Senate Reset: Dems Staring Down Barrel Of 47
On Bad News For Dems
Two polls this week out of Georgia have incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock losing to former Georgia Bulldog and likely Republican nominee Herschel Walker, which is one of those things that both matters and doesn’t. Warnock losing right now is in some ways meaningless – I mean, it’s two polls in January – but also entirely meaningful, because right now, Democrats are staring down the barrel of not just losing the Senate, but losing it so badly that a theoretical GOP President after 2024 is staring at 56 Senate seats.
I’m being that blunt because Democrats are going to lose three seats in 2024, at least – Ohio, West Virginia, and Montana are gone for Democrats – and if they lose Georgia this year, they’re losing Arizona, and probably Nevada too. And if that happens, then we’re staring at the biggest GOP majority in the Senate since the fucking Depression. And I have no idea right now if that’s likely or not.
As I said when I did Px3 this week, I don’t think it will be that bad, but I recorded that podcast on Tuesday before two polls suggested Walker was primed to beat Warnock, and they confirm the one thing I said then, which is if Biden’s still this unpopular in the fall, nothing else matters and it will be a wave. Everything everybody is talking about about close elections and North Carolina and Ohio Congressional maps being close, all of it is implicitly, if not explicitly, built around the idea Democrats will get their heads out of their asses and Biden will go from hellaciously unpopular to just kinda unpopular. But if that implicit assumption’s wrong, oh boy we’re fucked.
If the elections go the way they would if the midterms were today, Democrats would be destroyed, and the Senate would be 47/53. Biden’s net approval, currently sitting at a miserable -11%, is a disgrace, and the fact that the party is in such a hole seems to be one of those things people keep trying to will themselves out of, without an actual plan. “Ah, but once COVID is gone,” has been the constant refrain, now it’s “once inflation goes down”, which is replacing “once Congress passes the infrastructure bill”, which replaced “once Afghanistan fades from the news cycle” on the list of excuses. At some point, the Democratic Party has to acknowledge that they’re in power, and they can make the weather – in other words, they have the power to change their circumstances.
When I did Px3 on Wednesday, the first question I was asked is whether the right way to think of Biden isn’t as a normal American President with a trifecta but as a leader of a Parliamentary Government in a Hung Parliament, reliant on unreliable votes for survival. It’s a nifty theory, but if we want to pretend that Biden is less Obama than Julia Gillard, that’s not even a good excuse for his uselessness, because Gillard knew the two things to take care of when you’re trying to manage a Hung Parliament: do as much as you can through executive action, and get everyone on the same page from the start.
Biden has been unwilling to move on student loan relief or guns by EO, his climate regulations have been both very good and decidedly not championed enough by the Administration, and he has managed his caucuses much worse than Gillard ever did. You think getting Manchin and the Squad on the same page is hard? Gillard had to get two conservative independents and the Greens on board every single piece of legislation, and she managed to get the votes from those two conservative, rural members for a carbon tax. So, please, spare me the aria about how hard it is.
If Biden cannot get his head out of his ass and can’t find his way to boosting his approvals and giving his party something to cheer about, then he is about to condemn the party and the country to a GOP Senate majority that will leave a theoretical Alito or Thomas SCOTUS seat open for as long as they have to, and one that will be very, very hard to beat when the time comes. Even if the 2026 map isn’t great for Democrats – Susan Collins might lose in Maine, if she even runs, maybe John Cornyn in Texas is vulnerable – and the next Democratic Senate majority always looked likely to be 2028 anyways, think about how much easier it will be to win Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona if Democrats already have members there?
For Democrats, the risks here are huge, and those who deny the crisis in front of the party do so out of a blind deference to a political class inside the party that hasn’t earned it. If the midterms were today, Democrats would lose at least 2 Senate seats, and gun to my head, they’d lose three. Our only hope is Biden doing something we have no evidence he can do.
Time to panic.