As recently as the 1960 elections, Democrats controlled all 22 seats in the 11 states that comprised the Old Confederacy. Republicans did not make their breakthrough until 1961 in Texas. John Tower, whom Democratic vice presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson defeated by 17 points in 1960 while also running to retain his Senate seat in case Richard Nixon beat John Kennedy, narrowly won a run-off election in May 1961 with 50.6 percent to capture the Senate seat vacated by LBJ.
Thus was the Democratic monopoly in the South broken. Three years later Strom Thurmond of South Carolina switched parties, becoming the second Republican senator in the South. Still, by controlling 20 of the 22 Southern seats after the 1964 elections, Democrats reached their largest Senate membership level (68) since 1939 (69). Never again would their majority be so large. For Republicans, Barry Goldwater's victories in five contiguous states in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina) represented the silver lining in their 1964 election debacle.
However, even after Richard Nixon's massive re-election in 1972, when he won landslide victories throughout the South, the Republicans managed to control only seven Southern Senate seats. After the 1976 election, only five Southern Senate seats were held by Republicans. Four of the 12 Senate seats captured in 1980 with the help of Ronald Reagan's coattails included Alabama, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Following Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election landslide, Republican-controlled Southern Senate seats totaled 10, still less than half. After Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election, in which Democrats suffered a net loss of two Senate seats as Republicans won Democratic seats in Alabama and the president's native Arkansas, the Republicans controlled 15 Southern Senate seats. By then, the South had become instrumental to the Republican Party's 55-seat majority.
During the 2002 and 2004 elections, the Republicans swept all nine open Southern Senate seats. Today, Republicans occupy 18 of the 22 seats of the Old Confederacy.
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20050619-111016-5632r.htm
Granted, this is not an open seat, but the macro shift is still in the GOP's favor. I'm not saying Ms. Harris will win, but to say she can't win (especially now that Jeb and Dubya are warming up to her) is really kinda silly.
"One factor I have yet to see addressed in this argument over Harris' prospects for Nelson's seat is the following (addressed frequently by Zell Miller)"
But one of those 2 seats that the Dems control is in Florida, and until Martinez won, the Dems controlled both Senate seats. Remember that Martinez won by a hair against someone he should have clobbered. What's really distressing is that the Dems have fielded such an eminently beatable candidate, and the GOP has failed to capitalize on it.