You can find a lot of left-of-center talking heads and writers promoting long-shot Democratic Senate challengers in Texas, Florida, and Nebraska. But the better measure of Democrats’ ambitions and expectations is where they’re spending their money.
Thirty-eight Republican senators are not up for reelection this year. Eleven more Republicans either look like safe bets for Senate reelection or are running for open seats in deep-red states such as Utah and Indiana.
I put Ted Cruz’s bid for reelection in Texas in that “safe bet” category. Yes, a recent Morning Consult poll in Texas had Democratic senate nominee Colin Allred ahead of Cruz by one percentage point — “well within the survey’s margin of error,” as the pollster noted. But another poll out Monday put Cruz ahead by three percentage points.
It doesn’t really matter if your Democratic neighbor down the street thinks that Allred can beat Cruz. Your neighbor probably was one of the small-dollar donors who gave Jaime Harrison $130 million, believing he was going to beat Lindsey Graham in South Carolina in 2020, or gave Amy McGrath $88 million believing she was going to beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky in 2020, or gave Beto O’Rourke nearly $79 million, convinced he was going to beat Cruz six years ago.
What matters is whether the movers and shakers at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the directors of various left-of-center Super PACs who control significant financial resources believe that Allred has a shot at beating Cruz. If the DSCC starts sending money to help a Democratic campaign in an extremely big and expensive state (20 separate media markets, including the expensive Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin ones), it will mean something. But as of a week ago, that wasn’t happening:
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, indicated the party is not yet committed to devoting financial resources to Texas or Florida despite its claims that it is in striking distance to flip the two GOP-held seats.
Peters must prioritize, and vulnerable incumbents are always first in line.
The same goes for the persistent Democratic belief that “independent” Dan Osborn — who says he “loves Bernie” Sanders — is going to knock off incumbent Republican senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska. If it’s so close, where’s all the outside help? Democrats’ mouths are saying they believe Osborn can win, but their wallets say otherwise. And it’s a state with inexpensive media markets! Omaha was ranked the 73rd largest market in the country last year.
(By the way, the Harris campaign ended August with $235 million in cash on hand, while the Trump campaign had $79 million in cash on hand. Do you think when all is said and done, if there’s a President Harris and a GOP Senate, Democrats will grumble that Harris could have done more to help out Senate Democrats?)
Those of you who can do math have realized that 38+ 11 = 49, meaning the absolute floor for Republicans in the Senate in January 2025 is 49 seats.
But it really is 50 seats, because in West Virginia, Republican Jim Justice is ahead by more than 30 percentage points.
So, the hopes of a Democratic majority in the next Senate are hanging by a thread. In Montana, Democratic incumbent Jon Tester appears to be falling behind Republican challenger Tim Sheehy.
Sheehy confounds the Tester playbook. He may be relatively new to the state, but he has prospered in it as the co-founder of an aerial firefighting company. He has donated to area hospitals. And he is a decorated veteran. A retired Navy SEAL, he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. There’s reason to believe that this background endears him to Montanans in a way that those of prior Tester challengers didn’t, especially in a favorable political environment. Recent polling has moved in Sheehy’s favor. “You can beat on him all you want about not being from here,” Krauss says. “But if he was sleeping in a tent in a war zone, as far as I’m concerned, that was Montana ground.”
An irony arises in this campaign. While each candidate tries to claim the mantle of the true Montanan, each has, in a sense, succumbed to trends beyond the state. Tester’s time in Washington has weakened his claims, personal and ideological, to be a Washington outsider. And Sheehy has relied on Tester’s transformation, as well as broader political shifts, in the effort to oust him; in August, Sheehy rallied with Donald Trump. And out-of-staters may help both sides. Though some recent arrivals have made purple and blue parts of Montana bluer, Republicans believe that others are “refugees, not missionaries” from blue states, as Daines, also chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, put it. He thinks they are “moving to Montana to join us, not to change us.”
Sheehy would be the 51st Republican senator, ensuring GOP control of the chamber.
But perhaps Senate Republicans won’t have such a small majority.
In Pennsylvania, most recent polls have incumbent Democratic senator Bob Casey ahead of GOP challenger Dave McCormick by four to eight percentage points, but the Washington Post survey conducted earlier this month had them tied.
McCormick has the sterling resume — West Point graduate, combat veteran and Bronze Star recipient, Ph.D. from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, U.S. Department of the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, senior post on the U.S. National Security Council, and former CEO of Bridgewater Associates. Oh, and five years as a three-dollar-an-hour orange squeezer at the Kohr’s orangeade stand at the Bloomsburg Fair.
Meanwhile, Casey — who’s been in public office since the Macarena was a hit — votes with the Biden administration 98.5 percent of the time. When the percentage of time that your allegedly moderate centrist senator votes with Biden is around the human body temperature, it’s time to make a change.
Casey runs around insisting that he supports fracking, but he also wants the Environmental Protection Agency “conducting rigorous oversight of hydraulic fracturing which occurs during natural gas drilling.” Under Obama, the EPA declared fracking a threat to U.S. water supplies. Just how friendly would a Harris administration’s EPA be to fracking operations with its “rigorous oversight”?
It’s a similar dynamic in Maryland, where Democrat Angela Alsobrooks, the tax cheat, is usually ahead of former governor Larry Hogan . . . except for in a recent survey conducted for the AARP, which showed a tie. (I went back and checked Hogan’s first run for governor against Anthony Brown in 2014. Brown led every poll that cycle except one . . . and then Hogan won by nearly five percentage points on Election Day.)
And then in Ohio, incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown looked just barely safe enough against Republican Bernie Moreno . . . until the last few polls, which have Brown ahead by one point, ahead by three points, ahead by two points, and trailing Moreno by a point. Suddenly, this looks like a really tight, neck-and-neck race in a state that Trump is probably going to win by a comfortable, perhaps even double-digit margin.
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