Cornyn, Paxton, and the Attention Economy

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

At Politico, Adam Wren notes that Democratic Senate candidates are mismatched in the attention economy.

ON THE REPUBLICAN SIDE: A similar gap exists on the right, as Cornyn faces a primary challenge from Texas AG Ken Paxton. Senate Republicans would much prefer Cornyn, worrying that Paxton could lose to a Democrat in the general under the right conditions.

But Paxton has adapted to our new, disruptive attention-based political era. He has run to where MAGA eyeballs are. Yes, that means doing hits on Fox News, but it also means going into less-mainstream media appearances, including as a guest on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “We had you really early on this — before it got kicked off,” Bannon told Paxton in a gerrymandering-centric appearance earlier this week, effectively vouching for his MAGA bona fides.

Cornyn has taken a more institutionalist approach. Perhaps his most prominent foray into the redistricting fight came in the form of a sternly worded letter to the FBI asking for their help in tracking down the absconding Texas Dems. To be fair, that move was successful in generating its own earned media and resulted in the FBI approving a request to locate the contingent of quorum-breaking Democrats, though it remains unclear what that means in practicality and the FBI is declining to comment, as POLITICO’s Gigi Ewing writes.

Cornyn is also using tactics that have failed against Paxton in the past, POLITICO’s Andrew Howard sharply observes. In May, Cornyn’s campaign launched a website attacking Paxton titled CrookedKen.com, highlighting a number of Paxton’s flaws. The site’s content is almost identical to a website rolled out by George P. Bush during his primary race against Paxton in May 2022, called KenTheCrook.com. Bush’s political team had a lot of overlap with Cornyn’s, and Paxton won that primary by more than 30 points.

Cornyn declined an interview with Playbook.

“Every campaign I was ever on, including in 1980, our objective was to get in the local paper when we visited it, and get on the local radio station, and get on TV as much as possible,” Dave Carney, the Abbott strategist, told Playbook. “The difference between that — which is the exact same strategy, get as much attention as you can earn — now is: There’s 600,000 … places to get noticed.”

 

NRSC Hardball Against Paxton

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Charlie Cook:

Thursday afternoon, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released a statement from communications director Joanna Rodriguez on Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton’s divorce filing against her husband, state Attorney General Ken Paxton. “What Ken Paxton has put his family through is truly repulsive and disgusting,” read the statement. Not your everyday Capitol Hill press release, to say the least.

...

Paxton served 10 years in the Texas state House and two years in the state Senate before his election as attorney general in 2014. In 2015, a year after becoming the state’s chief legal officer, Paxton was indicted on securities-fraud charges. The case languished for nine years, during which he was reelected twice, impeached by the state House, and acquitted by the state Senate. In March of 2024, he reached a plea-bargain agreement that required restitution of almost $300,000 but did not require him to step down from his post.

That brings us back to the NRSC. To be very clear, I am not criticizing Rodriguez, the NRSC staff, or its chairman, Sen. Tim Scott. I understand why they did it, but—wow!

If Cornyn is the GOP nominee, he wins the general election easily—period. But virtually all polling shows Paxton ahead in a primary, be it by 9 points, 19 points, or even 22 points. The most reputable survey, conducted by the Tarrance Group for the Senate Leadership Fund (the chief super PAC for Senate Republicans, closely aligned with Majority Leader Thune), showed Paxton’s margin on the lower end of that range, at 10 points.

Given all of Paxton’s baggage, some of that same polling shows that Democrats would have a good shot against Paxton if he’s the nominee. So it’s easy to understand why national GOP leaders have a vested interest in Cornyn winning renomination, in the process saving them a pile of general-election money.

 

Todd Achilles

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Claremont McKenna College alum Todd Achilles is running for the Senate.

Sarah Cutler at The Idaho Statesman:

 Todd Achilles is no longer an Idaho state legislator, and he’s no longer a Democrat. Instead, he’s an independent, now challenging a longtime Idaho Republican senator for his seat in Congress.. Achilles, 58, weighed the decision to run against U.S. Sen. Jim Risch for a long time, spurred by frustration with the state of the economy and the dysfunction of the two-party system, he told the Idaho Statesman.

Idaho’s Republican congressional delegates, including Risch, in recent months have faced public outcry over some of President Donald Trump’s policies, including proposals backed by Trump to sell public lands in Idaho for development. Risch has called on lawmakers to reject the proposal — though in April, he voted to reject a budget amendment that would have banned the government from reducing the federal deficit using proceeds from the sale of public lands. “Everybody’s frustrated by the debt, deficits and dysfunction in Washington, DC,” he said. “Too many people are struggling. Their wages are low. They’re having to get health care from Medicaid programs. The whole system is broken.”

Joni Ernst Gaffe

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) might have a competitive reelection race next year.  Yesterday's gaffe will not help.  Alexander Bolton at The Hill

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst (R) pushed back against constituents who shouted out at her recent town hall meeting that cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would cause people to die, responding, “Well, we’re all going to die.”


The awkward moment came at a town hall meeting on Friday in Butler, Iowa, while Ernst defended the spending reforms in a House-passed budget reconciliation package that are intended to stop people who crossed into the country illegally from receiving federal benefits.

JUNE 1 UPDATE: Then she made it worse with a sarcastic video.

 

Absolutely bonkers — Joni Ernst doubles down on her “we are all gonna die” defense of Medicaid cuts while walking through a cemetery pic.twitter.com/tZrhtvODeK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 31, 2025

Maybe the reference to Jesus was an effort to shore up her evangelical base after this:

#ICYMI: The Air Force revealed earlier this year that a general who oversaw its lobbying before Congress had inappropriate relationships with five women.

Sources say one of the women whose relationship with him was scrutinized was Sen. Joni Ernst.https://t.co/97qos9S9hC

— ProPublica (@propublica) June 1, 2025

The Senate Map

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Adam Wren, Rachael Bade and Lisa Kashinsky at Politico:

Brian Kemp’s decision not to run for Senate isn’t just a setback for Republicans in Georgia. It is the latest sign that the GOP’s prospects across the Senate map are far less certain than just a few months ago.

It could turn worse, too, as President Donald Trump’s tariffs cause global market chaos ahead of next year’s midterms and a cloudy economic picture comes into fuller view.

Republicans are still widely expected to keep the Senate. But after Kemp and former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu rejected GOP recruitment efforts — and with hardline conservative Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton primarying the establishment Sen. John Cornyn — the GOP is bracing for a more turbulent cycle than once expected.

That’s not to mention other brewing challenges in Louisiana and North Carolina, where MAGA figures are threatening primaries against longtime incumbents.

Senate 2026

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Chris Stirewalt at The Hill:

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) announced that she would not seek a fourth term. Shaheen, 78, joins two other Democrats from similarly light-blue states, Sens. Gary Peters (Mich.) and Tina Smith (Minn.), who already announced their retirements.

But Shaheen hits a little differently. Not only has New Hampshire been among the crumbliest pieces of the “blue wall” in the Trump era, it has a solid Republican Party. If popular former Gov. Chris Sununu decided he wanted the gig, it would make it tough for Democrats to hold. At the very least, it is going to be an expensive headache for a party already playing defense.

...

Of the 35 seats — 33 regular elections and special elections in Ohio for the remainder of the term won by now-Vice President Vance and in Florida for that of now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio — most are on Republican turf. Looked at that way, Republicans have more on the line with 21 seats to defend compared to just 14 for Democrats.

But most of the Republican seats are in places where the risen Lord couldn’t win a statewide election if he was running as a Democrat. 

D pickup opportunities are slim.  In Maine, Collins could be in trouble if she runs again. 

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis is in a better place than Collins but faces a different kind of problem. His state has voted Republican on the presidential level every year since 2008. It’s been wobbly now and then, but it is still a red state. The main problem for Tillis is that his state party is a disaster and the Democrats there are not. He is certain to draw a primary challenge from the same wing of the North Carolina GOP that served up Mark Robinson, author of an embarrassing 2024 gubernatorial defeat. Tillis will be lucky to survive his primary, and if he does will likely face a top-drawer Democrat, like former Gov. Roy Cooper.

In Georgia, Ossoff was lucky in 2020.  

Could Republicans repeat their past mistakes and put a screwball candidate up in midterms? There’s always a chance. But if Senate Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.) and the GOP can convince Gov. Brian Kemp to take the plunge, Ossoff’s luck will probably have run out.

Of course everything could change if the economy crashes and take the GOP with it. 

Schumer Agonistes

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. 

Lulu Garcia-Navarro at NYT:

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is facing the biggest revolt from Democrats in years, but in a conversation with The Interview after his crucial vote supporting a Republican federal spending bill this past week, he tried to brush off questions about whether he should step aside. Democratic officials appeared stunned when Schumer did an about-face on the spending bill, arguing that the choice was the lesser of two evils. Schumer defended his decision in the second part of our wide-ranging interview, even as questions over his leadership by senior party officials continued.

...

Schumer said that he made a “very, very difficult” decision to support the Republican bill in order to avert a government shutdown that, he said, President Trump and Elon Musk wanted. He called Trump and Musk “anti-government fanatics” and “nihilists.”

They want to shutter “agency after agency,” he said, which would create a situation far worse than the Republican bill. He continued:

Two days from now in a shutdown, they could say, well, food stamps for kids is not essential. It’s gone. All veterans offices in rural areas are gone. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. They’re not essential. We’re cutting them back. So it’d be horrible. The damage they can do under a shutdown is much worse than any other damage that they could do.

Isn’t this just — Wait, let me just finish, Lulu. It can last forever. There is no off ramp. One of the Republican senators told us: We go to a shutdown, it’s going to be there for six months, nine months, a year. And by then, their goal of destroying the federal government would be gone. And finally, one final point here, and that is that right now under the C.R., you can go to court and contest an executive order to shut something down. Under a shutdown, the executive branch has sole power.

On 3/11, Jake Lahut Leah Feiger Vittoria Elliott reported at Wired:

As President Donald Trump has been trying to keep House Republicans in line over a continuing resolution to keep the government open through the fall, Elon Musk has expressed a desire for a government shutdown, four sources familiar with his position tell WIRED.

Sources also tell WIRED that Musk has wanted a government shutdown—an aim that runs contrary to the White House’s stated desire to avoid one—in part because it would potentially make it easier to eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, essentially achieving a permanent shutdown. The sources, whom WIRED has granted anonymity, specifically asked to be described generically because information about Musk’s support for a shutdown is closely held.

“A shutdown has been his preference,” says one Republican familiar with the situation, referring to Musk. “I think he’s boxed in there by the president. I think it would be really hard for him to get around that.”

A second Republican who had heard about Musk’s desire for a government shutdown tells WIRED that the billionaire’s goal is for the continuing resolution—a spending bill to temporarily fund the government—to tank, if only to achieve a brief government shutdown.

“You know none of this is about saving money, right?” says a third Republican familiar with the behind-the-scenes push from Musk. “It’s all about destroying a liberal power base.”

 

 

DSCC to Play in Primaries

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Stephen Neukam and Hans Nicholst Axios:

New Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chair Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has been privately indicating she's prepared to intervene in contested primaries.

Why it matters: Senate Democrats want to avoid the GOP's Obama-era pain of watching preferred candidates lose primaries to unelectable newcomers.Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) know their ability to claw their way back to the majority starts with candidates who are built for the general election.

The top target: Getting the right candidates in three of the most competitive races of the 2026 cycle — Maine, North Carolina and now Michigan.

Zoom in: At a private DSCC fundraiser on Wednesday night, Gillibrand told donors that Roy Cooper, the former North Carolina governor, would be a "formidable candidate," according to people familiar with the matter.Cooper has yet to decide whether to run, but he's clearly indicated he's considering it and used his farewell address to say, "I am not done."

A big announcement from Cooper would help offset fears of losing other seats — especially if Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) decides to challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.).

Democrats were stunned by Sen. Gary Peters' (D-Mich.) surprise announcement he won't seek a third term, opening a primary they thought would be closed.

The Best People

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee for the nation’s top health post, has repeatedly disparaged vaccines, falsely linked them to autism and argued that White and Black people should have separate vaccination schedules, according to a Washington Post review of his public statements from recent years.

In at least 36 appearances, Kennedy linked autism to vaccines, despite overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the use of vaccination to protect people from deadly infectious diseases and refuting any ties to autism, The Post found in a review of more than 400 of Kennedy’s podcast appearances, interviews and public speeches since 2020.

Kennedy, who is scheduled to face a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, criticized vaccines more broadly in at least 114 appearances, calling them dangerous, saying the risks outweigh the benefits and making misleading claims about vaccine safety testing or discrediting vaccine efficacy.

Holy sh*t. Senator Bennet absolutely annihilated RFK Jr. and exposed him for what he really is—an anti-vaxxer crackpot and grifter. In the pre-Trump era, this would have been the end of his nomination, and he would have withdrawn immediately.pic.twitter.com/Mmu6Ic23Vn

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) January 29, 2025

 

Ambassador Caroline Kennedy’s statement to the US Senate on RFKJr’s nomination for HHS Secretary

This is a reading of a letter she just sent to Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions

I’m so proud of my courageous mother, who’s lived a life of dignity,… pic.twitter.com/feysNA0Wwp

— Jack Schlossberg (@JBKSchlossberg) January 28, 2025

Brett Forrest, Caitlin Ostroff and Rebecca Feng at WSJ:

To defend and burnish Tulsi Gabbard’s image as her political star was rising, her congressional campaign hired a public-affairs firm in 2017 that tried to suppress coverage of an alleged pyramid scheme connected to her Hindu sect, according to interviews, emails and Federal Election Commission records.

Gabbard, a former House member who is now President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, was raised in the Science of Identity Foundation, a sect tied to a direct-marketing firm accused of running a pyramid scheme in several countries. Neither Gabbard, the sect nor the firm, QI Group, wanted the relationships scrutinized.

Gabbard’s campaign paid Washington, D.C.,-based Potomac Square Group for the PR cleanup, trying to mask the connections. But the operation was directed by a Science of Identity follower—and longtime Gabbard adviser—who sits on the board of a QI subsidiary.

The revelations shed further light on Gabbard’s ties to the religious group—publicly described by some former followers as a cult that demands total loyalty to its founder—and to the Hong Kong-based QI, which has been a target of criminal and civil cases alleging fraud and racketeering in at least seven countries.

...

Gabbard’s relative inexperience in national intelligence, as well as her past support for regimes in Russia and Syria, has raised concern among some national-security officials and lawmakers. Gabbard served two years on the House Homeland Security committee.

Gabbard seemed confused about a key U.S. national-security surveillance power in recent meetings with Senate Republicans. GOP lawmakers are expected to support her nomination.

Democratic Challenges

Our next book is tentatively titled The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.   Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

John Haskell:

There are more red states than blue by a margin of 24-19. And as partisan lines have hardened this century we have now reached the point where Democrats have exactly zero senators from these states. The last of them had a tough time surviving — a seemingly impossible one in West Virginia that Joe Manchin managed, and improbable success in Montana for Tester and Ohio for Brown. Alas, Manchin stepped side in 2024 and other two were defeated.

The red state Senate Democrat can now be reclassified from an endangered species to an extinct one.

Even if the party gets every single blue seat (they have all but the one seat in Maine stubbornly held onto by Susan Collins), they start at a severe disadvantage. The balance of power in the Senate rides on the seven purple states. Democrats do very well there, with 10 of the 14 seats, but even that is not enough, with Republicans now holding a 53-47 overall edge. Democrats’ prospects of turning that around are vanishingly slim. More likely is that Republicans gradually begin to even the score in the purple states, adding to their advantage.

As for the House, we’ll know a lot more after the 2026 midterms. At this point the body is on a knife’s edge with 220 likely GOP seats to 215 for the Democrats once all is said and done. But Democrats hold far more Trump district seats (14) than Republicans have Harris district seats (3).

While the situation in the House is not as clear cut as it is in the Senate, it too doesn’t look promising for Democrats. It’s worthwhile to be reminded that the states that stand to gain the most seats after the 2030 census are governed by Republicans who have access to those computer programs that facilitate gerrymandering. What states will losing seats? You guessed it, they’re mostly blue. Add it up: a net gain for Republicans beginning in 2032.

What we’re starting to see is a mirror image of the 1954-1994 period where the House was solidly in Democratic hands and the Senate was usually but not always also Democratic. Today it’s a solid Republican Senate with John Thune of South Dakota headed for a long run as Majority Leader and Chuck Schumer having to make himself comfortable in the minority leader’s office space. In the House, a majority is within reach for Democrats, but maybe not for long.

Senate 2026

Our next book is tentatively titled The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.   Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Nathan Gonzales at Roll Call:

The smallest initial Senate battleground in history (probably) is good news for Republicans (probably).

At this early stage of the 2026 cycle, Inside Elections rates just five senators as vulnerable, including three Democrats (Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, Michigan’s Gary Peters and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen) and two Republicans (Maine’s Susan Collins and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis).

Recent cycles have shown a strong correlation between how a state votes for president and who it sends to the Senate, putting Ossoff, Peters and Collins in electoral danger because of the 2024 results (Donald Trump won Georgia and Michigan, while Kamala Harris won Maine). Harris won New Hampshire and Trump won North Carolina, but both states remain competitive.

Everything else looks like a stretch for both parties. It’s hard to imagine Republicans winning in Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico or Oregon, while Democrats need a lot to go right to seriously compete in Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Ohio or Texas.

Slotkin v. Identity Politics

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will discuss the extraordinary fight between an elderly white ex-president and a younger Black/Asian woman. 

Marc Rod at Jewish Insider:

Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said Wednesday that the Democratic Party needs to abandon “identity politics” to succeed in the future, and discussed her strategy to appeal to both Jewish and Muslim voters in Michigan on a webinar with the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

“I feel very strongly that identity politics — we need to have it go the way of the dodo,” Slotkin said on the webinar. “The idea that you can say ‘this group, because of their race or religion or ethnicity, is going to do this predictable voting behavior’ is not right. Coalitions are changing. Voters are changing.”

Slotkin said that she experienced this personally on her campaign, giving an example of an event with a group of Pakistani-American doctors she assumed would be reliable voters for Vice President Kamala Harris, but were actually all voting for Trump. She said the Democratic Party has also made mistaken assumptions about Latino and African American voters.

“You’ve got to appeal to people’s core issues regardless of their historical voting patterns, and you can’t get lazy,” Slotkin said. “And I think Donald Trump was not lazy.”

She described pocketbook issues as the key question in the race, and said her campaign had tackled the issue head-on. Voters, she said, were “confused” about what Democrats’ priorities were, especially at the presidential level, following President Joe Biden’s departure from the race.

President-Senate "Mismatches"

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Drew DeSilver at Pew:

Four states that Republican Donald Trump carried in this month’s presidential election also elected Democratic senators. That may not seem like a lot, but it’s twice as many “mismatches” between states’ presidential and U.S. Senate results as in all Senate elections held in 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined.

• This year, the states that chose Trump for president and sent a Democrat to the Senate were:Arizona: Rep. Ruben Gallego won the seat that independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is vacating.
• Michigan: Rep. Elissa Slotkin will succeed retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow.
• Nevada: Incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen fended off political newcomer Sam Brown.
• Wisconsin: Incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin edged out financier Eric Hovde.

No states had mismatches in the other direction, electing Republican senators but picking Democrat Kamala Harris for president.

The four mismatches, out of 34 Senate elections this year, made for a “mismatch rate” of nearly 12%. That’s the highest since the 2017-18 cycle, when the mismatch rate was 22%, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of results going back to 1980. Along with a Democratic win in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, seven out of 35 Senate races in the 2018 midterms (including two special elections) went to a different party than the state’s 2016 presidential vote did.

President-Senate mismatches of this sort used to be fairly common. But since 1990, fewer than half of Senate elections have diverged from their state’s most recent presidential vote – and over the past dozen years, the trend has been for fewer and fewer to do so.

BUT the AZ, MI, and NV results ended with same-party delegations in each state. WI remains split-party.  

Hannah Recht and Eric Lau at WP:

Voters in Montana, Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania — states that Donald Trump won on Nov. 5 — also voted for Republicans to take over Senate seats currently held by Democrats, helping Republicans secure control of the upper chamber.

After these flips, only Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will send a split-party delegation of one Democrat and one Republican to the Senate. That is the lowest number since Americans began directly electing senators more than a century ago.

 

How Sherrod Brown Lost Ohio

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Manu Raju and Clare Foran at CNN:

Sherrod Brown can boil down the loss of his Senate seat to this: Donald Trump and withering GOP attacks.

And the top of his ticket didn’t help him much, either.

As the veteran Ohio Democrat takes stock of the loss in his marquee race, he also has a blunt message for his party: Win back working-class voters or lose more elections.

“I think that we don’t appear to be fighting for them,” Brown said when asked why Trump won the same blue-collar workers whom the Democratic senator has prided himself in courting through the course of his three-plus decades in Congress. “Workers have drifted away from the Democratic Party.”

In a wide-ranging interview with CNN, Brown bluntly criticized his party for not addressing voter concerns over rising consumer costs and declining economic conditions. And he accused Republicans — including his foe in the Senate race, Trump-aligned businessman Bernie Moreno — of distorting his record as he battled the headwinds at the top of the ticket.

...

 “I lost, but we ran ahead of the national ticket,” said Brown, who fell to Moreno by 4 points. “When the leader of your ticket runs 12 points behind, almost, you can’t overcome that, even though it was a close race in the end.”

Loyalty to Trump

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. 

“I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty! I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.”  -- Lyndon B. Johnson

With the Gaetz and Hegseth nominations, Trump is rejecting the idea that anything other than loyalty is important in someone leading a massive government department and he is challenging the Senate to dare to disagree.
Gift link: https://t.co/icOsDNtyvA

— Philip Bump (@pbump) November 14, 2024

Andrew Kaczynski at CNN:

New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for US ambassador to the United Nations, is now refusing to stand by her previous push for Ukraine’s NATO membership — a stance she once framed as critical to regional stability.

Her office also declined to say whether she still believes Russia committed genocide in Ukraine, as she said in 2022.

In 2022, Stefanik urged NATO to admit the nation, especially as Russia’s invasion escalated. At the time, she argued for extensive military aid support, highlighting the Trump administration’s previous providing of Javelin missiles.

“I’ve seen how important Ukraine is for the region,” she said. “They need to be admitted into NATO and we need to do everything we can by providing them munitions and javelins, and remember, the javelins were supplied under the Trump administration.”

Her comments at the time reflected the strong pro-Ukraine stance that aligned with broad bipartisan support for Kyiv in the early days of the conflict.

Now, when asked if she still supports NATO membership for Ukraine, Stefanik’s spokesperson declined to specifically address her current position. Instead, her office signaled that she is aligning with Trump’s approach.

GOP Rep. Troy Nehls to us just now after Trump meeting:

“If Donald Trump says, ‘jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our head.”

He was wearing a Donald Trump tie while he said it.

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) November 13, 2024

Senate Elections and Coattails

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

The six-year cycle of Senate elections is crucial to understanding the chamber's partisan makeup.

A Senate class elected in a midterm will face reelection in a presidential year, and vice versa.  The political conditions of the second will be different from the first.  A wave election brings in a set of senators who are vulnerable to defeat six years later.  The GOP took control of the Senate in the Reagan sweep of 1980, and lost it in 1986.  The GOP tied in 2000, suffered a big setback in 2006.

Calder McHugh at Politico:

In presidential election years, when voter turnout swells, presidential candidates often receive more votes than Senate candidates, even Senate incumbents. Yet this year, 11 of the 14 Senate Democratic incumbents up for reelection won more votes in their states than Harris.

By contrast, Donald Trump vastly outperformed Republican candidates for Senate, especially in swing states like Nevada and Michigan. Of the eight GOP incumbents up for reelection (not counting Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts, a former governor who was appointed in 2023), Trump had a higher vote total than six of them. The only senators he didn’t outpace were Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, two veterans who are well known in their relatively small-population states.

Trump’s performance last week was a far cry from his first presidential bid in 2016. Back then, Republican candidates for Senate won in spite of him — of the 22 Republican Senate incumbents up for reelection that year, Trump ran ahead of only six of them. His great fortune was that Hillary Clinton was an even larger drag on her party’s ticket — all seven Democratic incumbents up for reelection that year won more votes than her in their home states.

This time around, he provided significant tailwinds, especially for the two Republican senators who had the closest reelection victories — Deb Fischer in Nebraska and Ted Cruz in Texas.

Trump’s transformation from drag on the Republican ticket to boon has Democrats unnerved about the future of their party. Where 2016 may have felt like a terrible nightmare powered by the strangeness of the Electoral College, 2024 felt like a total rebuke. Trump, who went from losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes to winning it (by how many is yet unclear), can no longer be easily dismissed as an aberration governing without a popular mandate.

Ironically, though, in terms of the Senate, the outcome might be better for the Democratic Party moving forward. In 2016, zero states voted for a president of one party and a senator who came from another. This year, if Democrat Ruben Gallego’s lead holds, there are four — Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.

All of that ticket splitting is due in large part to Trump’s strength relative to Harris; his popularity was in some cases not transferable to other Republicans on the ballot with him. He outran the Republican Senate candidates in those four states by huge margins, while Harris had trouble even matching the vote totals from Democratic Senate candidates.

As the dust settles on the 2024 election, Trump resembled a uniquely strong Republican candidate, while Harris ran more like a weak incumbent who voters wanted to punish. That might be a good sign for the future of the Democratic Party.

Sixers and the Senate Cycle

 Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

The six-year cycle of Senate elections is crucial to understanding the chamber's partisan makeup.

A Senate class elected in a midterm will face reelection in a presidential ytors.ear, and vice versa.  The political conditions of the second will be different from the first.  A wave election brings in a set of senators who are vulnerable to defeat six years later.  The GOP took control of the Senate in the Reagan sweep of 1980, and lost it in 1986.  The GOP tied in 2000, suffered a big setback in 2006.  

STEVEN SHEPARD and KATHERINE TULLY-MCMANUS at Politico:

Democratic Sens. Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey have had a lucky streak of election environments since they first came to the chamber in 2006. That luck seems to have run out.

The first elections for Tester (Mont.), Brown (Ohio) and Casey (Pa.) coincided with a Democratic midterm wave after six years of George W. Bush in the White House. In their second campaigns, their party’s presidential nominee won the popular vote by 4 percentage points. The third? Another blue wave repudiating Donald Trump.

But 2024 is a different story. At best, the two parties face a neutral political environment, as evidenced by tied polling from the presidential race down to Senate contests.

...

The first elections for Tester (Mont.), Brown (Ohio) and Casey (Pa.) coincided with a Democratic midterm wave after six years of George W. Bush in the White House. In their second campaigns, their party’s presidential nominee won the popular vote by 4 percentage points. The third? Another blue wave repudiating Donald Trump.

Money in 2024 Congressional Elections

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Paul Kane, Theodoric Meyer, and Clara Ence Morse at WP:

Powered by small-dollar donors, Democrats have seized control of the fundraising game in the battle for the House and the Senate, leaving Republicans at a disadvantage — and increasingly reliant on a small clutch of mega-rich donors.

In 25 of the 26 most competitive House races, the Democratic candidate raised more than the Republican in the third quarter, including 16 races in which the Democrat raised at least double their GOP candidate, according to a Washington Post analysis of reports filed Tuesday to the Federal Election Commission.

In the Senate, Republican candidates trailed their opponent in all 11 of the most competitive races. In eight of those, the Democratic campaign more that doubled the financial haul of the GOP campaign, including three that tripled their margin.

...

Democrats have learned that massive fundraising does not guarantee victory. In 2020, three of their Senate candidates set fundraising records in Kentucky, Maine and South Carolina, about $300 million combined, and all three lost by big margins.

But GOP leaders have been concerned about their cash problems for several years. Rep. Richard Hudson (N.C.), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has issued public and private warnings about the cash disadvantage for GOP candidates.

... 

To make up for this disparity, Republicans have relied on mega-rich donors who write seven- and eight-figure checks to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the House GOP super PAC, and the Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP super PAC.

Tester and the Democrats' Rural Retreat

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Carl Hulse at NYT:

Just 20 years ago, two Democratic senators represented both North Dakota and South Dakota — including the party’s Senate leader. Each state also boasted a Democratic House member. Nebraska had a Democratic senator and only a few years earlier had two. Today, those states are represented in Congress entirely by Republicans.

...

“Democrats are increasingly perceived as elite and focused almost exclusively on urban matters,” said Tom Daschle, a former South Dakota senator who served as both minority and majority leader before being narrowly defeated in 2004. “Rarely do national Democratic candidates spend time in rural America, and that ‘flyover’ perception continues to increase the perception of this divide.”

The disconnect is as much cultural as political.

“These are interior states, and a lot of people in the interior don’t trust the elites on the coasts,” said Mr. Baucus, who served as the U.S. ambassador to China after leaving the Senate. “They feel kind of put upon and that nobody cares.”

...

Then there’s the fact that Mr. Tester is trying to win a fourth term in a state that has moved sharply to the right. Unlike other rural states, Montana’s evolution has been fueled not by an exodus of voters, but by a steady influx of new conservative residents who are much more aligned with the MAGA movement. Democrats worry that these voters are unflinching Republicans who are strongly supportive of Mr. Trump and are not familiar with or interested in Mr. Tester’s long history in the state or Montana’s tradition of political independence.

“They don’t know Jon, and they are Republicans,” Mr. Baucus said.

Loophole!

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Ally Mutnick at al. at Politico:

Senate Republicans are preparing to significantly escalate their plans to exploit a campaign-finance loophole that will allow them to save millions of dollars on TV advertising, irking Democrats who hoped federal regulators would block the GOP plan.

Republicans in late July began quietly piloting their new strategy: running campaign ads for a candidate, framed as a fundraising plea, to get cheaper ad rates and avoid awkward content restrictions. Democrats, furious at what they saw as the crossing of ethical and legal lines, asked the Federal Election Commission to weigh in.

At a contentious meeting Thursday, the agency deadlocked 3-3 on whether these joint fundraising ads should be permitted — effectively allowing the practice to continue.

With no restrictions imposed, Republicans, who have been facing a deep cash disparity with Democrats, are now preparing to turn what was a smaller-scale effort into a key component of their closing TV ad strategy.