Actually, based on net worth the man’s almost certainly not part of the Occupy movement’s (remember them*?) vaunted 99%, but that number represents something much more relevant:

… 97%. That’s the amount of time Mr. Begich voted with Obama priorities—from ObamaCare to the stimulus to the president’s nominees. Another key number is zero. That’s how many times in his six years he sponsored an amendment that the Senate voted on. The other word you hear from fired-up locals is “endless”—as in the Obama administration’s nonstop assaults on Alaskan mining and drilling, which Mr. Begich has proved incapable of halting.

As Kim Strassel noted previously in the above link, Mark Begich’s problem is the Democrats’ general one: to wit, they lied to a heck of a lot of people in 2006 and 2008 to get power. Alaska did not send Mark Begich to Washington, DC in order to enable Harry Reid’s rants about Charles and David Koch. But that is what they ended up getting. By all accounts, quite a few people in that state are unhappy with this particular bargain.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: As a reminder: if you were to ask roughly 90% of the voting public when this year’s election cycle started they probably would have said ‘Um. I don’t know: Tuesday? Well, yeah, there were primaries, but… Tuesday.’ This is not to say that everything that’s been done for the last year and a half has been meaningless, just that it’s all gone on while being largely effectively hidden to most American voters. Still, the framework has been set in place, and the themes for this year’s election are already known. It’s now established that: the Democrats are facing an uphill battle; the Republicans fielded excellent candidates**; and that Democratic incumbents and candidates are prone this year to making lots and lots of mistakes and unforced errors. Whether you agree with any of that is immaterial; that’s how the race is being generally presented, and even the media is going along with it.

All of which is to give a reason for why we are simultaneously seeing Charlie Cook say that there’s no Republican wave forming, while Jay Cost says that sure, there could be one. From our point of view? The election’s almost over. For regular voting folks? The election’s just begun.

*Yeah, well, neither does anybody else at this point. Yeah, well, neither does anybody else at this point. Guess that they get to be one of those groups who a]re only remembered to history because their more victorious opponents just wouldn’t shut up about how awful – yet ineffectual – they were.]

**Which is as much a self-reinforcing statement as was The Republicans fielded some awful candidates.