Doom predicted for GOP Senate

Senate Republicans were already facing a tough re-election cycle, but Donald Trump's sudden clear path to the Republican nomination now has both conservatives and liberals making doomsday predictions about how Trump's candidacy will end up handing the Senate to Democrats.

"The Senate's gone," Varad Mehta, an historian and writer at the conservative website The Federalist, tweeted Wednesday morning. "It's all about minimizing the losses now."

Race analysts have for months calculated a tough November for the Senate GOP. The Cook Political Report, a non-partisan and highly respected election and campaign newsletter, rates a half-dozen GOP-held seats as pure toss-up races, which means they are highly vulnerable to a Democratic takeover.

On the Democratic side, only the seat held by retiring Minority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, is in the toss-up category.

But by late Tuesday, after Trump became the last Republican candidate standing, analysts were suggesting the list of toss-up seats could expand even further if voters link GOP candidates to Trump, who polls show has an average unfavorable rating of more than 65 percent.