If it’s true that the Republicans are losing their edge with educated white voters over sixty, they’re going to suffer a political bloodbath in November bigger than anything most people have given themselves the right to dream about. And there are signs that they’re already moving in triage mode. If they can’t save their majority in the House of Representatives, then the smart thing to do is to divert resources into protecting their majority in the Senate.
There are problems with this strategy, however. People don’t die a little bit or a lot. They either die or they survive. It’s one thing to lose their house majority, but it’s another thing to give up on trying to save it. They could make a bad election night into an historically catastrophic one. This election season is setting up in a counterintuitive way, and I’m not sure the Republicans understand the dynamics yet.
The founding fathers envisioned the Senate as a bulwark against rash populism and extremism, but the midterms right now look like they’ll be the exact opposite of this. The Republicans’ Senate majority hinges on them holding states like Tennessee and Mississippi and taking over seats in states like West Virginia, Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota. There are other important contests, like the ones in Nevada, Arizona and Florida, but the battlefield is going to be waged almost entirely on Trump’s turf. If the Republicans somehow have a big night, they do it by winning seats in traditionally Democratic states like Wisconsin and Michigan but, until proven otherwise, those are Trump states now. As a result, Senate Republicans know they can win these elections if they can turn out Trump’s voters but they don’t have confidence that they can win them if they produce too much distance between themselves and the president.
The House is the opposite, for the most part. The evidence is mounting that even heavy Trump districts are at risk provided that they have enough upscale voters. Holding traditional Republicans in line is very important to GOP candidates running in even partially suburban districts. These voters had a long history of opposing the Clinton political dynasty, which proved to be crucial to Trump’s success. He lost a lot of them, but not so many that it doomed him. He will do much worse in these areas the next time around, and the congressional candidates are going to feel the pain before he does. As a result, Republicans running for House seats have much more reason to run to the middle than Republicans running for Senate in places like North Dakota or Tennessee.
It’s never easy or without risk to create separation from a president of your own party, but it’s the best hope for a lot of Republicans. We just witnessed Democrat Conor Lamb win a special election in the Pittsburgh suburbs and exurbs by creating distance from Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes, a show of independence from the party’s national leaders is essential to success.
So, the GOP can’t really have one common strategy that applies to both the Senate and the House. Trump’s made this is even more obvious by starting a trade war with China that threatens corn and soybean farmers. That greatly increases the number of districts where a Democrat can do damage by saddling his opponent with the record and policies of the president.
If the Senate candidates decide to stick to Trump like glue, and the GOP decides to put all their eggs in the Senate basket, then we’re not going to see any daylight between the Republican Party and the president prior to the elections. House candidates will suffer not only from the diversion of resources, but from the lack of cover they get and the lack of message amplification they’ll enjoy.
As triage, it makes some sense. If they want to beat Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia or Joe Donnelly in Indiana, they need to be able to argue that Trump is doing a good job and is being unjustly investigated and criticized. If they show much doubt about these things, their argument could collapse. If they try to hold the House that way, though, it will amount to wishful thinking because the educated voters they’ll need are not impressed with Trump’s performance and want to see him held to account. They can’t hold seats in the Atlanta or Charlotte or Chicago suburbs by insisting that Trump is a victim of fake news and a witch hunt. They’ll need to run their own campaigns based on their own records, and hope that people will hear them out despite their party connection to the president.
So, ironically, we should expect to see more open criticism from House Republican candidates than from Senate Republican candidates. But we also should be prepared to witness a general abandonment of the House in a desperate last ditch effort to save their Senate majority.
If it works, we may see the GOP actually pick up a seat or two in the Senate but lose the House more decisively than most people are ready to predict.
Well, this is sort of counter-intuitive as a strategy, since you can’t gerrymander a state, you can only suppress the votes of its Democratic demographics. If revulsion for the Catastrophe of Conservatism were to actually occur with some portion of the incompetent white electorate, then it should hit the senate harder than the gerrymandered House which was engineered to withstand some rising sea levels.
The Repub midterm strategy is already quite clear. Talk up the irresponsible Job-Creatin’ Tax Cut(tm) that gave the schmoes a hundred a month (maybe), talk up the abolition of the Burdensome Red Tape that supposedly created jobs while irreversibly wrecking the environment, and talk up the heroic War on Latinos with its ethnic cleansing by our wonderful GICEtapo and noble troops on the border. These are all popular policies with the white electorate, and that’s the only electorate that matters to the “conservative” movement and its wholly-owned party. Also, too, blame Dems[!] for the destruction of DACA and rely upon the useless corporate media to so muddle reality that no one can see the bottom. Every Repub can run on these “accomplishments”.
As you say, the developing Trump Trade War is the wild card, as it has the potential to harm rural America, the bastion of “conservatism”. That will likely be the thing the coaches of Team Conservative will be desperate to get the Great Imbecile to modify. And given how quickly he dropped his steel tariffs, he very well may listen to them.
But of course if Repubs are forced to somehow have to “choose” between chambers, they must hold the senate in order to destroy the federal judiciary for the next 35 years. This should ensure the destruction of the planet and the republic, which seems to be the unstated goal of “conservatism”.
You would be right if all the Senate seats were up for reelection and if there were an a better representation of Democrats in the Senate (2 reps per State) structure.
In general, statewide elections should be more vulnerable than house races taken as a whole. But that’s why this election is weird. The Senate turf is almost all on heavy Trump territory.
We know from the PA special the tax cut isn’t doing them much good with voters (it is getting them lots of money from billionaires, of course). I don’t think the “cutting red tape” aka poisoning the country is going to help either. That leaves beating up on the browns, and I expect a lot of that.
A racist/nativist message would work towards Boo’s hypothetical “save the Senate” strategy. It would be lethal to the Republicans in the House, swinging lots of diverse and/or educated suburban districts to us. But in the Senate, it would probably help the Republican more (ND/MT/MO/WV/IN/TN/MS) than it would hurt them (FL/NV/AZ/TX). As you say, the Senate quite possibly gives them the judiciary, which is far more important to them. Holding the House at this point is probably just about preventing investigations – if they do hold the majority will be so narrow it will be very difficult to pass legislation.
Hmm, looking at that Senate race list is making me more optimistic.
All elections are local blahblahblah…
A wave is a wave because it carries everyone along with it, the virtuous and the venal. I love that Republicans think they can win CT5, because it’s the closest Connecticut has to a swing district. Esty won it with 58% of the vote last time.
The idea that they can strategize their way out of this mess must be the only way to keep going.
No.
I’m not going to get overconfident counting on Republican turnout to be lower than normal or white men to be less racist misogynists or less educated white women to turn into independent voters in November.
I’m counting on motivated Democrats to turn out in ahistorical rates for midterms.
But I’ll reserve judgment until I see the Karl Rove “math” before I place any bets in Vegas.
Hope this works out a lot better than 2016.
I’m with you on this. I plan on doing my bit between now and November and will be working here in my state to reclaim a statewide office or two for the Dems held by the GOP since 2002, when a huge Red tsunami hit this red state.
We’ve got two women, one black and one white, running for Governor in the Dem primary on May 22nd. Also, we’ve got the last white Democratic congressperson from the South, John Barrow, who lost his seat in 2014 is vying to take over the Secretary of State position.
I met him at a recent meet and greet and he says that if we can get a Dem into that important seat we can do something about the Diebold computers, now 16 years old with no paper trail, and improve the Democratic results by a couple of points just by being in control of that so very important office. The current GOP Secretary of State is vying to become his party’s nominee for Governor. The current lieutenant governor is running against him. I hope they do some electoral damage to each other in the primary.
This is an important election year here and Democrats finally have a chance to reclaim just a bit of parity. We need to stay focused.
Also left leaning or truly independent and/or unaffiliated voters. About 1/3 third of all registered voters in Colorado are not registered with a political party.
We just witnessed Democrat Conor Lamb win a special election in the Pittsburgh suburbs and exurbs by creating distance from Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes, a show of independence from the party’s national leaders is essential to success.
Is there proof of this one way or another? It’s one thing for people here, or on Twitter, to get outraged by one quote but is there any actual evidence that this moved that race at all? After all, the GOP probably ran craploads of “scary” ads tying Lamb to Pelosi. And yet Lamb won.
Probably?
They spent virtually all of their money trying to tie him to Pelosi. And so he just said he won’t support her and neutered their biggest play.
Knowing Pelosi, she probably told him it was okay to do that. It’s a nice Meta move, but in the trenches, if someone had done a real exit poll on that race, I would bet that almost no one would rate his non-support of her in their top ten reasons for voting for the Democrat in that race. The stakes are way too high for something that insider to matter.
Right, which is the whole point. It’s a nice toss-off line to some reporter but who in the district will remember it two days later? I’d love to see a poll of various districts asking them who the Minority Leader is and why they’re from. I’m guessing the response in the affirmative won’t be too high. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if more GOPers knew only because of the 12+ year long GOP demonizing campaign.
how much did he win by?
. . . have to matter very much to matter.
(627 votes = 0.2%, to answer your question.)
Well, there’s always Fuzzy Bear and Cosy Bear who apparently are hard at work trying to take over actual voting machines in key states.
If successful, the Democrats could still have a bad night without ever knowing for sure why.
(This is assuming that the Russians are still supporting the GOP, which is a pretty safe bet, in my opinion.)