The Senate Is GUARANTEED to FLIP RED in November!

The Senate Is GUARANTEED to FLIP RED in November!

In this fall’s Senate elections, Democrats will be defending more seats in precarious political terrain than in any other election during the 2020s. That list of challenging elections this year includes the final three Senate seats Democrats hold in states that voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and five more in states that President Joe Biden won by 3 percentage points or less. Meanwhile, Republicans this year are not defending any Senate seats in states that voted against Trump in 2020, or preferred him by 3 points or less.

That math underlines the stakes for Democrats in Biden improving his position in the key swing states by November. One of the most powerful trends of modern Senate elections is that it has become exceedingly difficult for candidates in either party to win seats in states that usually vote the other way for president.

The Senate Democrats running in difficult electoral terrain might break that trend this fall. Yet if they can’t, Biden’s fate in November could determine control of the Senate not only in 2025, but for years thereafter.

A strong recovery by Biden in which he wins most of the key swing states could position Democrats to remain competitive in the battle for Senate control through the remainder of this decade, even if they narrowly lose the majority in November. But if Biden loses most of the swing states, Democrats could fall into a Senate deficit too large to realistically overcome for years — especially because the party has so few plausible opportunities to flip seats now held by the GOP.

“If the bottom were to drop out for Biden, Democrats could lose the Senate for a long time,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the political newsletter “Sabato’s Crystal Ball,” which is published by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

That prospect has enormous implications not only for the passage of legislation but also for the composition of the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court. Four of the Supreme Court justices will be older than 70 by 2028. Even if Biden holds the White House in 2024, and a vacancy arises, a durable Republican Senate majority might refuse to fill any of those seats — just as then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did while Barack Obama was president in 2016. “You can imagine Supreme Court seats going unfilled for years,” Kondik said.

The default position for the Senate in the 21st century has been for small and fleeting majorities. In the 12 congressional sessions since 2001, one party or the other has reached 55 Senate seats only three times. By comparison, one party or the other won a majority of 55 or more Senate seats seven times in the 10 sessions from 1980 to 2000. Smaller majorities, not surprisingly, have proved more difficult to defend: In this century, control of the Senate has already flipped in the elections of 2002, 2006, 2014 and 2020.

The principal reason the chamber has become so closely divided is the growing correlation between how states vote for president and how they vote for the Senate. That has limited the number of Senate seats each side can win absent unusual circumstances.

Through the late 20th century, it was common for voters to split their tickets by electing senators from one party while voting for the presidential nominee of the other. After the 1984 election, for instance, Democrats still held about half the Senate seats in the states that voted for Ronald Reagan in both of his winning presidential campaigns.

But now the alignment between presidential and Senate outcomes has become nearly complete. Heading into the 2024 election, Republicans hold 47 of the 50 Senate seats in the 25 states that voted for Trump in 2020. Democrats, in turn, hold 48 of the 50 Senate seats in the 25 states that voted for Biden last time.

This surface equivalence in the two parties’ position in the Senate, though, masks a deeper divergence that largely explains the risk to Democrats this year.

While Biden and Trump each won 25 states in 2020, Biden won far more of them by very narrow margins. As a result, Senate Democrats are much more dependent than Republicans on states that lean their way only slightly in the presidential contest.

In 2020, Biden won three states by less than a single percentage point: Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. He won three others by less than 3 percentage points: Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan. Democrats now hold 11 of the 12 Senate seats from those six highly competitive states. (Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is the only Republican senator from these states.)