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| Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) |
This week, while his junior colleague Bob Corker was still wandering the halls of Congress (and apparently getting stood up by the president as one last slight to a senator who was once a titan in his party), Lamar Alexander announced that this will be his last term in office.
Alexander, for those who don't know, has had three very intriguing chapters to his long career in public life. Like many politicians, Alexander's first foray into elective politics went poorly; he lost the 1974 governor's race to former Rep. Ray Blanton during the Watergate scandals because Blanton linked him to the unpopular president (Alexander worked in Nixon's legal office early in the president's first term). However, Blanton's career ended in disgrace, and we so often forget that many successful politicians have an early loss on their resumé before they become titans (George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush & Barack Obama all lost races for Congress before they eventually held the Oval Office). This was the case for Alexander, who became a wildly popular 2-term governor four years after losing to Blanton, and then joined the first Bush administration as Secretary of Education, a post that gave him a taste for his boss's job, as Alexander became a presidential candidate in 1996 & 2000.
Before there was "Jeb!" there was "Lamar!" a presidential race that also ended poorly, but were it not for a stampede of group think, may have changed history quite a bit. While Bob Dole was seen as the frontrunner for the nomination in 1996, he was considerably older than Bill Clinton (who had gained a lot of great press in 1992 for his youth compared to President Bush), and there was clearly an opening for a better candidate. The problem was that, other than Alexander (and arguably Texas Sen. Phil Gramm), no one who was actually in the race felt qualified to hold the presidency (major players in the party like George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, John McCain, and Christie Todd Whitman all turned down the opportunity). Instead, in a foreshadowing of things to come, the GOP nearly turned down the longtime party leader Dole in favor of a bombastic, unqualified television personality named Pat Buchanan. Buchanan nabbed second place in the Iowa caucuses, then headed to a stunning victory in New Hampshire. Combined with Steve Forbes strange billionaire's bid for the White House (Buchanan & Forbes combine to basically make Trump), there wasn't room for Alexander in the way a past primary might have allowed. Alexander placed third at the Iowa caucuses-were he to have gotten second place (and he was relatively close to Buchanan) and captured a similar momentum, his positions as a cabinet secretary & governor (plus being 13 years Dole's junior) may have gotten him the nomination, and perhaps even the White House. In 2000, he also ran, but his momentum had stalled at that point and most people figured he was a has-been who was done with public office.
Which leads us to 2002, when he began the strangest, longest chapter of his career, that of a US Senator. In 2002, Tennessee wasn't as unwinnable for Democrats as it is today, and the GOP was genuinely worried that hard-right Rep. Ed Bryant, who had run the unpopular Clinton impeachment hearings, would take the GOP nomination and lose to Rep. Bob Clement, a conservative Democrat. Alexander entered the contest after much pleading, and his decades of popularity in Tennessee crushed both Bryant and Clement, as a result making him a junior senator at the age of 62. He's served three terms in this position, mostly as a reliable conservative vote, frequently overshadowed by his more famous fellow senators (Bill Frist, Bob Corker, and almost certainly Marsha Blackburn for the next two years).
I made Alexander's biography long here mostly because the contest will be pretty dull. I anticipate a bloodbath between the Republicans after they saw Blackburn win with relative ease (outgoing Gov. Bill Haslam may have right-of-first-refusal, but I doubt sincerely that he scares anyone away), and the Democrats got their best chance to win this seat in 2018 & still got creamed, so unless Taylor Swift is interested in running for public office, this seat stays red. But it's worth remembering that behind a relatively bland congressional career is a man who, were it not for a few thousand farmers in Iowa, could have been president.
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| Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) |
Another red bastion that has a retirement (rumored) this year is in The Sunflower State. While Alexander has confirmed he will leave public office, Pat Roberts has publicly speculated he'll retire in the way that only people who are planning on leaving their post do, though nothing is official yet. At the age of 82, he's one of the oldest members of the Senate, hates fundraising, and won a relatively close race in 2014 considering the national mood & his state's hard-right lean.
I'm not going to profile Roberts in the same way as Alexander. He's basically just been a DC fixture for the past forty years (first for 16 years in the House, then for 24 in the Senate), and honestly has not sponsored a particularly large amount of legislation. Despite having followed politics myself for the past 25 years or so, the only things I could say about Roberts off-the-top-of-my-head is that he was (deservedly) criticized for his investigation into the Iraq War, particularly the lies told by the Bush administration about Saddam Hussein's access to WMD's, and that he once joked about "not wanting to lose his mammograms" in a healthcare debate, ignoring that piecemeal healthcare is a terrible policy & that men can, in fact, develop breast cancer. So I won't give him the Alexander treatment.
But I do want to note that this race could be more competitive than Tennessee, and quite frankly might have been more competitive regardless. Roberts was certainly going to face a primary fight, and with him out of the way it's probable that the Republicans can get a quality candidate who actually enjoys fundraising & campaigning, rather than risk Roberts being outflanked by a Kris Kobach-style figure (or Kobach himself). But it's worth noting that 2018 was a really good year for Kansas Democrats. They picked up the governor's mansion, as well as a House seat (and came within less than a percentage-point of winning a second seat), proving that the Kansas City suburbs are making the state more approachable for Democrats. Republicans will have a plethora of candidates (Kobach, former Gov. Jeff Colyer, and Rep. Roger Marshall should all be considered serious options), but the Democrats could recruit someone like former State Ag Commissioner Joshua Svaty or former US Attorney Barry Grissom, the latter of whom has expressed a desire to run. I'm not usually a fan of this, but perhaps their best bets might be one of the four female state legislators who switched this month from Republicans to Democrats (Dinah Sykes, Barbara Bollier, Joy Koesten, & Stephanie Clayton). While I usually wish they'd pay more of their dues before pursuing higher office, a successful Democrat for the Senate in Kansas is going to need to make a compelling argument to wayward Republicans, and a recent convert would probably be an easy sell there. Kansas has not elected a Democrat since 1932, so this is a steep hill, but I'd argue a shallower one than Tennessee. If you want an even playing field, though, you have to head to...
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| Sen-Designate Martha McSally (R-AZ) |
The Democrats' road to the majority in 2020 for the Senate is tough, and there's no doubt that it needs to go through Arizona. The Democrats need 3-4 seats (depending on who wins the White House), and I've said for a while that their (current) path of least resistance would be losing Alabama, winning the White House (while being smart enough not to pick any senators like Sherrod Brown or Elizabeth Warren who will be replaced by Republicans thanks to their current governors), and then taking CO/AZ/ME/NC. One of those states, in my humbled opinion, just got easier this week though that is not universally-shared conventional wisdom.
Martha McSally is undoubtedly an impressive woman. Her military career is groundbreaking and only the most partisan of hacks wouldn't concede that she's a trailblazer. She was the first woman to fly in combat during the Gulf War (after the prohibition on female combat pilots was lifted), and was involved in a major lawsuit against the Defense Department in 2002 regarding women's clothing in Saudi Arabia.
However, her political career is, well, kind of pathetic. In 2012, she lost her first Republican primary for public office (for the special election to succeed Gabby Giffords), only to then lose the next general election later that year to incumbent-Rep. Ron Barber. She beat Barber by a paltry sum in 2014 (during a Republican wave, she only took him out by 167 votes, despite Barber being a relatively lousy campaigner himself), and in 2018, she became the first Republican since Keith DeGreen in 1988 to lose a Senate general election in 2018. There are a lot of reasons to explain why Gov. Doug Ducey chose her (she was the frontrunner for the seat so he didn't have to risk alienating other ambitious Republicans, she's a woman in a party lacking in female leaders, she's well-liked in the party, she clearly wants the job & she's a good fundraiser), but the GOP has had rose-colored glasses about McSally for a while now, and I think this is a big mistake.
McSally now has to run in 2020 as an incumbent, so she's going to take more votes & can be linked to Trump more easily. It's difficult to imagine hard-right conservatives won't make a play for her in the primary, considering she just proved she can lose a general election (an easy attack line), and even if she makes it through the primary, she has to run on the GOP ticket in a state that barely went for Trump in 2016, and in 2018 showed real signs of movement for the Democrats (in addition to Kyrsten Sinema, three other Democratic women won statewide, by-far the biggest movement of a Romney-Trump state to the left in the midterms). The Democrats don't have a candidate as good as Sinema in the wings, but they don't lack candidates (Rep. Ruben Gallego, astronaut Mark Kelly, & Rep-Elect Greg Stanton are all quality options, and like I said Katie Hobbs, Sandra Kennedy, and Kathy Hoffman just won statewide), and they now have an easy map of how to best McSally in a general election. McSally could surprise here, and she's not without precedent (Gordon Smith, John Thune, & Richard Lugar all took general election losses and turned them into wins in their next contest), but there's a lot longer list of candidates who lost two Senate races than there is ones who only lost their first and won their second. In 2020, it's entirely possible that the GOP's delusions about McSally's electability blinds them to the fact that she could lose them their Senate majority.
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