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Democrats have had great success in recent presidential elections registering, targeting and turning out their core voters. Now they're hoping to use that sophisticated field operation to to stave off defeat in this year's midterm elections.

They'll need all the help they can get because the Democratic hold on the Senate is looking increasingly shaky. The president is unpopular. So is Obamacare, and the number of vulnerable Democratic Senate seats is growing by the day. Several independent handicappers have recently moved several more Democratic seats into the "toss up" category.

Republicans only need a net of six pickups to take control of the Senate. And Democrats know that would make the last two years of President Obama's term pretty miserable. Obama himself has been sounding the alarm at every fundraiser and party meeting.

Last month at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee, he said, "When Democrats have everybody on the field, we cannot lose. That's just a fact."

That's certainly been true in presidential years, where Democrats have won the popular vote in five out of the last six elections. But in midterms, it's a different story altogether.

"A lot of Democrats don't vote during midterms," Obama said. "We just don't. Young people, African-Americans, Latinos — we just, often times, don't vote during midterms."

And earlier this month, in a special election for a congressional seat in Florida, that's exactly what happened — or didn't happen. Geoff Garin, the pollster for Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate who lost, says the problem was a drop in turnout.

"The cold, hard facts are that 49,000 fewer people voted in that special election than in the Nov. 2010 election for Congress," he said, "and about 160,000 fewer people voted than in the presidential election in 2012. That dropoff is occurring disproportionally among Democratic voters and creates a pretty substantial head wind for Democratic candidates."

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is planning a massive investment to address that problem. It plans to spend $60 million to hire 4,000 staffers in the most competitive Senate race states. The goal is ambitious: to make the midterm electorate — which tends to skew older, whiter and more Republican — look more like a presidential year electorate: younger, browner, and with more single women. In short: more Democratic.

The executive director at the DSCC, Guy Cecil, is in charge of deploying this large army of paid field organizers who will focus on registration, canvassing and phone banking.

"We are going to do everything we can to make sure that folks are motivated and energized to get to the polls in our targeted states," he said. "It's going to be a test to see whether or not we can do that."

According to Sasha Issenberg, the author of The Victory Lab, a good ground operation can add a point or two to the vote — tipping the balance in an otherwise tight race.

"Everything we know from basically 15 years of field experiments shows that high-quality, face-to-face contacts for a volunteer living in the same community as the voter is the best way to turn somebody out," Issenberg said. "So there is a road map to doing this. But it is expensive and it takes a lot of staff, and a lot offices and infrastructures to recruit and train those volunteers."

Democrats insist it can be done. They point to last year's Virginia governor's race, where Democrat Terry McAuliffe won by turning out more Democratic voters than in the 2009 Virginia governor's race. But political analyst Larry Sabato doubts whether Democrats can repeat that feat in other states.

"They have not cracked that code," Sabato said. "A lot of Democrats don't think midterm elections are sexy and they don't vote. What they might be able to do is what McAuliffe did — to marginally increase the relative turnout of minorities and young people who vote Democratic. So if, for example, North Carolina turns out to be a 1 or 2 percent race, that could make the difference."

North Carolina, like Virginia, is a state that President Obama carried. So a good field operation might help there. It also might help in Michigan, a blue state with a competitive Senate race this year. And Democrats are hopeful that their candidate in Georgia, a state with a large and growing minority population, might benefit from a beefed-up turnout effort.

But what about red states — where so many Democratic Senate incumbents are on the defensive this year?

"A state like Arkansas," Issenberg said, "where Democrats haven't run a very competitive presidential campaign in decades, where you don't have a strong Democratic state party, you don't have a culture of volunteering, the question is: who is going to knock on those doors for [Sen.] Mark Pryor? That's something that isn't easily solved just by throwing money or staff from Washington out there."

The problem for Democrats is that this year's Senate map is full of red states like Arkansas. And that's why Republicans — who are very good at getting their voters out in midterm elections — doubt the Democrats can succeed. Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus happily ticked off the long list of places where Democratic Senate candidates are vulnerable.

"They're running in states where the president in 2012 didn't receive 41 percent of the vote," Priebus said, "whether its Alaska, Montana, South Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia. Now we're extending the map to Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, and Michigan. And now potentially New Hampshire. It goes on and on and on."

A game to cover that much ground would cost a lot more than $60 million and would quickly exhaust the party's resources. The Democrats don't have the equivalent of the Koch brothers, who are spending tens of millions of dollars this year to help GOP candidates.

Republicans are betting the map of vulnerable Democrats is too big for even the best field operation to cover. But Democrats are hoping they can change the electorate — just enough — and in just enough places — to minimize their losses in November.

[Been contacted by a campaign before? Try our quiz below.]

So as you can imagine, a few people given that kind of setting are able to change their behavior at least temporarily, maybe permanently. But most people can't deal with their addiction, which is deeply driven, by just being in a brotherhood.

On a psychological approach to addiction

When people are confronted with a feeling of being trapped, of being overwhelmingly helpless, they have to do something. It isn't necessarily the "something" that actually deals with the problem ... Why addiction, though, why drink? Well, that's the "something" that they do. In psychology we call it a displacement, you could call it a substitute ...

When people can understand their addiction and what drives it, not only are they able to manage it but they can predict the next time the addictive urge will come up, because they know the kind of things that will make them feel overwhelmingly helpless. Given that forewarning, they can manage it much better.

But unlike AA, I would never claim that what I've suggested is right for everybody. But ... let's say I had nothing better to offer: It wouldn't matter — we still need to change the system as it is because we are harming 90 percent of the people.

As U.S.-Russian relations sour, some observers fear the plan to eliminate Syria's chemical arsenal might stall.

This past week, the removal of chemicals from Syria reached the halfway mark. Without pressure from both superpowers, however, some believe Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will begin to drag his feet.

"I think what you're likely to see is that the Assad regime will comply just enough, at a slower pace, as it consolidates its hold over the country militarily," says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert, at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The plan to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons was hatched at a summit last fall in Geneva. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stood side-by-side and presented an ambitious plan to spirit dangerous chemicals out of the country in a matter of months.

"The United States and Russia are committed to the elimination of Syrian chemical weapons in the soonest and safest manner," Kerry said at the time.

"It's one of the unique instances where both Russia and the United States have come together in a very cooperative way to work on a common goal," says Paul Walker, a chemical weapons expert with the non-profit Green Cross International.

Walker says the Russians were instrumental in getting Assad to go along with the plan. Russia has strong ties with the Syrian regime, and supplies it with considerable military aid to fight its ongoing civil war.

"When the Russians say step up and join the chemical weapons convention, Bashar al-Assad pretty much salutes and says, 'Yes, Sir,'" Walker says.

Syria pledged to remove its most dangerous chemicals by the end of last year, but then it started to stall. Assad said security was the problem, but Western observers suspected he was dragging his feet — drawing out the process to keep America from interfering with the war.

Russia broke the impasse, says Amy Smithson with the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies. In December, it sent dozens of armored trucks to carry the chemicals out of Syria. The trucks addressed Assad's security concerns, but they also sent a message.

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Leaders of high-tech companies, including Google and Facebook, descended on the White House Friday for a meeting with President Obama on the subject of privacy. The meeting itself was private. But aides say Obama wanted to hear from the CEOs about their concerns with the government's high-tech surveillance.

High-tech CEOs are not the obvious messengers to be delivering a privacy lecture to the government. After all, they make their money by scanning customers' emails and tracking their movements, all with the goal of serving up more targeted ads. Just a few years ago, Google's Eric Schmidt told an interviewer, "If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

But Marc Rotenberg, who directs the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says the titans of Silicon Valley have suddenly gotten religion.

"The Internet leaders who might have said a few years ago that privacy is a thing of the past, today they're at the White House telling the president we need to find a way to protect privacy. And that's a remarkable turn of events," he said.

What changed, of course, is the revelation by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden of just how widespread the government's snooping has been, often with the help, knowingly or unknowingly, of those same high-tech companies.

"Mr. Snowden has done more to raise the level of public awareness about privacy issues than probably anyone else I can think of," Rotenberg said.

And that has the potential to hurt the companies' bottom lines. Since the Snowden leaks began last summer, public opinion towards government surveillance has steadily soured. Fifty-three percent of Americans now disapprove of the NSA's spying. Pollster Carroll Doherty of the Pew Research Center says this is the rare issue that unites Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats.

"It's really an area on which you do find common ground between conservatives and liberals. Consistently across these polls, liberals and conservatives are expressing the most concern about it whereas people in the middle of the electorate are somewhat less concerned," he said.

Disapproval of government surveillance is strongest among people under the age of 30. While this generation shows little reluctance to document their every movement on electronic devices, Doherty says they don't like the government looking over their shoulder.

"They are concerned about privacy. They really are. And this issue has clicked a bit with young people," he said.

The White House meeting comes one week before the administration has to make some decisions about how to reform its collection of bulk telephone data.

President Obama has promised to make some adjustments — particularly to the program under which the NSA has been stockpiling telephone records. The legal authorization for that program expires next week and Obama wants to replace it with something different, though he hasn't said what. Obama insists that government workers who carry out survillance do take privacy concerns seriously.

"They have kids on Facebook and Instagram, and they know, more than most of us, the vulnerabilities to privacy that exist in a world where transactions are recorded, and emails and text and messages are stored, and even our movements can increasingly be tracked through the GPS on our phones," he said.

Privacy advocate Rotenberg says Internet companies could reduce the temptation for government spying if they simply stopped storing years' worth of personal data about their customers.

So far though, the companies haven't been willing to take that step.