Huh?

Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel is retiring. Which is certainly not a bad thing. What is curious is this blurb from the MSNBC story about it:

His retirement means the Republican Party will be scrambling to fill his seat in 2008 at a time when the GOP will already be defending more Senate seats than Democrats.

Say what? Scrambling? Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning has been running for months, and was in the race whether Hagel sought re-election or not, and was actually leading Hagel in several polls, which probably led partially to Hagel's retirement. So I'm not exactly sure how MSNBC deduces that the Nebraska GOP is scrambling when a top flight candidate was already in the race...