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A half-dozen senators fighting for their political lives and their partys hold on the majority in tough races while trying to avoid being dragged down by an unpopular president and the stark reality that second-term midterm elections almost never work out for the side controlling the White House.

2014? Yes but also 2006, an election cycle that Republicans are increasingly beginning to see as a parallel to this one as the fight for control of the Senate enters its final four weeks.

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.

At the start of the 2006 election, Republicans controlled 55 seats, buoyed by two consecutive elections 2002 and 2004 that had moved seats their way. But their vulnerabilities were significant. Despite defending only 15seats (to the Democrats 17), the GOP had incumbents in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island two states that President George W. Bush had lost convincingly two years earlier as well as sitting senators in places such as Missouri and Montana who, through a combination of the competitiveness of their states and their own foibles, were in deep trouble. As the cycle wore on, Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) turned his race ultra-competitive by referring to a Democratic tracker as a macaca.

By this time in the 2006 election, it had long been clear that Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) wasnt going to make a miraculous comeback against Bob Casey Jr. (D), who had led the incumbent by double digits throughout the campaign.

But the other five incumbent races, in which GOP senators such as Jim Talent (Mo.) and Lincoln Chafee (R.I.) had managed to stay in the hunt started to turn south for Republicans.

The main factor was the deep unpopularity of Bush, who sat at 37percent nationally. That distaste for the head of the Republican Party made Democratic messaging easy: Dont like President Bush? Send him a message by voting against the person who has voted with him [fill-in-the-blank-but-its-a-lot percentage] of the time. Bush stayed largely hidden on the campaign trail, but it didnt matter.

Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) collapsed, losing to Sherrod Brown by 15 points. (Side note: When you lose by that much, its hard to blame Bush or the national environment totally for the loss.) Chafees race also turned permanently against him Bush had won only 39percent of the vote in Rhode Island and Sheldon Whitehouse won by seven points.

Then there were the trio of Republican incumbents who lost by two points or less: Allen (a 0.3 percentage point loss), Talent (2.1 points) and Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana (0.7points). In all three cases, the incumbents remained stuck in the mid to upper 40s, the spot where they had been for much of the election and lost as undecided voters flocked to their opponents.

It all added up to a six-seat loss for Republicans and the minority status in the Senate, defeats that came just two years after a Republican president was reelected for the first time in about two decades. And it meant that Republicans spent the next eight years all the way through today in the minority.

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In 2014 midterms, Republicans increasingly see parallels to 2006 election