Democrats Must Make Plays in Florida, Texas and Ohio to Save the Senate

by Cliston Brown | Mar 8, 2024 | Election Analysis

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.

Keep Calm And Stop Paying Attention To Polls

by Cliston Brown | Nov 6, 2023 | Election Analysis

The recent set of swing state polls by the New York Times—the world’s most overrated media company and one of the world’s most overrated institutions, period—have cued up a whole line of Democratic bedwetters to scream and cry and shout that the sky is falling. Despite the fact that the poll results are so laughably off-base (Trump +11 in Nevada and winning Las Vegas?) that anybody who takes them seriously clearly knows nothing about politics, that hasn’t stopped a cavalcade of panicky Democrats from seriously suggesting that Joe Biden ought to forego another run.

Folks, the first thing you need to do is grab a paper bag and breathe into it until you stop hyperventilating. Then you need to sit down with a stiff drink, or some weed if that’s your thing, and let Uncle Cliston tell you a bedtime story.

In a land called America a long time ago, there was a fellow named Michael Dukakis. I’m told some of his friends called him Mike. He came out of the Democratic convention less than four months before the 1988 election leading George Bush by 17 percentage points. But when November came, Mike lost 40 states to George, who then became America’s president.

George eventually took America into a war and saw his approval ratings reach 91%. The Democrats were terrified, and almost no leading Democrat chose to run against him in 1992 because he clearly could not be beaten. But a brave, if unknown, soul from Arkansas named Bill Clinton took a gamble, and a year and a half later, Bill won big and became the next president.

Things went sour for Bill quickly, and his party was crushed in the 1994 midterm elections. It was obvious that there would be no second term for Billy Boy, whose polling was in the toilet. Yet, in 1996, he won in a landslide that surpassed his 1992 election. Nobody has won by as large of a margin since!

Then, along came a man named Barack Obama, who fell behind John McCain in the polls in 2008 with less than two months to go before the election. Yet he somehow won a landslide that carried in crushing majorities for his party in Congress.

Much like Bill, Barack had a short honeymoon after becoming president. His party was creamed in the midterm elections, and his approval ratings almost never even sniffed 50%. Many polls said a man named Mitt Romney would defeat him in 2012. The leading pollster of them all had Mitt ahead all the way up to election day! And yet, Barack beat Mitt like a drum in almost every swing state and even won Florida, which it was believed was too Republican for him to win a second time.

Four years later, Bill’s wife Hillary ran for president, and her prospects were so certain that nobody believed she could lose to her opponent, an orange-haired clown named Bozo. She was so far ahead in the crucial state of Wisconsin that it clearly made no sense at all for her to waste precious time and money visiting that state. And yet, when the circus ended, Bozo had won, and the clowns were now running the circus.

Look, I get it, folks. You’re scared. Because Democrats are ALWAYS scared, and it’s annoying and completely not a good look, but it is what it is. But one of the reasons you’re scared is because you lack perspective—especially if you’re in your 20s and you haven’t seen 35 years of embarrassing polling mistakes or quick, crazy shifts in the electorate the way Uncle Cliston has.

Now, kiddos, I’m not going to promise you that Story Time with Uncle Cliston is going to have a happy ending. There’s no way in hell Joe Biden is losing all these states, and certainly not by the margins these ridiculous polls say he is, but it is absolutely possible that he could lose several of them and Bozo could become president again. We have to be honest with ourselves about that.

But freaking out and flailing around like unhinged lunatics every time a poll comes out doesn’t do any of us any good. The upcoming election is going to be close. It could go either way. What we need to do right now is to get ahold of ourselves, stay steady and courageous, and see this thing through.

And with any luck, we’ll all live happily ever after.

The End.