This is an off-year election, and there’s no popular politician with coattails to ride, but the voters are restive, and that’s always dangerous for the party in power. Exhibit A is Rand Paul, the libertarian eye doctor who upended his party’s chosen nominee for an open Senate seat in Kentucky. His doctrinaire views led him to question the wisdom of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a plunge into America’s past that in another election year might doom his candidacy. But this year his supporters are commending his lack of political wiles.

Another candidate who has lurched to unlikely electoral prominence is Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. We don’t know enough about her yet, other than the fact that she’s prepared to spend $50 million of her own money to win a Senate race in Connecticut, where there are fewer than 2 million registered voters, a cost per capita that should break a record. Her Republican primary opponent, Rob Simmons, a Vietnam veteran, backed out of the race, saying he couldn’t compete with her money, and warning that some of the practices associated with the WWE will make voters queasy and go to McMahon’s character.

The two leading candidates to oppose Senate leader Harry Reid, one of the most endangered Democrats, seem just as unlikely to last on the national scene should they succeed in November, as James Abdnor did as McGovern’s replacement 30 years ago. GOP frontrunner Sue Lowden opposes Obama’s health-care reform and proposed a bartering system modeled after a time when her grandparents brought a chicken to the doctor’s office as payment. Her chief rival for the GOP nomination is Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle, who is being touted as the next Rand Paul, which, depending on your viewpoint, can be a good or bad thing.