Georgia Just Won Schumer Four Years As Majority Leader

The Real Impact Of Tuesday

Congrats to Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, you just cost the GOP the Senate - not just for 2 years, but for four of them.

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Take a gander through the 2022 Senate map, and you face one inescapable conclusion - we'll all be talking about the same 7 states for two years now, and honestly within that, a core group of like 4 states. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina are all plausible Democratic pickups, and then the GOP have some chance of picking up any of New Hampshire, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia (the Warnock seat). It looks fairly neutral and maybe even potentially good for Republicans, but here's the thing - their pickup opportunities are crap. None of them are in Trump 2020 states, and the GOP bench in the three non-New Hampshire states are terrible. The argument for any of them would be a 2010-style disaster, but that was about turnout cratering, and cratering turnout makes Democrats do better now - as Georgia shows. The GOP have no good candidates in any of Arizona, Nevada, or Georgia, and part of how we know this is that Republicans didn't have a better option than Kelly Loeffler or Martha McSally for this cycle.

New Hampshire, of course, has Chris Sununu, but Doomeristic Democrats would do well to remember how "popular red-state Governor in small, white, political heterodox state" worked for one Steve Bullock in November before declaring that Republicans can win in New Hampshire. Partisanship is king in Senate races now, and the GOP in New Hampshire have won exactly one Federal, statewide race in the last 15 years - Kelly Ayotte in 2010. Consequently, the GOP have at best a 25% chance of winning any of those races, especially considering there are four returning Democratic incumbents for these races.

Head over to the Democratic pickup opportunities, and you'll see a markedly different picture - Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were both Biden states, and even North Carolina was only Trump by less than a point and a half. Pennsylvania is an open seat where Democrats will almost assuredly run their popular Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, whose strength in Western Pennsylvania means he starts any race as a clear (but not prohibitive) favourite in 2022. In a state where the Philly collar counties aren't even close to stopping their realignment and where Trump managed to get a ridiculously strong turnout of rural whites - and then still lost - Pennsylvania is a very good Democratic pickup opportunity.

Wisconsin is a bit harder to handicap - Democrats have the Governorship there up in 2022, but Biden underran Tony Evers in southwest Wisconsin by a non-trivial amount. He won the state because of an overperformance in the Milwaukee collar, which shows the Democratic tradeoffs. If the Democrats get those collar results again, and the GOP don't get their turnout in the southwest, it's a Democratic win. If the collar stalls out and Evers only does Biden-level in the southwest, it could stay red. It's a Tossup, for now.

North Carolina is the last state, which is the worst of the three pickup opportunities because it is the reddest state of the three, but it is also the one where Trump's turnout operations was the decisive factor. If those transient, low propensity whites - who just didn't turn out in the numbers needed in Georgia - stay home, the state can go blue. Even if it's a Lean R race, it's still easily more winnable than anything the GOP has to gain.

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There's also a chance, such as it is, that the Democrats could pass DC Statehood, which even beyond the 2022 slate would mean two more Senators for Democrats - an accomplishment that can only happen (if it does) because of Warnock and Ossoff. But even without DC, the GOP have to defend the three most vulnerable Senate seats on the board in just under two years, and they can't hold steady. Any loss - which, honestly, seems quite likely in Pennsylvania - and the GOP need to gain two seats, which is plainly not happening except in fairly low-probability cases.

Now, I should probably heed my past warnings and actually discuss the case that this is all overzealous on Democrats and the GOP actually aren't dead. Maybe these low-propensity whites aren't gone from voting anymore, and someone else can rally them to the polls. Maybe Biden is just more unpopular than I realize with suburbanites, and there is suburban slippage once people face the consequences of a Biden administration. Or, hell, maybe the GOP just run good campaigns in the states they need to do well in. All of that is plausible, and over reading singular results - especially when they confirm a prior - is a risk. And, I think more importantly to disclose, I'm battling one hell of a hangover after Tuesday night.

But, the mission statement of Scrimshaw Unscripted is to show readers where my head is, and right now, there's clarity through the whiskey-fueled fog. Democrats just won the Senate not for two years, but for four.