I was heartened to read in The Hill today that the Biden campaign is going to be sending surrogates to Florida, Texas and Ohio, among other states, in the wake of his triumphant, “Trumanesque” State of the Union speech.
Last night, after the president’s speech, I posted on Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else) that I thought President Biden should campaign in Ohio. I felt that his pro-union message, his fighting demeanor, and his status as the only sitting president to walk a picket line offered the potential to shrink his margin of defeat in the Buckeye State from the 8% rout he suffered at the hands of Donald Trump there in 2020.
I don’t have very high hopes for Biden actually contending in Ohio, but I think shrinking Trump’s margin might give Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) a puncher’s chance to survive this fall.
As I have noted, both on this site and on Twitter, ticket-splitting in presidential years between presidential and Senate candidates is at an all-time low. Voters have become highly polarized, and they have also come to understand that it makes no sense to vote for one party’s candidate for president, and then simultaneously vote for a Senate (or House) candidate who is going to block virtually everything that president wants to do.
The statistics bear this out. In 2016, every state that had a Senate race voted for the same party’s candidates for president and Senate. In 2020, there was only one exception to this trend, with Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) prevailing despite Joe Biden winning her state. Even in that case, Collins had her closest race since she was first elected in 1996. That means 68 of the last 69 Senate races held during presidential election years have resulted in the same party winning both the presidential and Senate races in those states (a 1.4% split rate over the last two cycles). Statistically, the likelihood of Brown holding his seat while Biden loses Ohio is very low, and the larger Biden’s margin of defeat, the likelihood of Brown surviving gets even lower.
If Biden can shrink his margin of defeat in Ohio, Brown might be able to hold on to his Senate seat. But even then, Democrats are likely looking at losing the Senate by a seat, and that’s where Florida and Texas come into the picture.
I know that it is fashionable among Democrats these days to suggest that Democrats should forget Florida, but Florida, rich with electoral votes and House seats, remains one of the closest states in the country and one of its biggest electoral prizes. Conceding Florida is a mistake, especially with the Sunshine State having a Senate race on the ballot this year. Everyone understands that North Carolina is a better bet for the president than Florida is, but North Carolina has no Senate race on the ballot this year. It would be great for Biden to win North Carolina, but if he wins there, he almost certainly already has the election won irrespective of the results in that state. There’s really no benefit or added value to winning North Carolina in 2024. But winning Florida, or at least making it close, could help Democrats defeat Senator Rick Scott (R-Florida) and get back to 50 seats in the Senate, if Sherrod Brown also wins.
Texas is also a state which I believe is not especially promising for Biden this fall, but again, if he can cut his margin in the Lone Star State, he could help Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred in his race against the unpopular Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Remember that Cruz only won his last race by about 2.5%, and while that was a midterm election in which Democrats overperformed nationally, Cruz clearly does have some electoral and political weaknesses.
None of these three states are especially good bets for Biden, but conceding them also means conceding the Senate. The likelihood of Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) overcoming a double-digit Biden loss in his state is very, very low. Don’t kid yourselves about that. Tester has never faced a race with these kinds of headwinds. Of his three previous races, two were in midterm elections, with no presidential race on the ballot to weigh him down, and the one time he won during a presidential election, in 2012, was when Barack Obama only lost Montana by about 10%. Biden lost Montana in 2020 by 16%. Tester has never won by a large margin, and if Biden loses Montana by double digits again–especially now, in a more polarized environment that 2012, with presidential/Senate ticket-splitting all but dead now–Tester is probably doomed. With the West Virginia Senate seat being vacated by Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), that seat is certain to flip Republican. Democrats have to hold Brown’s seat and, let’s be honest, find another seat to flip to guard against the likelihood that Tester will lose.
Besides Florida and Texas, there are no other Republican-held seats on the ballot this fall where Democrats have any chance to win. The other nine Republican Senate seats up in this year’s election are in Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming and Nebraska (where both seats are on the ballot due to a special election). Unless something extremely weird happens (like a Roy Moore situation), Democrats don’t have a prayer in a single one of those nine races.
In short, if Democrats want to hold the Senate, they have to win two out of four seats in Florida, Montana, Ohio, and Texas, and despite Tester’s incumbency and unusual strength for a Democrat in his state, his prospects are by far the worst.
That is why I wrote, over a year ago, that Biden needs to devote significant resources to these four states even if it appears unlikely that he can actually win them.
So I’m heartened by the fact that the campaign is clearly targeting three of those states–the three where Democrats have the best chance to win. If Democrats don’t win two of those seats, the Senate is all but gone. That means even if a Supreme Court seat comes open, Biden likely won’t get to fill it, even if he himself is reelected.
It’s not just the right move–it’s the only move.