CHICAGO – Senate Democrats, told for most of this cycle they will likely be serving in the minority next year, said this week they see similarities between their candidate matchups in November and when they expanded a narrow majority in 2022.
“We have been very fortunate on the Democratic side,” Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told reporters on Wednesday. “We’ve had great candidates, great incumbents that are running for reelection or are running … and they are running against Republican candidates who are flawed and in some cases extremely flawed.”
He pointed to races last year in Pennsylvania, where then-Lt. Gov. John Fetterman defeated television personality Mehmet Oz for an open seat that had been held by a Republican, and in Georgia, where Sen. Raphael Warnock defeated former football star Herschel Walker. Democrats have argued that like Oz, Republican Senate candidates this year including Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania and Erik Hovde in Wisconsin have loose ties to their states.
“If you look at Republicans’ recruitment for their candidates, they tend to recruit folks who are very wealthy and who can self-finance,” Peters added. “But the problem is they also tend to have fairly tenuous relations with the state that they’re actually running in.”
McCormick and Hovde, however, have poured money into their campaigns, and Republicans argue that they are fresh faces to voters while the Democratic incumbents have supported unpopular policies. But recent polls have shown them trailing as they’ve sought to introduce themselves to voters.
Peters said the burst of Democratic enthusiasm over the last month after President Joe Biden stepped back from running for reelection is also helping to build stronger campaigns. In Michigan, the number of campaign volunteers doubled one week after Vice President Kamala Harris took over the ticket.
Still, Democrats face an uphill climb to keep the Senate. Already, Republicans are all but guaranteed a win in West Virginia, where the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin III, who changed his party affiliation to independent this year, is expected to clear the way for Republican Gov. Jim Justice to win the seat.
In Montana, Sen. Jon Tester is facing Republican Tim Sheehy, a businessman and veteran, in a state where President Donald Trump won by 16 percentage points in 2020. A positive sign for Democrats came Wednesday when the state certified that along with the Senate race, voters will weigh in on an abortion rights referendum.
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown also has a tough race against Bernie Moreno in a state that Trump won by 8 points four years ago.
To keep their majority, Democratic incumbents and candidates will need to run the table in Ohio and Montana plus Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states where the presidential election will also be decided. Races could also be competitive in Maryland and New Mexico.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer predicted during a speech Tuesday night that Democrats would grow their majority, which currently sits at 51-49 including Manchin. Democratic Senate candidates, Schumer said, can message their legislative accomplishments from when the party controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House during the first two years of the Biden administration.
“Our candidates are implementing all the great things we did in 2021 and 2022,” Schumer told reporters. “When President Biden said he’s building 50,000 bridges, people said ‘Eh.’ When [Pennsylvania Sen.] Bob Casey says ‘I’m building, I’m getting $250 million to rebuild that bridge over the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania,’ people love it.”
Democrats also argue they defied expectations in 2022 when they held onto control of the Senate and all of their incumbents won reelection.
“There were a lot of naysayers two years ago,” Schumer said. “They said, ‘Oh you’re going to lose the Senate, three or four seats.’ I said, ‘We’re going to keep the Senate and maybe pick up one.’ I say the same thing.”
With little effort underway to keep West Virginia in the Democrats’ column, adding to the caucus would likely mean capturing states on the edge of or off the battlefield, such as Florida or Texas or an upset race such as Missouri.
The party is working to promote some of its candidates this week. Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive who is running in Maryland against former Gov. Larry Hogan, took to the stage on Tuesday to introduce herself to a national audience. Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is running for an open seat in Arizona, is set to speak on Thursday.
Former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones told CQ Roll Call on Tuesday that he felt good about his party’s chances to hold onto the majority.
“It is our incumbent seats that everybody puts at risk, and we have got great incumbents,” Jones said, adding that Tester and Brown in particular are “killing themselves working.”
“People think today that it’s all national. Not really,” he said. “They’re working their states because they’re not taking any of this for granted.”
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