The recent notion that Democrats will hold the Senate might be wrong. Here’s why some Democratic strategists are nervous.
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J.D. Vance should be able to dispatch his Democratic opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, in Ohio, a state that has become solidly Republican in recent elections.
It has recently become conventional wisdom that Democrats have a pretty good chance of clinging to the Senate — despite a national political environment that has looked dire for their party throughout most of this year.
I’ve written about this a fair bit myself. And even Mitch McConnell, the once and possibly future Senate majority leader, has taken to complaining lately that Republicans have a “candidate quality” problem.
McConnell’s deputies use other words in private that cannot be printed here — a reflection, in part, of the tensions between his camp and the network around Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who is officially running the G.O.P.’s Senate campaign efforts. In the view of McConnell’s team, it should be Scott’s responsibility to clear the field of fringe candidates who can’t win general elections, and he failed to do so in many of the biggest Senate races. Adding to those tensions is the fact that Donald Trump has openly feuded with McConnell and threatened to muscle him out of the role of Senate leader in favor of Scott.
So when McConnell complains about “candidate quality,” he’s also taking a shot at his own rival, Scott.
With those caveats out of the way, let me say this: Republicans might very well do better than the pundits expect. And that is keeping some Democratic strategists up at night.
This is true for two main reasons: a flood of outside money that is about to hit the airwaves on Republicans’ behalf, and polling that indicates that the political environment remains a problem for Democratic candidates, despite their party’s recent string of accomplishments.
First, the money
Senate Democrats have been able to outspend and out-fund-raise Republicans so far this year.
That’s partly a function of incumbency. G.O.P. candidates have spent the bulk of their money and energy attacking one another and vying for Trump’s favor, and Democrats have well-established email lists and national infrastructure to support them.
With the primaries wrapping up, however, that’s about to change in a big way. Outside groups are tooling up tens of millions of dollars in ad spending on behalf of Republican candidates, according to public reports. And television advertising still matters a great deal with the older voters who traditionally dominate midterm elections.
There’s the Senate Leadership Fund, a group close to McConnell, which has announced $141 million in advertising reservations. That compares with just $106 million announced by Senate Majority PAC, the counterpart on the Democratic side.
Already, the leadership fund has ramped up its spending in key states, adding more than $9 million in spending in Georgia, $20 million in Ohio and at least $1 million in Pennsylvania.
Another group affiliated with McConnell, One Nation, lifted its spending by nearly $2.6 million in Georgia, $1.24 million in Wisconsin and a little over a quarter-million dollars in Nevada.
Outside conservative groups are flush with cash, too, with the Senate Leadership Fund reporting $104 million on hand as of late June. In contrast, the liberal Senate Majority PAC is wheezing a bit, reporting just $72 million cash on hand as of late July.
Raising money outside the official campaign apparatus has frequently been an advantage for Republicans, who tend to have a much easier time enticing single megadonors to cut large checks. Democrats have plenty of megadonors of their own, of course. But liberal funders are often pulled in multiple directions, driven by causes like climate change, women’s rights or L.G.B.T.Q. issues rather than electoral politics.
Whether Republicans will see their usual monetary advantage is more in question this time. In the past, Republicans have relied on individual billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers to bankroll super PACs and other kinds of groups. But Adelson died in 2021, and his wife, Miriam, has not indicated the same level of interest in financing politics. The Koch brothers have loudly declared that they are no longer as engaged in donating to political campaigns and would prefer to work on issues like criminal justice reform.
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Other G.O.P. donors have stepped up to fill the breach, but this newer breed has often leaned harder toward the Trump end of the party than toward the establishment — which is precisely McConnell’s problem.
For example, there’s Richard Uihlein, a construction magnate who backs many hard-right candidates, and Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who financed J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona. Rebekah and Robert Mercer, the daughter and father who operate a conservative foundation, maneuvered to put their stamp on the Republican Party, until they had a falling out with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top strategist, and Breitbart, the ultra-MAGA news media outlet. Further on the fringe, Mike Lindell, the pillow entrepreneur, has plowed his relatively meager fortune into Trump-friendly “Stop the Steal” candidates across the country.
ImagePresident Biden’s approval ratings are slowly climbing, but remain low in some key states. Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Riding the poller coaster
Then there’s the polling, which is throwing off different signals depending on where you look.
In the major averages of public polls, President Biden’s percentage of approval by voters is slowly climbing into the low 40s. Many Democrats have hailed that fact as an indication that recent achievements like the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, combined with falling gas prices, are turning around the narrative of this presidency in many voters’ minds.
“In today’s divided political environment, moving four points is not inconsequential,” John Anzalone, one of the president’s top pollsters, said in an email.
Anzalone also pointed out that, according to Gallup’s numbers, only one modern-era president’s approval rating has increased during the first two years of his first term: Donald Trump, who saw a modest bump of two percentage points before the 2018 midterms.
What he didn’t mention: The Republican Party got absolutely smoked in those contests. Democrats picked up 41 seats in the House, retaking the majority and setting themselves up for two impeachment inquiries that softened Trump’s numbers before his 2020 re-election bid.
But unlike in the House, which is more sensitive to national trends, Senate races tend to be state-by-state contests. So it’s possible that coastal Democratic strongholds like California and New York are pushing up Biden’s numbers in ways that aren’t reflected in battleground states.
That could be why several polls privately commissioned by Democrats and shared with The New York Times are giving some on the left nightmares.
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In Nevada, for instance, a mid-July poll of general-election voters showed Biden’s approval rating at 38 percent and his disapproval at 60 percent.
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In Georgia, a mid-August poll of likely voters found Biden’s approval rating at just 34 percent, with 56 percent of voters disapproving of his performance.
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Biden is doing a little better in Wisconsin. There, a mid-August poll of general election voters found his approval rating at 40 percent, with 55 percent disapproving.
The good news, for Democrats, is that their incumbents are still polling ahead of their Republican opponents in the key races.
Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona is up on Masters by nearly 10 percentage points. Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire is breathing more easily as Republicans seem poised to nominate Don Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general who has embraced Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia has benefited from revelations that his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, fathered several previously undisclosed children and threatened his ex-wife with a gun. Even Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, widely assumed to be the most endangered Democratic incumbent this year, is ahead in most polls against Adam Laxalt, the Republican nominee.
The other big Senate races may be a different story.
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman seems to have Dr. Mehmet Oz’s number in Pennsylvania, where both men are running to replace Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who is retiring. Fetterman has been torturing Oz, the celebrity surgeon, with memes and posts about his multiple homes and his thin ties to Pennsylvania. Fetterman is slowly recovering from a stroke he suffered in May, and he recently returned to the campaign trail. But his health could be a political liability with general-election voters in a way that it wasn’t during the Democratic primary, and Oz seems determined to make it so.
Vance should be able to dispatch Representative Tim Ryan in Ohio, a state that has become solidly Republican in recent elections. On the other hand, Republicans wouldn’t be pouring an extra $20 million into that race if they were fully confident in Vance’s chances.
And in Wisconsin, many centrist Democrats fret that Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the Democratic nominee, has taken some left-wing positions that could keep him from defeating Senator Ron Johnson despite the latter’s dismal approval ratings. For now, however, Barnes is ahead.
One wild card that has entered the discussion among political insiders since a ballot initiative in Kansas: abortion. Earlier this month, voters in that state surprised many analysts by roundly defeating a measure that would have curtailed abortion rights — a political earthquake that led many Democrats to wonder if they had been underestimating the political potency of the issue, especially among women.
Democrats have a forgiving map this year: They just need to hang on to all five battleground seats to maintain control of the Senate, though they would also love to pick up Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which gives them a little more room for error.
Asked about the possibility that the media coverage had moved a bit ahead of the true state of the key races, David Bergstein, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said, “We operate under the assumption that each of our battleground races will be extremely close, which is why the D.S.C.C. is continuing to take nothing for granted.”
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What to read
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Fact-checking teams are back and warnings about misleading content are cluttering news feeds once again as Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube prepare for election misinformation. Stuart Thompson has the details.
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Source: nytimes.com
