Stunned by this report that Shadegg could lose his AZ-03 seat, I was momentarily tempted to agree with Ross when he wrote:

And while it would be nice, as Daniel suggests, to decouple the fortunes of the House and Senate GOP from the fortunes of the McCain campaign, I don’t think that’s going to happen: This is a national election, and I suspect that House and Senate candidates will only rise in the polls if the national ticket is rising in the polls.

On the face of it, a Shadegg loss in deepest “red” Arizona would suggest a kind of annihilation of the Republican Party that no one has been imagining, and it would seem to confirm Ross’ observation that Republicans will all sink or swim together, but I have a slightly off-the-wall interpretation that might make the “decoupling” position look more credible.  Shadegg’s difficulties are almost certainly related to his flip on the bailout, which he voted against the first time and then backed on the second vote.  We may end up seeing a number of otherwise safe-seat Republican members who are going to face an unusually difficult race for re-election because they went along with the leadership in backing the bailout either the first or the second time.  If voters are going to punish them for the bailout, there is not much that can be done for them now.  Nonetheless, that suggests that the House GOP’s best chance to escape being pulled down by McCain’s defeat is to run away from him, their own leadership and everything remotely connected to the national party.  Bizarrely, the NRCC has been trying to nationalize races all year long by talking about Obama and Pelosi when the path to surviving the profound anti-GOP mood in the country is to make every contested race as localized as possible.  Tying the fortunes of the Congressional GOP and McCain together does just the opposite. 

Anti-bailout Republicans are best positioned to pull this off, as they already demonstrated their opposition to the administration, McCain and Boehner, but it may still be possible for many House members to put distance between themselves and the increasingly ridiculous McCain campaign.  The Senate candidates are in a more difficult position if they are about to be swamped by another Democratic wave.  In any case, I think we are seeing the possibility of a slight change in the dynamic that has prevailed all year: instead of McCain running better than the Congressional Republicans because of his alleged “maverick” status, they may have a chance of running ahead of McCain by running from him and his irrelevant campaign focused on Ayers and the like.  They could say, “Unlike that clueless McCain, we’re here to work for you and address your economic concerns.”  Better yet, they will just pretend that McCain doesn’t exist.  So my original argument remains the same: the emphasis ought to be on limiting Democratic gains rather than wasting time backing a McCain campaign that is already going down to defeat.  The alternative, it seems to me, is to exacerbate what were already going to be bad House and Senate losses and watch McCain lose by almost two hundred electoral votes.