, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- Tuesday's primary elections added three promising names to the list of Republicans who will try to break the Democrats' tenuous control of the Senate in time to help President George W. Bush gain political momentum before he is up for re-election in 2004.
Voters in North Carolina and New Hampshire selected Elizabeth Dole and John Sununu, well-known names in Republican politics, to defend the Senate seats now held by GOP conservatives. Voters in Minnesota chose St. Paul Mayor Ron Coleman to challenge Democratic incumbent Paul Wellstone.
"Coleman will be able to beat Wellstone, and there's your Senate race right there," Tripp Baird, a political analyst who specializes in the Senate for the Heritage Foundation, told United Press International.
Janet Reno continued to trail in the tight race for Florida's Democratic gubernatorial nomination Wednesday where they are still counting the votes, but the field for the mid-term congressional elections on Nov. 5 was largely set.
The Democrats now hold the Senate by a single seat, which has denied the Bush administration some high-profile victories and could complicate the White House's efforts to build a consensus on the Hill for possible U.S. actions against Iraq.
Tuesday's three GOP winners, however, were favored by the administration and could add three welcome allies to the Senate.
But Baird cautioned that the current contingent of Republican senators was often independent-minded and couldn't be counted on to toe the White House line on every issue.
It remains to be seen, he told UPI, whether winning a small majority will be enough to move the Bush agenda forward.
"The Republicans don't have too many people with whom they can go to the well," Baird said, comparing the GOP side of the aisle with the more-disciplined Democrats.
"Those people (Democrats) in the Senate vote lock, stock and barrel with whatever (Majority Leader) Tom Daschle tells them," he said. "You can't point to too many Republicans who are going to leave the reservation."
Baird said he saw the three Republicans elected Tuesday as having been cut from that very same cloth.
Coleman, a Brooklyn native, ex-prosecutor and self-described "accomplished juggler," is making his first run for Congress and has been dinging incumbent Wellstone on nearly a daily basis for dodging debates; being a pro-abortion "extremist" and committing the cardinal sin of ignoring the plight of Minnesota's farmers.
But Coleman boasted Monday that he had lobbied Congress just this week to pass the farm disaster relief bill that the White House had opposed as too expensive.
"Farmers waited all summer for disaster relief, but Congress hasn't gotten the job done," Coleman declared. "Time is running out. The Senate needs to stop filibustering and start working together."
Sununu ousted a sitting conservative Republican in the New Hampshire primary, but many analysts concluded it was Bob Smith's brief fling as an independent presidential candidate that had come back to haunt him.
"But he was a good conservative and a solid conservative vote," Baird noted, adding that Sununu was probably more of a conservative on fiscal matters rather than abortion and other social issues that were dearer to Smith.
Sununu, whose father was chief of staff for President George H.W. Bush, the president's father, will square off against Gov. Jeanne Shaheen. She is considered by some analysts to be a solid national prospect for the Democrats, but New Hampshire also has a long conservative tradition.
"Make no mistake, Jeanne Shaheen is a liberal Democrat," the 38-year-old Sununu told his supporters Tuesday night. "How much clearer can the choice be?"
Shaheen told her loyalists that the economy was in disarray while Sununu and Smith routinely "put the powerful special interests first."
But Baird said he believed that economic messes tend to splatter on governors during election years.
"This isn't a good time to be a governor," he joked.
In Dole, the Republicans have a long-time party loyalist with a solid reputation in the national scene.
But North Carolinians have agriculture and tobacco issues on their minds as well as the struggling furniture industry, which has been battered by the kind of global free trade that is held dear by the White House.
Tip O'Neil's long-held rule of thumb that "all politics are local" is a truism that will make Dole a more moderate senator than the venerable (Jesse) Helms, Baird ventured, provided she gets past Erskin Bowles, the Democratic nominee and an aide in the administration of Bill Clinton.
If the numbers fall in the administration's favor on Nov. 5 and the Senate pendulum swings back to the GOP, the White House may not be a lock to win every vote. But with the political skills Republicans honed while dealing with a Democratic majority, they will have enough of an advantage they can work with as Bush gets closer to his own re-election campaign.
"The administration can bob and weave with the best of them," Baird said. "They are a politically savvy group."
