Why I'm obsessed with winning the Senate - Matt Yglesias

[In It to Win It]

https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-im-obsessed-with-winning-the

[T]he reason I’m obsessed with the Senate map is that I am, in fact, alarmed about Trump’s threat to democracy and the rule of law. The good news is that so far, the judicial system continues to do its job and Trump is losing in court, even before judges who were appointed by George W. Bush or by Trump himself during his first term. The bad news about judges is that the president gets to appoint new ones. And unlike during Trump 1.0, Senate Republicans are not constraining Trump here. He has an unqualified lackey as Secretary of Defense. He fired the Chair of the Joint Chiefs for no reason to install a loyalist. He has a stooge running the FBI.

These are legitimate uses of presidential power in a constitutional sense, but the Senate is supposed to prevent the president from wildly inappropriate appointments.

They’re not doing that, in part because a lot of them are now genuinely in the MAGA cult, but also because basically nobody in the GOP caucus is all that worried about losing elections to Democrats.

No excuses for the midterm

Democrats seem to be convincing themselves that winning the House while failing to gain much ground in the Senate would constitute a good midterm. They think, rightly, that it’s not especially plausible to gain many Senate seats vis-a-vis the 2026 Senate map. But the problem with that reasoning is that while the 2026 map is terrible, it’s not uniquely terrible.

Check out the 2028 map. The best pickup opportunity for Democrats here is Wisconsin, a Trump-Biden-Trump state. But Democrats are defending three seats — Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — in Trump-Biden-Trump states. Plus they need to defend the Clinton-Biden-Trump state of Nevada. You could easily imagine this map generating one or two net seats for the GOP, even in a scenario where J.D. Vance loses the election narrowly.

[msongs]

1. so Matt, in which state are you running for the senate seat? nt

[dsc]

2. He is right about the problem

we have a huge difficulty winning the Senate as it is presently configured. But his prescription is not a good idea. GOP voters won't vote for candidates that are a little toward their side on the cultural issues as he seems to think they will. I don't know what the solution is, other than, the next time we get power we need to add DC and Puerto Rico as states at the very least. That would give us some margin of error. Right now, there are only 25 states that were carried by one of Biden, Clinton, or Harris. That is 50 senators if we can win them all. There is only one state among the states that Trump carried three times that has been close all three times (NC). We have also won statewide in NC on a decent number of ocassions. That gives us 52 if we can win them all. There are 48 senate seats in states that Trump won easily all three times. The GOP holds all 48 of those. It also holds the 2 NC seats plus one each in ME, PA, and WI.

Until we can start winning seats in states that Trump has carried it will be very hard for us to get a senate majority. In 2028, we will have 47 seats going in, and only ME is up among GOP seats in states carried by Biden. Winning that gets us to 48 and then we have pretty much nothing.

[In It to Win It]

3. Let's say Puerto Rico became a state, it's not even a guarantee that Democrats would win

I think Puerto Rico would be competitive. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Puerto Rico is a largely centrist island. Puerto Rico would be a swing state at best. A Republican can win an island-wide election there.

Also, with regard to the solution he presented, I think there are nothing but bad options on the table for the reason you mentioned. However, doing nothing to try to change some minds also bad because we do need to expand our senate map. We went from a party that could win 60 seats to a party struggling to get 50 seats. At best, I can’t even imagine Democrats getting more than 52 and that requires we win seats from states that have a slight Republican lean, like Georgia, and all the tossup states. I wrote a post about it just after the election. https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219690865