In 2014 midterms, Republicans increasingly see parallels to 2006 election

“During that cycle, our guys in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Rhode Island, Missouri, Montana and Ohio could never move their numbers, and in the last couple of weeks the races blew open,” said Billy Piper, who was chief of staff to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at the time. “The macro environment was too much to overcome in states that were not reliably red.”…

Like Bush, this is the second midterm election of Obama’s presidency. Like Bush, Obama is not at all popular nationally. (Gallup’s daily tracking puts his job approval rating at 41 percent.)

Like Republicans in 2006, the fate of Democratic control rests in the hands of a handful of incumbents — Sens. Mark Pryor (Ark.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Mark Udall (Colo.), Mary Landrieu (La.) and Kay Hagan (N.C.) — who sit in states that, at best, swing between the two parties and, at worst, are firmly Republican at the presidential level.

And in each of the five races, the Democratic incumbents have spent much of the past 22 months successfully fighting against the negative pull of their national party — making the case that voting for them has little to do with supporting (or not) Obama.

Of late, however, the movement has been all toward Republicans.