Georgia Poll And Democratic Senate Chances

A Meditation On Chances And History

On the basis of the overturning of Roe, I wrote in my betting column for TheLines this week that I think Democrats are Senate favourites, a take that got pushback from the usual suspects for the usual reasons – none of which I can push back on. The thing is, they might be right, in a sense – I am honestly terrified that I am going to end up seeing myself inch closer and closer to the edge of the reasonable election outcomes, as I did throughout 2022, and I am still on the Democratic optimist side, especially in terms of the Governor’s Map. I know all of this, which is why when I pick columns for TheLines, I make sure to pair a state where I’m optimistic on Democrats (say, Pennsylvania Governor) with one where I think the GOP are trending well (Georgia). When I wrote about the state poll barrage this month, I wrote not that Democrats were in great shape, but that these polls were, in my words, “shit”.

Does “Democrats are probably Senate favourites” mean “I will have them winning the Senate in November? Not necessarily. I think they’re favourites because of how narrow this map truly is – if Democrats lose New Hampshire or win Wisconsin or North Carolina, those would be shocking outcomes, and as of right now fringe possibilities. If any of those three happen, good on the people seeing it now, but the Senate map is four states, which makes thinking about the whole map holistically very easy to do.

I’m not really here to relitigate that column – you can read it yourself – but I do have a bunch of other points, mostly launching off of a Quinnipiac Georgia poll which had Herschel Walker down 10% in his bid to unseat Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock.

Let’s start with the obvious – is Warnock really up 10%? God no. Is Warnock probably up? Assuredly. Is it plausible that, especially after Dobbs, the lead could be in the 4-6% range? Unlikely, but plausible. But none of this is the actual point. I could make 1000 points about the poll, and how if Warnock got 35% of the white vote he’d easily get more than 50%+1 and how likely he is to get 35% (not very), but it’s not the guts of the poll that interest me. It’s the fact that the GOP don’t have a singularly great candidate in any of the four races they need to win 2 of to win the Senate.

You can make the argument they don’t have even have a good candidate anywhere, depending on your view of Adam Laxalt in Nevada, but even accepting him as a good one, he is certainly no rock star. In the other three key races? Herschel has undiagnosed CTE that isn’t going to get any better any time soon, has 3 secret kids, and used to beat his wife, Dr. Oz is apparently the least popular politician in America right now (even adjusted for a decent house effect bias), and Blake Masters in Arizona is calling for a national ban on abortion, referring to a fetus as a child with 14th Amendment rights and abortion as murder.

Put aside your personal beliefs on that last one, but the idea that that will be popular with Romney-Biden voters in the suburbs of Maricopa is absurdist nonsense. It will be about as popular as the idea of drinking one’s own piss in a state that’s 63% pro-choice, per the 2020 Fox Exits. The GOP gotta win two of these races, and how are they gonna do that, exactly?

Even if you think the salience of abortion is going to go down from the fever pitch, it will be higher than it was at the beginning of the year, and that dampens the chances of a GOP wave. As I consistently write, Democrats do worse with anti-choice voters than Republicans do with pro-choice voters, because the GOP manage to maintain stronger vote shares with pro-choice, pro-tax cuts, small government wealthy white people. It’s how they win Southlake and Forsyth by the outrageous margins they do.

The problem for Republicans is their Senate recruitment was dogshit at a time when Arizona and Georgia are the exact kinds of states primed to re-elect their Democratic Senators while voting for GOP Governors, and in the two states where picking a moderate nominee would have had the most benefit, they picked two lunatics. In Nevada, Laxalt isn’t crazy, but he’s also not a good nominee, and the GOP have to overcome a state where they don’t often win federal office anymore. If you think the GOP can do two of a) keep their Hispanic gains against a Hispanic incumbent, b) extend their rural margins, and c) win back Romney-Biden voters in the Vegas suburbs, then you think the GOP probably win. I think they’re going backwards with Hispanics and not gaining much, if anything, in the burbs, so I have Catherine Cortez-Masto ahead.

At the end of the day, I think Warnock is the safest of the 3 competitive Senate Dems given the tire fire that is Herschel Walker’s campaign, I think Cortez-Masto is in the middle because of the gap between her and Kelly’s states’ partisanships, and I think Mark Kelly is barely favoured. My contention is not that Democrats will win Pennsylvania – I firmly don’t believe Dr. Oz is this bad of a candidate – but I think the odds of them winning at least one of Arizona and Pennsylvania is greater than 50%, and given what I think about Nevada and Georgia, I have Democrats favoured in the Senate.

Maybe this is all wrong, but this is where my head is right now. I don’t call races tossups, let alone control of chambers, so I have Democrats slightly favoured. I might be very very wrong (House is Safe R, in case anyone thought I might think otherwise). But right now, I think it’s a status quo Senate, and I’m not gonna shrink from that just because I’ve been burned before.

I had Mark Kelly losing before Dobbs – I wrote in May for TheLines that I thought Democrats were values to win the Senate, but not favourites, because at that point I had Kelly as a 40/60 underdog. Now, having looked at the abortion salience stuff and Masters’ dogshit policy on it, I think it’s 55/45 Dem. If Masters had a policy of supporting bans after the first trimester, I think he’d win, but a full ban is a loser. These are all falsifiable predictions, but that’s where my head is.