Thirty-eight Republican senators are not up for reelection this year. Eleven more look like safe bets for reelection, or they are running for open seats in deep-red states such as Utah and Indiana. (No, Democrats, don’t get your hopes up about Colin Allred beating Ted Cruz in Texas. Please heed the lessons of the Beto-mania of 2018.)
By Jim Geraghty
This puts the floor for Republicans in the next Senate at 49 seats — knocking on the door of a majority.
In West Virginia, Democrat-turned-independent Joe Manchin III is retiring, and Republican Jim Justice, the current governor, is way ahead. This puts Republicans at 50 seats.
In Montana, Democratic incumbent Jon Tester is in real trouble, trailing or tying Republican challenger Tim Sheehy in every poll except one since March. It’s easy to shrug and say that the red-state Democrat Tester is always in trouble, but he never actually trailed in the polls in 2018, and led the polls intermittently against Denny Rehberg in 2012.
It is likely, then, but not guaranteed, that Republicans will have at least 51 Senate seats in January. Keep in mind, if Kamala Harris wins the presidency, there’s a world of difference between a Democrat-led Senate where Tim Walz breaks the ties and a Republican-led Senate where one of three competing Republicans — John Cornyn of Texas, John Thune of South Dakota or Rick Scott of Florida — calls the shots as the chamber’s majority leader.
One of the quieter stories in this tumultuous and unpredictable year is how gloomy the outlook is for GOP Senate candidates outside of the party’s red state comfort zone.
In Arizona, Kari Lake consistently trails Democrat Ruben Gallego, often outside the margin of error.
Mike Rogers in Michigan lags Democrat Elissa Slotkin, but at least he’s kept it close in several polls this summer.
In Ohio, Republican Bernie Moreno falls short in the polls against incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown by four to six percentage points. Keep in mind, Donald Trump is probably going to win Ohio by double digits, and has Ohio’s other senator as his running mate. Moreno needs all the coattails he can get.
In Wisconsin, Republican Eric Hovde has trailed incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin outside the margin of error all summer long.
In Pennsylvania, Republican David McCormick is closing the gap against incumbent Democrat Bob Casey, but still trails by at least three percentage points.
And in Nevada, Republican Sam Brown can’t seem to make it a competitive race against incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen.
I’d love to blame Trump for this swing-state weakness, but in all those states, he outpolls his party’s would-be senators. In the blue states, he’s toxic of course, but as Susan Collins showed in cruising to reelection in Maine in 2020, a Republican who maintains independence from Trump can capture the occasional win on opposition turf.
Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, staunchly anti-Trump, is the Republican best positioned to pull that off this year. After two polls put Democratic Senate candidate Angela D. Alsobrooks well ahead in that deep-blue state, the latest survey released Tuesday by AARP showed Hogan tied with Alsobrooks, with 46 percent for each. The same poll showed Harris lapping Trump in Maryland, 64 percent to 32 percent.
Summing up: the odds are good that if elected, Harris will be dealing with a narrow GOP Senate majority. This won’t stop her from moving federal policies to the left through executive orders and judicial appointments. But a considerable amount of her agenda will be abated.
Republican donors and activists should concentrate on making this happen and on driving up the Senate score. And there’s no point in waiting for help from the presidential nominee. Of the roughly 4.3 million people who voted for Nikki Haley in this year’s Republican presidential primaries, about 1.2 million of them live in the swing or competitive states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. They might be the ones to decide how strong the GOP will be come January — yet Trump has expressed little to no interest in courting this demographic.
It is unlikely that these Haley voters will be won over by a nominee who spends his convention address talking about the performance of the Green Bay Packers, who publicly denounces the Republican governor of a swing state, who contends he didn’t know Harris was Black, who keeps insisting that his crowds are bigger than those for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, who goes on at length about the pronunciation of CNN anchor Dana Bash’s name, and so on.
There’s a compelling, policy-based argument to make against Harris. But a 78-year-old candidate with the attention span of a toddler is proving incapable of making it. Trump once speculated that President Joe Biden was “higher than a kite” during his State of the Union address. I, for one, would love to see Trump debate Harris while under the effects of attention-focusing Ritalin.
Disaffected Republicans, exhausted with a presidential nominee who seems determined to throw away every opportunity, might find it more worthwhile to focus their efforts elsewhere: building the strongest possible Republican majority in the Senate.
