November 2022 – Democracy Watch

If Democrats thought that 2022 was a difficult environment, they only have to look at the Senate map in 2024 to see that it can get even tougher.

During this year’s midterm elections, Democrats outperformed across the board with few exceptions. The president’s party typically loses across the board. Instead, the party gained governorships, state legislative chambers, and trifectas. In fact, for the first time since 1934, the president’s party did not lose a single state legislative chamber.

If that was not enough of an accomplishment, Democrats will hold the Senate and possibly even gain a seat. That is pending the outcome of Georgia’s Senate runoff between incumbent Raphael Warnock and the Trump-backed, scandal-plagued challenger, Herschel Walker.

Meanwhile, the red wave proved to be nothing more than a ripple in the House of Representatives. Republicans were crowing that they might win as many as 50 or 60 seats. With only five races left uncalled, the Republicans currently stand at a bare majority of 218 seats. At best, they can hope for 223 seats, although that appears unlikely.

Democrats are well-positioned to regain control of the lower chamber in 2024 with numerous obvious targets in Biden-won swing districts in California and New York, in particular. The Senate is an entirely different story.

The Senate map in 2024 looks brutal for Democrats

The Senate is looking far more precarious for the party. Democrats have few genuine targets and about a dozen incumbents who are at least marginally vulnerable. It’s arguable that Democrats will need to win the Georgia runoff next month to have a fighting chance at keeping the Senate in two years.

Worse yet, all of the Democratic targets in 2024 are basically a stretch. First, we’ll go over the numerous opportunities for Republicans, and then we’ll look at the possible targets for Democrats.

Republicans start with a considerable advantage

Although we do not know yet whether the incumbents will run for re-election, Republicans can target Democratic incumbents in Trump-won states. The two most vulnerable incumbents are Jon Tester in Montana and Joe Manchin in West Virginia.

West Virginia is one of the Trumpiest states in the country, second to only Wyoming (sorry, Liz Cheney). Joe Biden failed to even clear 30 percent of the vote in the Mountain State. Joe Manchin is a popular former governor and won a close Senate race in 2018 against the state attorney general, Patrick Morrisey. Despite his record as a conservative Democrat, that might not be enough to save him in 2024.

Jon Tester has won close races many times before. The senator was first elected in 2006 as Democrats won both the House of Representatives and the Senate amid a backlash against former president George W. Bush over his handling of the disastrous Iraq War, a botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and corruption scandals within the Republican-controlled Congress.

The good news for Senator Tester is that Biden won over 40 percent of the vote in Montana in 2020, so he would only need to run roughly ten points ahead of the top of the ticket. Needless to say, that is a considerably better starting position than the Democrats face in West Virginia.

Beyond Montana and West Virginia, Sherrod Brown is defending a seat in Republican-trending Ohio. Like Tester, Brown rode into the upper chamber amid backlash to former president George W. Bush. While Tester is known for his folksy personality, Brown embraces a pro-union, blue-collar working-class agenda. Will it be enough to buck the Buckeye State’s rightward drift?

Democrats must also defend seats in numerous swing states that will likely determine the 2024 presidential election. They include seats in:

Arizona
Michigan
Nevada
Pennsylvania
Wisconsin

Given the fact that partisanship is resulting in fewer crossover voters, these states are likely to vote for the same party in both the presidential and Senate races. In 2020, Susan Collins was the only senator from either party that won despite their party’s presidential nominee losing statewide. This is a continuation from 2016 when every Senate race mirrored the presidential election.

Lastly, they will have to defend seats in Democratic-leaning states like Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Virginia. If Republicans have a particularly good election in 2024, these states would be in play. It is at least conceivable that Republicans could manage a filibuster-proof majority.

Democrats have few legitimate targets

Democrats have only four Republican-held seats that are even remotely competitive: Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and Texas.

Indiana will have an open seat if incumbent Republican Mike Braun announces an expected run for governor, but the Democratic bench is thin. Former senator Joe Donnelly could potentially make it competitive against a weak opponent – as he did in 2012, winning against Richard Mourdock – but is he even willing to consider running another longshot campaign?

Meanwhile, as a member of Joe Biden’s cabinet, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has his sights set on a much higher office: the Oval Office. Should Biden decline to run for re-election, Buttigieg is expected to make a second run for president.

Rick Scott wants to gut Social Security and Medicare and has always won his elections by a hair, but Florida has trended Republican. Ron DeSantis just won by almost 20 points against former Republican governor Charlie Crist. Democrats have a slightly stronger bench in Florida than Indiana, but it’s not stocked with charismatic potential candidates.

Ted Cruz barely won re-election in 2018 and is unpopular within both parties, but you cannot beat something with nothing. Beto O’Rourke just concluded a third consecutive losing campaign (counting his failed bid for president), but maybe one of the Castro brothers could make this competitive. Again, it’s a stretch.

Insurrectionist Josh Hawley is up for re-election in 2024. However, it’s not at all clear that that is even considered a negative in a state as red as Missouri. Former senator Claire McCaskill is a potential Democratic nominee for Senate here, which would be a rematch of 2018.

The one potential silver lining for Democrats: an unexpected retirement or death could give them a chance to win a special election that we do not currently know about. Otherwise, the map is grim.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court very likely decided control of the House of Representatives.

Kevin McCarthy should consider sending Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas holiday cards. The incoming razor-thin Republican majority in the House of Representatives – the exact size of which is still unknown – can thank the United States Supreme Court.

Utilizing the shadow docket, the Supreme Court issued a stay, reversing a lower court’s ruling that forced the state of Alabama to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in time for the midterm elections. At issue is whether Alabama is compelled to create a second black-majority congressional district in a state where over a quarter of the population is black. It’s a case that we previously covered back in January.

“Black people drove a disproportionate share of Alabama’s population growth. Throughout last year, Black Alabamians publicly called on the Legislature to recognize this reality and sought equal representation in Congress,” said NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Senior Counsel Deuel Ross.

The Brennan Center calls the Supreme Court’s intervention “dangerous,” noting that SCOTUS was setting the stage for overturning four decades of precedent that has resulted in greater representation for non-white voters.

Michael Li, Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center, writes:

The case centers on whether Alabama has an obligation under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to create a second district where Black voters have a reasonable opportunity to elect community-preferred candidates. Black Alabamians are currently 27 percent of the state’s population, but under the map passed by the Republican controlled Alabama legislature, have the ability to successfully elect candidates in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts.

This anomalous result is the product of a carefully constructed two-step maneuver. First, lawmakers packed a large portion of Black Alabamians into the sprawling, heavily Black 7th Congressional District, which joins much of the state’s historic Black Belt with parts of both Birmingham and Montgomery. For the rest of the state, map drawers then surgically divided Black voters among the remaining six white-majority districts. The outcome is a map where the 7th District is more than 56 percent Black, but where no other district is more than 30 percent Black, well below the level needed for Black Alabamians to sway elections given the high levels of racially polarized voting in the state.

The Alabama case resulted in federal courts allowing racially gerrymandered maps to go into effect in Georgia and Louisiana. A federal judge found that Georgia’s Congressional map likely violated the Voting Rights Act but cited the Supreme Court’s decision in the Alabama case to allow the map to remain in place for the 2022 elections. The Supreme Court itself intervened after a federal court ordered Louisiana to redraw its racially gerrymandered maps.

All told, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Alabama directly resulted in at least three fewer black-majority districts in the South – seats that were all but guaranteed to go to the Democrats. Beyond those seats, it’s important to point out that gerrymanders in Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin cost the Democrats between a half dozen and a dozen seats.

In 2019, the conservatives on the Supreme Court decreed that federal courts could not rule on partisan gerrymanders but left the door open to ruling on racial gerrymanders. With its shadow docket rulings in Alabama and Louisiana, it looks as if those guardrails against racially-discriminatory maps are now gone as well.

We are a nation of laws, but it is increasingly obvious that the United States Supreme Court is bending our nation’s laws to benefit one particular political party.

Photo Credit: Wally Gobetz, Flickr