Believe me, I definitely do not enjoy being the bearer of bad news. But sometimes I have to do it. The Democrats just lost relatively close races for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina. They got embarrassed in Iowa and Florida. Hopefully, they will hang on to win the races in Arizona and Nevada. Do you know when the Democrats have a reasonable chance of winning a Republican-held Senate seat again? The answer is 2028, and it’s from this same set of seats.
First let’s look at the seats up for election in 2024, a presidential year that usually provides a more positive environment and higher turnout than midterms. There is almost no imaginable way the Democrats can win a statewide election for federal office in Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Tennessee, or Mississippi. That makes Texas and Florida the Democrats’ only hopes in 2024, and we all saw what just happened in Florida, where the Republicans carried Miami-Dade County while Gov. Ron DeSantis was reelected by more than a 19 point margin and Sen. Marco Rubio was reelected by more than a 16 percent margin. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott won by eleven points. Meanwhile, the Democrats will have defend seats in Montana and West Virginia, not to mention Ohio, and in Arizona and Nevada again.
So, how about in the 2026 midterms? Here we see at least a couple of targets. Yes, actually just two: the seat held by the always elusive Susan Collins of Maine, and a seat in North Carolina where we always seem to come up just short. I supposed we can throw Iowa in the mix since we can at least remember winning there sometime in the recent past.
There’s nothing on either of these maps that compares to the Wisconsin race we just lost. The reality is that we’re basically capped out in the U.S. Senate at 49-51 seats for the next six years. It’s immeasurably more likely that the Republicans will pick off some of our seats in that time that we will pick off any of theirs.
Now, I know that things can change in American politics, sometimes quite rapidly. During the Bush the Younger years, the Democrats held Senate seats in the Dakotas and Nebraska, and even held both of Montana’s seats. When we lost those, we gained seats in Virginia and most recently in Georgia. When I look at the 2024 map, in particular, I don’t see any hot prospects for this kind of partisan change. Texas would be the best bet.
I also know weird things can happen, like the Democrats briefly holding a Senate seat in Alabama due to scandal. Sometimes, open seats due to retirements can be vulnerable when the political mood turns sharply against the incumbent party. I don’t rule out a fluky seat pickup over the next couple of election cycles.
But what I can say fairly confidently is that the odds are that the current composition of the Senate is as good as it’s gonna get for the next six years. The only way that changes is if the Democratic Party changes in anticipation of the challenge it faces in winning these seemingly unwinnable elections.
But, to be honest, no amount of change is going to make Wyoming a plausible pickup. Only something external, like a war or some other earth shattering event could turn the deepest red states into purple states.
If your a political strategist for the left and you don’t want to be paralyzed by these facts, you may need to start thinking completely out of the box about how to win power. It can’t be through clever slogans or think tank-generated policy gimmicks. It can’t be by raising money, registering voters and knocking on doors. It’s got to be more systematic, like looking at how people receive information, how the right achieves its hold on so much of the country’s culture. The whole dynamic has to be shifted, because electoral politics as they stand are just too jammed up for the left to have hope. And if you can’t honestly provide an avenue for progress, then progressive politics will quickly become a bunch of empty and delusional promises, and the home for scammers and charlatans. I don’t want to be a part of that kind of movement.
Hope DeSantis wins the primary and Trump founds the MAGA Party, which runs Senate candidates and divides the Right?
Like the Good Samaritan when a democrat sees a problem they fell obliged to fix it or find a solution. So we want Medicare for All and raise the minimum wage and provide abortion services. But guess what? For the most part folks around Indiana are not interested in that shit. They want to keep their money close so fuck that chicken shit, people need to take care of themselves. And we don’t need no immigration services, just send them back. Better join them and get inside their brains. There just ain’t no other way. They don’t like your bullshit solutions.
we just finished an election when abortion and Medicare and social security as well as voting rights and democracy itself were on the ballot, I even heard Obama say so.
So here’s the issue. What you gonna do? Try to convince the dumb Hoosiers how to take care of their shit? Not gonna work. Let them have their thing for a spell. Maybe then we talk.
Pretty much the same attitude here in much of Ohio. That is, until people all of the sudden find that they’re not able to take care of themselves or their families. Suddenly, a decent wage and health care seem like great ideas. But they still consistently vote for Republicans, and fail to understand that they are voting for the people who really don’t want to help them maintain a decent way of living. I still think, even if the GOP made a strong push against Medicare and Social Security, that these Ohioans would still support them and compartmentalize what was really happening, in order to fend off the pains of their own uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. One thing is for certain, and has been very openly demonstrated here in our state, those Republicans in charge will always make choices that benefit them personally, knowing the chances of any consequences are almost nil. They are openly corrupt, proud of it, and the majority of voters simply don’t care to even take notice.
i find myself wondering if we need a Manchin here in Indiana and Ohio. Don’t promise anything but look for an opportunity. Ryan seemed to promise even the kitchen sink and asshat Vance nothing and he still won.
All bets are off if the US defaults on debt. That’s the earthquake coming down the way.
Oh, one other thing: the governor of Kentucky is a Democrat and Mitch McConnell is not a young man.
Yes the math as currently constructed does look imposing but check out this 3 year old post
https://progresspond.com/2019/09/17/how-red-states-are-turning-blue-in-the-era-of-trump/
In 2019 I would not have thought that GA would be more likely then TX to turn purple.
AZ is close to ground zero for GOP crazy town and how is that working out for them today ?
12 months is an eternity in our current political cycles.
Onward to the near future (12/6/22)
Next big date after that ?
4/4/23 The Wisconsin SC election
Win that and WI may be able to become less locally gerrymandered -> which gives people hope-> and then they vote!
I get it, but do we really need this post today? I feel like we need a couple weeks just to be grateful we narrowly dodged the jackboots of full throated fascism. Sometimes you just got to take a win as a win…
You’d have to create 4-6 states that were reasonably likely to vote for Democrats, add some justices to the Supreme Court, and have Kagan/Sotomayor retire.
All unlikely to happen, but 2024 through 2032 is going to be a very tumultuous period no matter what action is taken simply because the political divide is largely a generational divide. We will have to wait for the true numbers to know for sure, but with Millennials moving into the 40 year old vote section their liberalism will really start pushing into the vote curve. The age divide is very stark around ~45, and you don’t really start voting in midterms until you’re 45. Your peak voting age is around ~75! Then you go over the waterfall of death.