It’s a dream scenario for Democrats that, in August, seemed on the brink of reality: Widespread predictions that the party would capture the Senate along with the White House, giving a newly inaugurated President Hillary Clinton a legislative partner in Majority Leader Charles Schumer, her former Senate mentor.
Less than a month later, that fantasy has floated away like an end-of-summer breeze.
Two major data- and statistical-analysis websites on Wednesday downgraded Democrats’ chances of wresting Senate control from the Republicans, from highly likely in late summer to something approaching a toss-up in early fall — with less than two months to go before the presidential election.
The New York Times’ The Upshot blog on Wednesday declared its data suggests Republicans are slightly favored to maintain the Senate majority over Democrats, 53 percent to 47 percent. It’s a sharp drop from mid-August, when the blog had Democrats’ likelihood of winning at slightly better than 60 percent and Republicans’ chances at just below 40 percent.
Nate Silver’s influential FiveThirtyEight blog, which correctly predicted the outcome of the last two presidential elections, followed suit, although it still had the Democrats ahead. Nevertheless, its updated models showed Democrats’ likelihood of winning Senate control had plunged from 72.7 percent Aug. 7 to 57.2 on Wednesday — a drop of more than 15 percentage points in about six weeks.
Experts caution the Democrats’ apparent reversal of fortune is, like most polls, merely a snapshot in time, and “the basic playing field is still tilted in the Democrats’ favor,” according to Yahoo News’ Down Ticket blog. While the GOP must defend nine Senate seats, writes Andrew Romano, Democrats need just four pickups to get control, and will almost certainly gain seats on Election Day, if not an outright majority.
“They’re snap polls, and I think it’s hard to know from any given moment in time where we’ll be in seven weeks,” says Lauren Passalacqua, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee national secretary. At the same time, she says, the battle for Senate control “is competitive. It’s a partisan time. We expected that.” She says they have prepared for the fight by investing in communications and voter outreach.
But others say a newly disciplined Donald Trump — coupled with wealthy GOP donors bypassing his campaign to pour millions of dollars into tight Senate races, and surprising surges from once-vulnerable incumbents — has fueled the Republican push and reversed Democratic momentum.
The Republican surge also mirrors the evaporation of Clinton’s double-digit lead over Trump in national polls, suggesting Democrats have struggled to tie the highly unpopular GOP presidential nominee to Republican Senate candidates like a millstone. That failure, experts say, has enabled discriminating voters to differentiate the flamboyant celebrity billionaire from the party he represents.
When it comes to the presidential race, “a lot of investors at our level are interested in a concrete plan and strategy” to maintain Senate control as a hedge against Trump, said Steven Law, a Republican and top executive of both One Nation and the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP-affiliated super PAC.
The campaign between Trump and Clinton “is too volatile for them to feel comfortable investing in, and they see that,” Law told The New York Times. “And there is a pathway for us to hold the Senate majority, and they are very eager to invest in that.”
It also offers an arguably better return on that investment: Though Trump has erased much of Clinton’s double-digit lead in national polls, the businessman has struggled to overtake her in key swing states, including Pennsylvania, Colorado and Virginia. Analysts say Clinton only needs to win a relative handful of the seven political battlegrounds to take the White House, but Trump has to run the table in order to win.
With Republicans holding a four-seat advantage in the Senate, Democrats can capture the Senate majority with four seats if Clinton wins the White House, with Vice President Tim Kaine as the tie-breaker vote. However, if Trump scores an upset win in November, the Democrats would need an additional seat for Senate control, and a far-fetched 14 seats for a filibuster-proof supermajority.
Yet if the trends in crucial Senate races continue — and if Republicans, as predicted, keep their House majority — the next president would be sworn into office along with GOP majorities in both houses of Congress. That would mean a virtual legislative mandate for a President Trump, and chronic gridlock under a President Clinton.
“The Senate is [the Republicans’] firewall, and they are going to do what they can to keep it,” Schumer, a Democrat who is Minority Leader Harry Reid’s hand-picked successor, told the Times. And voters should hate the game and not the players.
“I wish we could change the rules, and I hope Citizens United is overruled,” he said, referring to the Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited spending on outside political groups. “But before that, we can’t unilaterally disarm them.”
The big spenders include casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, arguably the most influential couple among active GOP donors. Bloomberg Politics reports that the Adelsons, who spent the most among all major donors during the 2012 election cycle, kicked in $20 million to groups backing Republican Senatorial candidates in August, but has given a relatively paltry $5 million to Trump.
Wealthy hedge-fund managers Kenneth Griffin and Paul Singer gave “several million” to the Senate Leadership Fund, another pro-Republican group, according to Bloomberg. The Senate Leadership Fund subsequently hauled in $28 million in August, more than doubling its total fundraising.
The billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch also made it rain on Senate races, according to Bloomberg, spending tens of millions of dollars on the campaign to keep Congress in Republican hands.
Already, the money has paid dividends, according to a Wesleyan Media Project analysis of Kantar Media/CMAG data. Republicans and their allies have run 61,015 TV or web ads in Senate contests, while Democrats have put up 56,474.
The Senate Democrats’ momentum slide began around Aug. 25, according to data on the FiveThirtyEight and The Upshot websites. Some pollsters say it’s evidence that Trump isn’t dragging down other GOP candidates, but Down Ticket’s Romano suggests it’s because Democrats have struggled to make Trump a campaign issue in Senate races.
” Some analysts have argued that because Trump is a sui generis celebrity candidate — a party of one — voters won’t let their feelings about the GOP ticket-topper sway their down-ballot behavior,” Romano writes. “To a certain extent this is true: In the key battlegrounds of Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina, Trump is running an average 2.7 percentage points behind the local GOP Senate candidate. This means that at least some Clinton voters are planning to pull the Republican lever for Senate.”
The DSCC’s Passalacqua says the dropoff in support for Senate Democrats looks worse than it actually is: The party will gain seats in the Senate because the GOP has to play defense.
In August, there were a lot of polls after the Democratic National Convention] showing a prohibitive lead for Democrats, she says. “But we don’t take any of our campaigns for granted. We’re doing what we always do: prepare for tight elections”
[NEWS OF THE DAY: Trump’s Comments About African-Americans Set Off Another Firestorm]
Although Republicans like Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are running surprisingly strong races against formidable Democratic challengers, Trump could still have a negative effect in tight, make-or-break Senate races in some battleground states. That includes New Hampshire, where GOP incumbent Kelly Ayotte is running neck-and-neck with Democratic challenger Maggie Hassan, and Nevada, where Republican Joe Heck has an edge over Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, for Reid’s old seat.
And after several weeks of positive headlines and sticking to his campaign script, Trump has shown signs of reverting back to the mercurial, shoot-from-the-lip candidate who fires back at his critics and makes outrageous claims that dominate entire news cycles. That includes his live-on-TV declaration that Clinton started the controversy over President Barack Obama’s birthplace but he ended it — a bogus statement that was instantly discredited.
“A couple days ago, I was somewhat concerned with Trump’s ability to show some discipline on the campaign trail,” Democratic strategist Jim Manley told The Hill on Saturday, after Trump’s press event. “I can’t believe I fell for it for a couple days but that’s not going to happen in the future. The man is utterly incapable of sticking to a plan.”
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Republicans Could Keep Control of Senate — in Spite of Donald Trump originally appeared on usnews.com
