Republicans (and as Colorado voted to re-elect George W. Bush) Salazar defeated Republican Pete Coors to claim an open Senate seat. The outcome was partly due to Coors’ deficiencies as a candidate, but it also suggested that Salazar had unusual appeal to Republican-leaning voters.

Salazar, in other words, could be the ideal candidate to combat the expected GOP tide of ’10. Plus, without Ritter, the nature of the race will change; no longer will it be a referendum on the incumbent in what will probably be an anti-incumbent year.

That said, it’s possible that Salazar’s standing in Colorado isn’t what is used to be. He left his Senate seat in the middle of his first term to join Obama’s Cabinet; did that leave a bad taste in voters’ mouths? And now, after just a year on the job, he’s coming back to run for a different office? Plus, being so closely identified with the Obama administration could prove a liability in Colorado right now.

The bottom-line in Colorado is that Ritter was probably going to lose. But there’s a chance that Salazar could be a far better candidate and actually win the race.

So there you go. In one state (Connecticut), a retirement just boosted the Democrats’ prospects exponentially. In another (North Dakota), it hurt them considerably. And in the third (Colorado), it won’t make things any worse – and it might actually help them. That’s not a trend. It’s a wash.

Yes, I know, the climate of 2010 will be rough for Democrats. They will lose races – maybe many of them – this fall that they never would have lost in 2008 or in 2006. There are reasons for this. But when it comes to this week’s retirements, the news actually isn’t bad for Democrats. And it may even be good.

The right’s giddiness comes from a new poll – conducted by (who else?) Rasmussen – that shows Brown, a state senator from the suburbs south of Boston, pulling within nine points of Attorney General Martha Coakley, who cruised to the Democratic nomination in December.

And now, some conservatives are talking about winning the race, humiliating Democrats in a deeply blue state, and – suddenly armed with a 41st vote in the Senate – driving a last-minute stake through the heart of health care reform.

Take it from this Bay State native: It ain’t happening.

Brown, to his credit, has run a savvy campaign that has found clever ways to attract attention. And he’s a marketable candidate – confident, good on television, and attractive enough to have once posed nude in Cosmopolitan. Coakley, meanwhile, is mimicking the unimaginative front-runner’s strategy she employed in the primary, trying to run out the clock while making as little noise as possible.

That’s the perfect recipe for Brown’s poll numbers to peak. But rest assured, if the Rasmussen finding is replicated in other public polls – and in her own internals – Coakley will have the resources to saturate the Boston (and Providence and Springfield) airwaves with attack ads and to win ugly. Plus, she can rely on a Democratic turnout operation on Election Day that, even on a bad day, will dwarf whatever effort the GOP musters.

The final margin may not be impressive, but Coakley will win this race – and Senate Democrats will still have the 60 votes they need to pass health care reform.

Still, it’s true that the Massachusetts contest is closer than most people expected, and closer than it would have been had it been held a few years ago. This has everything to do with an underappreciated dynamic that will loom large in 2010, particularly in Democratic-friendly states like Massachusetts: The disappearance of the Gingrich/Bush shield, which protected Democratic candidates for nearly two decades.

Let’s consider what’s happened in Massachusetts over the last 20 years. Yes, it’s long been a Democratic bastion, but when the 1990s arrived, Republicanism was actually on the rise in the state. Mixing economic conservatism and cultural liberalism, the party claimed the governorship in 1990 (when Bill Weld defeated John Silber with the help of liberal suburbanites) and won enough seats in the state Senate (16 out of 40) to sustain the new governor’s veto.

Two years later, two Republicans – Peter Blute and Peter Torkildsen – won congressional seats, and on the morning after the state’s 1994 primary, Kennedy awoke to a poll that placed him two points behind Mitt Romney, his (then) little-known Republican challenger – the only time in his 47-year Senate career that Kennedy every trailed in a Senate poll. Kennedy would come back to win that race, but the state of the Republican Party in Massachusetts heading into that ’94 campaign wasn’t bad at all. (Weld won a second term that year by a record-smashing 42 points.)

Then the Republican Revolution of November ’94 happened. With Newt Gingrich crowned as House Speaker, a new image of the GOP took hold: the party of Southern evangelicals and their ideological fanaticism. With this brand of conservatism defining their party, there would be no more fair hearings for Republican candidates in Massachusetts.

In 1996, Weld, despite his staggering popularity, lost a Senate race to John Kerry by seven points. That same year, Blute and Torkildsen, the state’s two GOP congressmen, both lost their seats – and no Republican has won a House race in Massachusetts since then. One by one, the GOP early ’90s gains in the state Legislature were rolled back. Today, the party has just five seats in the state Senate and only 16 (out of 160) in the state House of Representatives.

Things only got worse for GOP when George W. Bush came to power in 2001. Besides a victory by Romney in the 2002 governor’s race (when he campaigned as a pro-choice moderate who would serve as a check on the Democrats’ Beacon Hill monopoly), Republicans have barely put up a fight. They let Kerry run unopposed in 2002 and mounted only token opposition to him in 2008 (and to Kennedy in 2006) and have routinely failed to contest congressional and state legislative contests, because what would the point be?

From 1994 through 2008, party label alone was enough to loft virtually any Democrat running for virtually any office in Massachusetts to victory, so mighty was the average voter’s distaste for the Republicans running Washington. But the demise of the GOP Congress in 2006 and the election of Barack Obama last year have changed that dynamic.

With Democrats running the show, Massachusetts voters are – for the first time since before the Gingrich revolution – willing to listen to (some) Republican candidates. And more to the point, they’re willing to consider voting for a Republican candidate as a way of expressing frustration with the ruling Democrats.

This, more than anything, explains why the Coakley-Brown race might be closer than expected. In the climate of, say, 2006, Coakley would be ahead by 30 points right now. Brown’s marketability and clever strategy – and Coakley’s bland, uninspiring campaign – would have mattered for nothing. In 2009, though, they do count for something.

Massachusetts is far from only state where the disappearance of the Gingrich-Bush shield looms large. The effect was evident in New Jersey two months ago, where Republican Chris Christie unseated Governor Jon Corzine. Corzine had more than his share of problems, but he would have been able to deflect them with the Gingrich-Bush shield. Too bad for him his seat wasn’t up in 2008.

In blue states like Massachusetts and New Jersey, Democrats were nearly invincible for 14 years because of the shield. In non-blue states, like Virginia, its protective effects only kicked in at the end of the Bush era, when Iraq and Katrina and runaway deficits and congressional corruption further soiled the GOP’s image. By 2006 and 2008, it was protecting Democrats in just about every corner of the country.

But, as the Coakley-Brown race seems to be proving, in 2010 it is gone – everywhere.

Which raises a simple question: How – and when – can they get even? The answer is more elusive than you might think.

The most immediate route would be to convince Democratic leaders in the Senate to strip Lieberman of his Homeland Security committee chairmanship. But that’s a nonstarter.

The main reason is that Lieberman – despite wasting few opportunities to poke a stick in the left’s eyes – has made sure to make himself just valuable enough to Majority Leader Harry Reid within the insular world of the Senate. He routinely votes with Democrats on procedural matters and on legislation that doesn’t attract the same type of attention as health care has.

His health care gamesmanship is a perfect example. Lieberman had plenty of fun sticking it to the left (and grabbing the spotlight for himself – it can be hard to tell which is more important to him) and succeeded in stripping the bill of a public option (and the Medicare buy-in proposed as an alternative). But then, just as Republicans were starting to believe he’d actually join them in killing reform altogether, he broke their hearts, returned to the Democratic fold, and helped ensure the passage of a diminished bill.

Had he stuck with the G.O.P. filibuster, immediate retribution from Reid would have been a realistic prospect. Instead, Lieberman can claim that he’s just as loyal – or no more disloyal – than Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu or Blanche Lincoln, and there’s no serious movement to punish them.

So Lieberman’s chairmanship – which, don’t forget, he secured with the White House’s help after trashing Obama on the 2008 campaign trail -is safe through the 2010 elections.

Theoretically, Democrats might take it away when the new Congress convenes in January 2011. If, as now seems likely, the party’s Senate majority is reduced by several seats, he won’t have the clout he enjoys now (as the filibuster-killing 60^th vote) or that he had in 2007 and 2008 (when he was the 51^st vote). But don’t hold your breath: Time and again, national Democratic leaders have shrugged their shoulders and offered Lieberman one more chance.

Payback for progressives, then, will probably have to wait for 2012, when Lieberman’s fourth term is due to expire. It’s a long way off, obviously, but it looks like taking him out then will either be very easy or very difficult – and the key will be the decision of a man not many people outside Connecticut have heard of: Richard Blumenthal, the state’s attorney general.

First elected in 1990, Blumenthal is more popular in his state than just about any other statewide elected official in the country – a 78 percent approval rating in the most recent poll. He’s resisted numerous opportunities to run for higher office in the past, but Connecticut Democrats are convinced that the 63-year-old will finally make his move in the next few years.

Until recently, it seemed a no-brainer that his move would be to challenge Lieberman in ’12, mainly because the other two races on the horizon didn’t seem inviting. It was assumed that Republican Governor Jodi Rell, whose popularity rivaled Blumenthal’s for much of this decade, would seek another term in ’10. And Blumenthal is too much of a party man to even think about taking on the embattled Chris Dodd in a Democratic Senate primary next year. So that left Lieberman, who wouldn’t stand a chance against Blumenthal in a Democratic primary or in the fall as an independent. (A poll this year showed Blumenthal crushing Lieberman by a two-to-one margin a general election match-up.)

But the calculus has changed in the last few months. First, Rell, faced with ebbing poll numbers, unexpectedly announced that she wouldn’t seek re-election – meaning that, all of a sudden, the governorship is the Democrats’ for the taking. And the party’s field (now headlined by Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz and Ned Lamont) is hardly that imposing. Connecticut Democrats who previously dismissed his interest in the race now say Blumenthal is seriously considering jumping in.

Then there’s Dodd’s situation, which can best be described as grim. Privately, Democrats doubt he can survive next fall – despite ramping up his campaign operation this year, he still trails his most likely G.O.P. foe, former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, badly – and wonder if he’ll stick around for the whole race. To national Democrats in particular, Blumenthal is regarded as the perfect insurance policy. If Dodd still looks hopeless in the spring, the thinking goes, they can persuade him to step aside and switch the unbeatable Blumenthal into the race.

If either of those scenarios plays out – a Blumenthal gubernatorial or Senate run in ’10 – Democrats would be denied their best weapon for knocking off Lieberman in ’12.

At that point, Lieberman might have a viable shot of winning another term. There is no other Democrat in the state whose popularity is anywhere near as wide or deep as Blumenthal’s. Plus, Lieberman’s ratings – at least as of last month – have actually been on the rise in Connecticut. After bottoming out after the 2008 campaign (when he notched a career low 38-54 percent job approval rating in December ’08), he now enjoys a 49-44 approval rating. Those numbers would make him vulnerable in ’12 – but victory wouldn’t be out of the question, either.

Whether he can sustain those numbers for the next few years is, of course, an open question. And, obviously, any Lieberman ’12 victory scenario would depend on him forming an alliance with Connecticut Republicans, like he did in 2006. It seems likely he could, but it’s too early to tell. The national climate – Barack Obama will be seeking re-election in ’12 – is another variable.

Still, the best advice for progressives who want Lieberman out is simple: Pray that Richard Blumenthal stays on the sidelines in 2010.