A Path Forward for a Democratic Senate

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

In 2018, I learned a valuable lesson-with modern election-voting methods, it's entirely possible that not only do you not know who will win the election on Election Night, you might not even have a good guess.  That year, I left Election Night pretty defeated, and to some degree I was right (we did not, in fact, win the Senate), but I wasn't right about how the night had gone.  The House, for example, had been won but felt like a missed opportunity as it seemed like California had delivered mostly whiffs, when in fact it'd been a perfect score, and we did end up winning at least one Senate seat (Arizona) which it felt like we'd lost on Election Night 2018 (sadly, Florida never actually landed for us).  As a result, I've been waiting for the results to come for additional states, and for some of the stragglers to be decided.  At this juncture, though, it appears all of the non-runoff Senate seats are decided, and all but two of the House seats are done (and we're getting much of the congressional-level data), so I'm going to start doing some analysis on Election Night 2020-this will be an ongoing series of articles over the next month or so, and then we'll probably close the door on this year, though any past election has a way of coming back to us.

Today we're going to focus on the Senate, which is not decided yet, but I will admit that in my head the Democrats have probably lost another chance at the majority.  Obviously if you're in Georgia, you should vote, but conventional wisdom has long dictated that Democrats do not show up to southern runoffs (we discussed this more here), and while polling shows this race close...after 2020, Senate polling is not something I put a lot of faith into.  Perhaps the biggest glimmer of hope for the Democrats comes from the weird scenario we find ourselves in in that only six senators (and no more than eight, depending on the situation in Georgia) will represent seats that their party lost in the previous cycle's presidential cycle.

This is basically unheard of, and is on top of a lot of evidence that straight-ticket voting has almost completely taken over national voting patterns.  In the past few years, Republicans have lost seats in Illinois, Nevada, Arizona, & Colorado (all states that went for Biden), while Democrats said goodbye to seats in Alabama, Missouri, Indiana, & North Dakota (all states that went for Trump).  In 2016, no Senate candidate succeeded where their incumbent didn't, and in 2020 (so far) only one has, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.  This has not historically been the case-for decades states like Nebraska, South Dakota, & Minnesota would split their tickets, picking Senate candidates of one party & presidential candidates of the other.  In an era without this split, it becomes vitally important for one party to not only win the electoral college, but instead to win at least 25 states to give their party a chance at the Senate.

It is often said that the popular vote has gone for the Democrats in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections, but the Democrats still lost the electoral college three of those times, indicating how undemocratic the electoral college is.  But if we move to a system where the Senate essentially is a carbon copy of the presidential map, that discrepancy gets starker.  1992 & 1996 are unusual because of the presence of Ross Perot on the ballot (though I will note that Bill Clinton won a healthy number of states, much more than 25, both times).  But taking a look at the rest of the elections since, we have a grimmer fate for the left.

Al Gore & Hillary Clinton both lost the electoral college but won the popular vote, and as you might imagine their share of the states was lower than their Republican counterparts in these scenarios.  However, it's a considerably larger drop than their shares of the electoral college or popular vote.  Gore, for example, won 49.63% of the electoral college and 48.4% of the popular vote-pretty, close right?  When you look at the number of states he won, though, he only won 20 states, so just 40% of the Senate if all those seats were straight-ticket.  Clinton is in a similar scenario, with 48.2% of the popular vote, 43.1% of the electoral college, but just 40% of the overall states as she also won twenty (for the record, not the same 20 states each time).  John Kerry fares the worst, though, having only won 19 states (38%), despite coming relatively close in the popular vote (48.3%) and the electoral college (46.84%).  Joe Biden hits 50% of the states (he won 25), but that's still lower than his shares of the electoral college (56.88%) or the popular vote (51.3%).

President Obama is the only Democrat to have won more than 25 states since 1996, and as a result his share of the popular vote did exceed his share of the states, but not by much.  In 2008 Obama won 28 states (56%), while his share of the popular vote was a relatively similar 52.9%, and in 2012 it was nearly identical where his state share (52%) was within a point of his popular vote share 51.1%.

This is a problem, because the Democrats are essentially being forced to run further than the Republicans are to win a majority of the states.  Based on their vote totals, Al Gore, John Kerry, & Hillary Clinton should've won roughly 4 more states to match their share of the popular vote.  They didn't do that because of high vote totals in California, New York, & Illinois while losing a number of smaller states (primarily in the Rocky Mountain & Great Plains regions), but if we live in a world where the Republicans are able to get straight-ticket balloting to be the norm, their roughly 50/50 popular vote splits with the Republicans would result in a filibuster-proof majority for the Republicans in the Senate due to the GOP-hold on Republican states.

This is not an easy issue to address.  Unlike congressional gerrymandering, we don't reallocate states based on population shifts, and there's no real mechanism short of, say, splitting California into three states that is going to get the Democrats there.  If the Democrats are to pull off some sort of majority in the Senate, there are a few things they have to do, and none of them are particularly easy.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)

The first is ensuring that they don't leave seats on the table.  I have been very vocal in calling for Chuck Schumer to resign as the leader of the party, as I don't think he has proven that he can win the majority in the Senate (Democrats are not good at acknowledging that a leader is incapable of achieving a majority, as we saw earlier this century with Dick Gephardt & Tom Daschle).  This is particularly true in the fact that Schumer could not beat Susan Collins.  It's clear both in hindsight, but was clear at the time, that the Democrats didn't have a very wide margin into the majority, but there was no plausible path without Sara Gideon picking up Maine.  Had Schumer had the tenacity of Mitch McConnell, he would have made a point of ensuring Collins was Public Enemy #1 in the Senate, but Collins (likely personally popular with her colleagues) never felt like she was loathed by the left, and the DSCC continually kept sunlight between Collins & Trump.  That doesn't work-Collins now doesn't have to face voters until 2026, and in an era where there aren't many flip opportunities (even if the seat opens up), basically not converting that seat was an indictment that Schumer doesn't know how to win a majority.

But the Senate Democrats have stuck the rest of the party with Schumer for the next two years (at least), and so the problem now resides in the 2022 midterms, which is, for my money, the last shot the Democrats have for a while to win a majority.  It won't be easy (at all), since Joe Biden will be president & the midterms are usually not kind to the incumbent party, but it is a promising field for the Democrats. Every incumbent Democrat is in a state that Biden won in 2020 (the first time that's happened since 1938), and so while potential challenges in Arizona, New Hampshire, & Nevada may emerge, they will be doing so in states that just went for Joe Biden.  And there are at least two (Pennsylvania & Wisconsin), and possibly three (depending on if Kelly Loeffler wins) states that Biden won where the Republicans will have an incumbent running for office.  Those seats are crucial, and quite frankly might be the only opportunity, period, that the Democrats will have for the rest of the decade to take back the majority.

The Democrats also need to look at the Senate map as less a series of weakened incumbents (like they did in 2020) and more as a "we can only win on straight-ticket voting" mechanism like the Republicans have done since 2010.  That means that we should focus less on long-shots in South Carolina & Kentucky, and more on shoring up their current states, and expanding the map as they can, because as Susan Collins proved, focusing only on 25 states is a problem for the Democrats.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC)

The best opportunity beyond the 25 states that Joe Biden won is North Carolina.  It's the only state that Trump won by less than 2-points (it's worth noting that Biden won four states with less-than-two points, so his hold on those 25 states is still questionable & worth watching in the future as they are not guarantees).  North Carolina, unlike Georgia or Arizona, doesn't have as secure of a hold on its urban centers & suburban centers as the swings that we saw in Phoenix & Atlanta; this is particularly true for the suburbs of Charlotte.  The Democrats will need to find a way to convert North Carolina in the future-it's worth noting the state will have a Senate seat up in 2022, one that is going to be open (Richard Burr is retiring)...that should be given the same level of attention that the seats in GA/PA/WI do.

Otherwise, the map doesn't look great.  Florida is the next closest election, but Florida has proven impenetrable for the past decade (with the exception of 2012) to the Democrats, with repeated close calls.  In many ways it's starting to be the inverse of Minnesota-a state that is definitely close, but rarely actually flips.  Marco Rubio is up in 2022, and the Democrats should at least look presentable there (considering it's a better option than most), but he starts as the heavy favorite.  Ohio & Iowa have largely slipped away from the party (if Biden couldn't do better there, no one could), and states like Alaska & Kansas are not close enough to be seriously contested, even if they shifted to the left during the Trump years.  The only other state, other than North Carolina & Florida, where Biden did reasonably well was Texas, which is still pretty red (and like Florida, saw a shift in Latino voting patterns that the Democrats need to find a way to fix if they want any chance in those states or Nevada going forward).  Texas, unlike Florida & North Carolina, doesn't have a Senate seat up in 2022, so it's not a conversation they need to worry about for a while.

We'll find out in a few weeks if Democrats can pull off the miracle in Georgia, but regardless of what happens there, it's clear that the Democratic path to a majority in the Senate got increasingly narrow in 2020, and them leaving a seat like Maine on the table for the Republicans is something they simply cannot afford.  The January 5th runoffs & the 2022 midterms are really the only chance the Democrats may have this decade, short of an unexpected realignment, of holding the Senate majority.  We shall see if they recognize this fact in the coming months.