The 2016 U.S. Senate Landscape: How Critical Will It Be in the 2024 Republican Presidential Elections? A Study of the Risks of Poll Error

Republicans are very likely to take control of the House – they only need to flip five seats, and after redistricting they’re already favored in seven (seats that are deemed likely or solid Republican), according to the Cook Political Report. The margins are going to play a big role in whether Democrats can fight another cycle. The Senate landscape is favorable to Republicans in the year of the presidential elections of 2024, which will be intense.

The unexpectedly strong Democratic performance, which will leave both chambers essentially split down the middle, means that the 2024 presidential election is even more critical. A popular candidate on either side could have strong coattails and sweep their party into a monopoly in power in Washington.

Arizona and Nevada have large shares of mail-in ballots, so these two states have been at the center of the battle for Senate control.

A month ago Democrats had a chance to keep their majority in the US Senate according to a model built by FiveThirtyEight.

• In Pennsylvania, Democrat John Fetterman’s lead over Republican Mehmet Oz has narrowed, as concerns about the lieutenant governor’s health (he had a stroke in May) have persisted. Fetterman was with Biden during his visit to Pennsylvania.

• In Arizona, GOP nominee Blake Masters appears to be making up some ground on Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. There is no question the incumbent is the favorite in the race.

Republican Adam Laxalt and Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto are separated by just two points, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll in Nevada.

Democrats are pointing fingers at Wisconsin, where Barnes has watched his lead over Johnson slip over the last two months. People hit their heads against a wall. Nelson ran for the Senate nomination earlier in the year, but said how to let this happen.

• Allegations regarding Republican Herschel Walker’s past relationships with women don’t appear to have doomed his chances against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, with most polling showing the incumbent with a low-single digit lead.

The voters will have final say on these questions, not the polls. We spent a lot of time going through the risks of polling error in this newsletter. Let’s imagine that the polls are correct about the national political environment. The race is in an extremely delicate place if that is the case. Everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total Republican rout becomes imaginable.

The majority in the house is up for grabs and the senate’s win comes with it. In some states, including California, Arizona and Oregon, mail-in ballots are still being counted. Even if Democrats don’t retain control of the House, they could leave the GOP with a small and unruly majority.

Election Day is almost here! Well, almost. Tens of millions have already voted, and the election is likely to extend beyond Tuesday for days, if not weeks. Several races, especially in the Senate, are expected to be razor tight and control of the chamber may not be known for a while.

It seemed for a while – from late June after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe through September – that Democrats might defy political gravity and not suffer the kinds of losses that are so typical for the president’s party in his first midterm. But in the past few weeks, much of the available data show things moving back in Republicans’ direction. Democratic numbers are lagging behind the GOP because of concerns over inflation and the economy. Democrats are still in a tight Senate race with their GOP opponents. Nobody really knows what will happen with the Senate, and people seem to think that they do.

According to the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, Gen Z/Millennial voters see abortion rights as their top voting priority, and it’s clear that the Democrats are trying to get them to the polls. But they are the group with the lowest level of interest in these elections. The discrepancy between the number of older voters and younger voters is very wide, 35 points. Democrats likely need youth voter turnout to be around 30% to do well, but that’s likely going to be tough. Black voters are going to be key in tight Senate races, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, while Latinos are going to be key in Nevada (as will Asian American voters) and Arizona. But each of those latter groups list inflation and the cost of living as their top concern.

It’s no secret that Republicans have fielded in the Senate some … challenging candidates. Trump gained votes for Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz in Georgia and J.D. Vance in Ohio. It is safe to say that Don Bolduc is not the strongest candidate Republicans could have put forward. The races of Oz and Walker will be important for the Democrats in order to hold the Senate.

Again, think of this as Election Season, not Election Day. It’s possible, if not likely, the Georgia Senate race, for example, goes to a Dec. 6 runoff. There’s a Libertarian on the ballot, where lots of protest votes could go and keep either Walker or Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock below 50%, which is needed to avoid a runoff.

In this year’s election, people with arms at voting places, the voting rules and access have changed in a lot of places, and even more people will vote by mail than ever before. There is just going to be a lot of confusion on election night about vote numbers, where they are coming from, what shifts look like in favor of one party or another in multiple states.

You can expect that some of the election-denying candidates will test out and not concede the elections they lost. We are currently in a very uncertain era of U.S. elections and anyone’s guess how widespread that will be.

The party overcame its fear over high inflation and was able to retain its majority as voters rejected the GOP candidates who had supported Donald Trump and were seen as supporting election fraud.

Biden told reporters in Cambodia that the results of the Senate election are a reflection of the quality of the candidates. “They’re all running on the same program. Wasn’t anybody who wasn’t running on what we did,” Biden went on.

And a clear majority for Democrats means that Schumer would not need a deal with McConnell on parceling out committee assignments and would have far more control over the process – a fact former veteran senator Biden noted in reacting to the Senate win in Phnom Penh over the weekend.

The Democrat-Democracy Case: A Voting Victory Against the MAGA Republicans in the 2022 Midterm Elections

Both candidate failed to clear 50% on Tuesday, meaning they’ll have to face off on December 6.

Biden is looking forward to the next couple of years with Democrats and admits that it would be better to have 51 seats in the Senate.

The final numbers in the Senate will not be known until the runoff in Georgia on December 6 between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican nominee Herschel Walker. If Warnock, who’s running for a full six-year term, hangs on, Democrats will have a 51-49 majority.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Saturday night called the Democrats’ hold on the Senate a “vindication” of the party’s agenda and said it amounted to a rejection of “anti-Democratic, extremist, MAGA Republicans.”

“Oh and one other thing we did, which I cannot forget, we staunchly defended a woman’s right to choose,” Schumer said, referring to the battle over abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

There is a chance of a nationwide abortion ban being defeated because the American people elected Democrats to the Senate.

Only one Senate seat has changed hands so far in the 2022 midterm elections: Pennsylvania, where Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who campaigned as he recovered from a May stroke, defeated Republican Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

Republicans won seats in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, while Democrats won seats in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire.

When Biden and Trump Returned Their Way: The Case for a New Congress in the U.S. Senator from the Early 2020s

Laxalt was a co-chairman of Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign in Nevada and played a leading role in legal efforts to reverse the results in that election, which he said was “rigged.” Masto had claimed that the lies and election conspiracy theories of Trump and his allies led to the attack on the US Capitol.

Masters took a break after winning the Senate primary and scrubbed some of the language from his website that had been used to make a false claim about the election. In a debate with Kelly, he also conceded that he had not seen evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election. But the Republican nominee seemed to reverse course after receiving a phone call from Trump urging him to “go stronger” on election denialism, a conversation that was captured in a Fox documentary.

A note has been written about the senior CNN political commentator and host of “The Axe Files”, David Abrahams, who was a chief strategist for the Obama presidential campaigns. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. You can also give your opinion on CNN.

The politician who whispered the salty line to Obama a dozen years ago was Joe Biden, who later had it captured on a hot mic.

If Biden shouted it again from the roof of Cambodia where he was attending an Asian summit, the Democrats would have continued to control the US Senate.

A moment of truth for some Republicans, who had been deceived by Trump in the election, was marked by the weekend.

Democrats will continue to control the agenda on the Senate floor and in committees, which is no small thing — particularly if Republicans take the House.

McConnell and the Senate majority changed history by allowing Trump and not Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancies.

The Last Days of the Republican Presidential Campaign: The Legacy of Mehmet Oz and the Birth of the Modern-day American Dream: When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Ruined Nevada

The British Prime Minister, who lost his majority in the 1945 Parliamentary elections, was given assurances by his wife that it wasn’t a betrayal.

The Senate race in Pennsylvania was lost by Mehmet Oz, one of Trump’s favored candidates. CNN has not projected a winner in the governor’s race in Arizona where one of the most prominent election deniers is currently locked in a close contest with a democrat.

But this year, the typical referendum on the ruling party and President became equally a judgment of the opposition and its putative leader, Trump. It was a repudiation of election denialism, extremism and coarseness.

That verdict was not lost on some Republican politicians who, out of fear and opportunism, have stuck with Trump despite knowing better. It has been interesting to watch the quick departure from his camp of Murdoch and his media empire. For them, trespasses against democracy and decency may be tolerated, but losing cannot.

The verdict from Nevada came while Biden was overseas, as he was about to meet with China’s President.

The President might have been hobbled going into these discussions by a thumping in the midterms. It would have intensified growing doubts among our allies and adversaries about the durability of American democracy and about Biden’s political viability.

The people had their say, and they dealt a blow to Trump and the Republicans.

Even with the GOP seeming to slowly move toward House control, Biden will be very uncomfortable for the rest of his term with the investigations into his administration and his son, Hunter, because the likely Republican majority will be smaller.

As Trump presses on with a campaign launch set for Tuesday, the GOP’s loss of the Senate and competitive races nationwide raised new questions about his chances of winning back the White House. Meanwhile, the defeat of several high-profile election deniers boosted Biden’s global campaign for democracy – a central part of his 2022 campaign message – as he heads into talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Cambodia and prepares for a possible rematch with his predecessor.

Unless they win power, political parties are pointless. So it makes sense why Democrats are celebrating the victory of a new senator in Nevada who gave them their 50th seat and control of the Senate.

“I think one thing that pundits and prognosticators missed was that in all the incendiary ads that blanketed the airwaves for weeks, people knew the Democrats were getting things done for them,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on Saturday night after CNN and other media outlets projected the Nevada race.

There are calls for leadership elections to be postponed until after the Georgia election, with Florida Sen. Rick Scott and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham both saying that now was not the time. Scott said he’d been approached by “a lot of people” about standing against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, with whom he’d had significant messaging disagreements during the midterms. Still, it likely won’t be lost on many lawmakers that the party fell short on Scott’s watch.

The failure of Republicans to capture control means that the White House will be spared a relentless onslaught of Senate investigations and subpoenas to match those likely to be pouring out of the House if, as expected, the GOP finally clinches a majority in that chamber. This is a personal and political benefit for Biden.

While the pro-Trump radical right will seek to dominate the House GOP if the party does get a majority, Republicans did pick up some key Democratic-held House seats, with some of those incoming Republicans likely to be among the party’s most vulnerable members in 2024. How McCarthy will reconcile their needs with the Trump caucus, which is itching to impeach Biden, is unclear.

A two-seat margin is clearly better for Democrats than having to rely on the tie-breaking vote wielded by Vice President Kamala Harris. It also gives them a small cushion if one of their members becomes sick or incapacitated and lessens the chance they will lose their majority at some point in the new Congress.

A 51-49 margin would also be a Joe Manchin-proof majority, meaning that the West Virginia moderate Democratic senator might not enjoy the veto he has held the past two years over Schumer’s intentions. Manchin is likely to become more of a vote for Democrat leadership if he decides to run for reelection in a state where Trump won twice. The senator from the coal state criticized the president over his climate change policies.

It’s still most likely that the Republicans will control the House with a narrow majority. Democrats need a perfect run through the remaining seats to stay in power. But McCarthy’s predictions of a huge win backfired and are making his expected smooth path to the speakership rather rocky.

The leadership is at risk of being toothless due to demands from the House Freedom Caucus for large concessions and support for him for the top job. The Republicans have a thin majority in the House so those extreme lawmakers would be able to use it to their advantage. CNN reported Sunday that a challenge to McCarthy in the House leadership elections on Tuesday could weaken the minority leader and expose anger over the GOP’s performance, even if his team insists he will have the votes to be speaker.

While the GOP is fighting for control of the house, the Democratic fight to replace Nancy Pelosi is going to be on hold. The speaker said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that she was making no decisions while the destiny of the House was undecided. The speaker said that family and politics could affect her decision after the beating of her husband. She is not tipping her hand.

“I’m not asking anybody for everything. People are campaigning. And that’s a beautiful thing,” the California Democrat quixotically told CNN’s Dana Bash when asked whether she might feel motivated to stay on as leader. I don’t ask anyone for anything. My members are asking me to consider doing that. Let’s just get through the election.

The third election in a row that Donald Trump has cost us the race is what I think. Hogan said on the show that it was like three strikes and you were out.

Hogan fails to realize that even after a blue wave in the House, his 2020 election loss, and the Capitol insurrection of 2021, Trump hasn’t struck out with the grassroots Republican base that set him on the way to the White House.

It was expected that Trump would ride out a wave of Republican euphoria on this weekend in order to power his campaign for the GOP presidential nod.

Biden and the Democrats had a negative record on inflation. They did not give power to the Republican radicals in Trump’s election-denying image.

Indeed, Trump is moving in the right direction. The ex-president will be launching a new campaign on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago before the 2020 election, according to his adviser. Trump’s recent rallies suggest he’s only doubling down on his election fraud lies, even though they were rebuffed by midterm voters.

One new wrinkle now is that there may be alternatives to Trump in the GOP. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis built a strong majority with his reelection victory. In 2021, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin won the governorship in a state that Biden took by 10 points the year before.