June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump rode down his stupid golden escalator and announced his comical run for President in front of a crowd of paid actors for the purpose of getting higher ratings than Gwen Stefani, was the official beginning of the Trump Era. And that era has not ended, and will probably not end until one of two things happens - Trump dies or Trump goes to jail, and if he goes to jail, it probably still won’t be over until we have to inevitably defeat the republican nominee promising to pardon him, or just beat Trump while he campaigns from his jail cell. The Trump Era, our present time, has all but destroyed members of Congress from states won by the other party.
The senate class of 2016 was the first class to be victims of the Trump Era and for the first time in modern history, every state voted for a senator of the same party as it voted for in the presidential election. And as a result, republicans Mark Kirk of Illinois and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said goodbye to their political careers. But that was just the beginning of the Trump Era’s path of destruction.
Next came 2018. The senate seats up for election in that year had last been elected in 2012, when Barack Obama won the popular vote by a mere 3.9% (less than Joe Biden’s 4.5% in 2020) and national democrats won the congressional popular vote by only 1%. And yet, in a close (in popular vote standards) presidential election year, many democrats were elected in very red states, and some republicans survived in blue states.
Heidi Heitkamp - North Dakota
Joe Manchin - West Virginia
Jon Tester - Montana
Joe Donnelly - Indiana
Claire McCaskill - Missouri
Dean Heller - Nevada
But after 2018, a year when the democrats won the popular vote by 8%, 7 percent better than 2012, four out of these six people said goodbye. In addition, Bill Nelson from Florida, a state Trump had just won, lost to Rick Scott by just 10,000 votes (Although I hate “denying” an election, I’ll always put an asterisk on this one). The lone survivors: Jon Tester and Joe Manchin, each surviving by a mere 4% and 3%, respectively.
2020 was the last senate class to be untouched by the Trump Era, and with a presidential election at the top of the ballot, more opposite-party incumbents met their end.
Cory Gardner, Colorado
Doug Jones, Alabama
Martha McSally, Arizona
David Perdue, Georgia
Kelly Loefler - Georgia
And now, our politics has become so polarized that in a midterm election with a president polling at between 41-45% approval rating, no incumbent senator who ran for re-election lost, the first time ever in history since the passage of the 17th amendment.
As of today, there are only 5 senators left from states won by the other party in the 2020 election.
Joe Manchin, West Virginia
Jon Tester, Montana
Sherrod Brown, Ohio
Susan Collins, Maine
Ron Johnson, Wisconsin
But here’s the biggest catch to this whole story, and the main point of what I’m writing about today. In the four election cycles of the Trump Era, it seems like there have been no stones unturned. We have seen everything. Every member of Congress, whether in the Senate or the House, is a product of the Trump era. They have all been elected or re-elected in an election happening after June 16, 2015. We have all the data points: senate elections in two presidential years, a midterm year with a republican president, and a midterm with a democratic president.
But there’s one thing we really haven’t seen in the Trump Era. What happens when there’s a vulnerable democratic senator running for re-election in a presidential year? The true answer is - we have no clue.
2016 ELECTION -
In 2016, the first Trump-era election, there were ZERO Democratic incumbents in states Trump ended up winning, or states Trump even came close to winning. The closest election in which democrats held on to a seat was Nevada, where the ex-Attorney General of Maryland, Catherine Cortez Masto, successfully defended Harry Reid’s seat as he retired. Hillary won the state by about 2.5%, and besides losing Washoe County (which Clinton won) by 1,683 votes, Cortez-Masto performed almost equally as well as Clinton. But keep in mind, she wasn’t even an incumbent.
The only other mildly competitive senate race in 2016 was Colorado, where incumbent Michael Bennett won re-election, over-performing Clinton by about 0.9%. Sure, Hillary underperformed Obama’s 2012 performance by like half a percentage point, but it really wasn’t that close.
2020 ELECTION -
In 2020, there were a few more data points for democratic incumbents, but still not many.
In Alabama - Doug Jones, who really shouldn’t have existed as a politician, but hit the fucking jackpot when Donald Trump appointed closeted-not-closeted racist Jeff Sessions as attorney general, and then his appointed replacement actually managed to lose a primary to ex-impeached Alabama Supreme Court justice and teen mall molester Roy Moore. And he still only won by 1%. But, he was up for re-election in 2020 in Alabama, where 90% of the white people voted for Trump, and 90% of the black people voted for Biden. And as a result, he lost, but he over-performed Biden by about 5%, and almost held a republican to less than 60% of the vote for the first time since 2002. Moral victory, I guess?
In Michigan, Gary Peters, who is jokingly known as the least well-known senator in America (36% of this own constituents don’t know who he is) was up for re-election. Gary Peters is so hilariously unknown that Joe DiSano, a democratic strategist, called him “just a boring guy who people can rely on.” Most of his own campaign consultants think of him just as a “neighborhood dad.” Gary Peters would go up against John James, a black republican who has the outward appearance of a strand-up guy - he was a member of the marines and has a very strong, likable persona. He had surprised the political universe in 2018 when he held incumbent Debbie Stabenow to just 52% of the vote in a bad midterm year. But John James is actually a fucking lunatic - he has been on record trying to defund Planned Parenthood and comparing abortion to “genocide.” Joe Biden won Michigan by 2.8%, but Gary Peters only won on the same ballot by 1.7%. And Mr. “Gullible people think I have a shred of sanity” John James refused to concede his 92,000 vote loss, raised $2 million from his own newly-created Super-PAC to contest the election, and successfully stalled the certification of the votes before reasonable republicans on the state canvassing board told Trump and James to go fuck themselves. Gary Peters was also hurt by the fact that democrats at the DSCC got fooled into thinking they had a better shot at winning states like South Carolina and Montana in 2020, and they neglected his race, thinking he had it won. Despite the fact that I don’t like to see Gary Peters almost losing, we can probably thank this close result for making Gary Peters so angry, he became the chair of the DSCC in 2021, and successfully defended the senate for democrats in 2022. He didn’t make the mistake of listening to democratic couch-consultants telling him to invest money in Ohio, which wasn’t even that close.
In the 2020 New Hampshire senate race , incumbent democrat Jeanne Shaheen, who has a great history of taking out some of the worst human beings (see below), was up for re-election. She over-performed Biden by over eight percentage points and won every county in New Hampshire. Quick history of Jeanne Shaheen’s amazing history of destroying the bad guys - in 1996, she was elected governor by defeating Ovide Lamontagne, an extreme anti-abortion lawyer who successfully defended the Catholic Church against criminal charges in a sex crime/child abuse scandal. In 2008, she successfully defeated extreme anti-abortion senator John Sununu Jr, and in 2014, she ended the political career of Massachusetts carpet-bagger and political trojan horse Scott Brown.
So other than those (sometimes close) elections listed above, we have never really seen what actually happens when a long-serving democratic senator from a red state meets a simultaneous presidential election. The 2024 election is the senate’s final episode of the Trump Era. It is the last group of senators who have never been touched by a presidential election occurring after June 16, 2015. Think about this: The last time these guys ever had their name on a ballot next to a presidential candidate (if at all) was when Mitt Romney was the face of the G.O.P. They are the last remnants of “before the dark times, before the empire.” Ohio, West Virginia, and Montana will be the first time we ever see what happens when a long-serving red-state democrat runs with Trump above their name.
The media (and I) would love to be able to know what happens when these two things collide, but the reality is, we don’t know what will happen. It’s never happened before. The only evidence we have is a completely mixed bag. Some incumbent democrats like Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire over-performed Biden enough that if Sherrod Brown did the same, he should feel very good about winning - and Jon Tester might have a chance too, especially in a small state. But if we looked at Gary Peters’ race, where a non-divisive incumbent democrat couldn’t manage to over-perform Biden, then the map becomes so much more daunting. We have lots of data for what happens to republicans in blue states during a presidential year, and although I’m happy we’ve won those races, blue-state republicans are 1-5 in the Trump era. But red-state democrats, as small as they may be in their numbers, might still have a little bit of magic left.
In 2024, in order to keep the senate and eliminate the filibuster, which will allow us to ban gerrymandering, pass voting rights bills, restore Roe, and more, the task can be distilled to a very simple (but daunting) checklist:
We must win every close democratic-held senate race in a state Biden won in 2020.
Minnesota (Amy Klobachar)
Wisconsin (Tammy Baldwin)
Michigan (Debbie Stabenow, who is retiring)
Pennsylvania (Bob Casey)
Nevada (Jacky Rosen)
We must win 3 out of four of the following races:
Arizona (possible three-way vs Sinema)
Ohio (Sherrod Brown)
Montana (Jon Tester)
Texas (Ted Cruz)
Another factor that should be SERIOUSLY considered is how incredibly exposed the republican party will be to the crazies being nominated for senate races - even more than they were in 2022. In many states (but to be clear, not all of them), senate primaries are held simultaneously with the presidential primary. If Trump is on the ballot in a primary - especially if it’s contested and high-profile - AND there’s a republican senate primary, his base is going to come out of the woodwork and vote for him, and then vote for a Kari Lake, a Dr Oz, a Blake Masters, or a Don Bolduc for the senate. The republican party would love you to think that they have realized their candidate quality problem and can fix it - but as soon as 2024 rolls around, and republicans are staring down the barrel of the presidential primary, I guarantee you that Mitch McConnell is going to be giving interviews on Fox News saying “we might have a candidate quality problem.” And if Trump is in jail or under indictment while running for President in a GOP primary, god help the republicans, because the only people voting in their primary will be the crazies supporting their President under attack from the “woke-left lizard people at the deep-state FBI and DOJ cabal who run the Jewish-space-laser and funnel money to Hillary Clinton and Maxine Waters’ undercover pizza parlor in Benghazi where they hire 87,000 IRS agents to traffic children, drink their blood, and sell them to Chinese agents in Maricopa County using bamboo ballots and hacked voting machines produced by the Venezuelan government under Hugo Chavez to steal the the election for Joe Biden.”
Sorry republicans, your candidate quality problem hasn’t ended with Herschel Walker. 2022 was just Round 1.
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