BETSY: Hi. I’m Betsy (ph) from Seattle. Today is quite exciting because I’m having a good hair day. Whoa. This podcast was recorded at…
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
1:05 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, September 5, 2024.
BETSY: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, just like my fluctuating hair vibes. Enjoy the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
XIMENA BUSTILLO, BYLINE: Cause for celebration.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Few things better than a good hair day. It really can affect your mood.
MCCAMMON: Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign.
BUSTILLO: I’m Ximena Bustillo. I also cover the campaign.
DAVIS: And I’m Susan Davis. I cover politics.
MCCAMMON: Today on the show, the campaign for control of Congress. Let’s start with the Senate. It’s hard to imagine a map any more favorable for Republicans this year. They need two seats for control. West Virginia looks like a sure bet after Senator Joe Manchin’s retirement for Republicans. They’ve got some possible pickups in Montana and Ohio. So Sue, which races are you paying the most attention to?
DAVIS: Well, first, I’d say not only is the map favorable to Republicans, but if nothing else happens but Donald Trump wins the White House, they might have already won the Senate majority. With that West Virginia seat, the starting line for the battle for the Senate is 50/50. So even if Democrats could hold every other seat, if Republicans take the White House, that means they also take the Senate…
MCCAMMON: Right.
DAVIS: …In a tied Senate. So I’d say that just to underscore what a good position Republicans are going into November.
MCCAMMON: Either way, it could be tight, and the presidential race could determine control of…
DAVIS: Sure. And the reverse is true. If Democrats can hold with 50/50 and win the White House, they will also have the majority. I’d say when you say what races are top of mind right now, I would say Montana, especially because there’s fresh polling data just out today, just within the past hour from the AARP, which is a nonpartisan outfit that has been doing polling in key states. And their polling in Montana shows no surprise – Donald Trump winning the state by 15 points right now. No one believes that Kamala Harris is going to contest Montana.
But it has the incumbent Senator Jon Tester down between six or eight points against Republican Tim Sheehy. One poll isn’t the thing that we focus on, but in the trend line of Montana, Sheehy, the Republican in that race, has been pretty consistently leading. We’re in that post Labor Day stretch where the polls really start to sort of solidify a bit more. And if Republicans flip Montana, which they are in a very good position to do, they have the majority.
And there’s still five or six other races we could talk about, but that could be it right there. So I think, despite how much 2024 has been upended, the battle for control of Congress is still very tight, and the bottom line that the Senate tilts towards Republicans has stayed pretty static.
MCCAMMON: Ximena, you were just in Ohio, another state where Democrats are on the defensive for a Senate seat. We’re going to talk more about that in a little bit, but, I mean, did you get the sense that there’s just a lot at stake for the Democrats?
BUSTILLO: Yeah, definitely. I think, to Sue’s point, Ohio mirrors a lot of the same trends that you see in Montana demographically. Also with these senators that are from rural states – last rural Democrats in the Senate, you know, really looking to defend their titles – but across the board. I also spent a lot of time in Arizona, and that has a contested Senate race between Democrat Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake. And, you know, it really has been a sentiment of, regardless of all the turmoil this year, the pressure on the Senate campaigns and the House campaigns, that stayed pretty steady. And they’re fighting their own battles separate of what’s happening at the top of the ticket.
MCCAMMON: Now, as favorable as things are looking for Republicans now, a while ago, it was looking like they could maybe even have more flips. And that’s because Democrats have improved their standing a little bit over the last few months. What is driving that?
DAVIS: I think the first thing you have to think about in a lot of these competitive races is that they’re almost all incumbents running for reelection, with the exception of Joe Manchin in West Virginia, who’s retiring. And regardless, incumbents are still really hard to beat. And Senate incumbents – assuming they don’t have some crazy scandal behind them – are really, really hard to beat. So incumbents like Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin have proven really resilient.
And even though Republicans are contesting those races, those Democrats are in a pretty good position now. I don’t think their victory is a sure bet either way – obviously, two very contested blue wall states. But they have proven to be very durable. You also have this other element of the Republican Party has still often puts up in primaries candidates that make it harder to win a general election.
Arizona is a very winnable state for Republicans. But the voters there selected Kari Lake as their nominee. She’s been a controversial nominee in the past. She has been an election denier. She’s already lost statewide once before. And that has allowed the Democrat in this open race, Ruben Gallego, to put up a bit more of a fight than he could have against maybe a more competitive Republican. So I think Arizona – if Montana is a bleak spot for Democrats, Arizona has become a bit of a bright spot.
MCCAMMON: So that’s the Senate. Again, Democrats in control but on the defensive. What does the situation look like in the House, where obviously there is a very narrow Republican majority right now?
DAVIS: The thing that’s interesting about the battle for the House in 2024 is a lot of the major races are happening outside of the swing state battle for control of the White House. So for the Senate, you have overlap in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan and Arizona for Senate races. In the House, it’s in places like California and New York – blue states that Democrats feel pretty optimistic about, especially with Kamala Harris now at the top of the ticket. And this renewed sense of Democratic enthusiasm and turnout gives them a better chance at focusing on these races that are considered toss-up races.
And just within California and New York, there are seven Republican-held seats that Democrats are contesting. Democrats need to net four seats to win a majority. So they’re in striking distance. They have a chance. But the House is tight. The House is a jump ball. I don’t think that either party has a clear shot to the majority right now. And all of these races from now till Election Day, like, they’re all dog fights.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, you mentioned the top of the ticket. Obviously, who’s at the top reshapes a lot of things down ballot – the way voters feel, who turns out. How much, though, have the candidates themselves been stumping for candidates down ballot from their party?
DAVIS: That’s a good question. Obviously, when Joe Biden was the nominee, there was no Democrat in a competitive race that wanted to be anywhere near him. I think the Harris-Walz campaign is a little bit different, and they’ve had a warmer reception on the campaign trail. I think it’s been completely the opposite with Republicans. I mean, the Republican Party is fully unified behind Donald Trump. I mean, Trump going to campaign in a place like Montana…
MCCAMMON: Right.
DAVIS: …Recently, like, that wasn’t about Trump. He’s going to win that state. He really likes Tim Sheehy. He really wants him to win. I think Trump is an easier candidate for Republicans to campaign with ’cause Democrats in swing places tend to want to seek some distance from the party. But Democrats also this week have something that I don’t believe the Trump campaign or the RNC has done. The Harris campaign just wrote $25 million in checks to the campaign operations for the House and the Senate and state ledge races, a testament to her own fundraising ability, but the campaign’s willingness to spend money to try to get down ballot candidates to win.
MCCAMMON: Right. Because it’s one thing to win. It’s another thing to have control of Congress or at least not have the other party in control of it.
DAVIS: Absolutely. And I think it’s also a sign that resources will not be an issue, right? Like, it’s not – Democrats are not going to not have the money they need to win these races. If they lose them, it’s not because they didn’t have the checks.
MCCAMMON: All right. I want to talk more about another important senate race in just a second. But first, we’re going to take a quick break.
And we’re back. And I want to look specifically at the race we were talking about earlier, Ximena, that you’ve been focused on, Ohio. You’ve spent some time there. It’s a race between the incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and his Republican challenger, Bernie Moreno. First of all, just tell me a little bit about these two.
BUSTILLO: So as you mentioned, Sherrod Brown is the incumbent. He first won in 2006 and has since really climbed up the ladder in the Senate. He’s the chair of the Senate banking committee, which is a pretty high-up post. He’s a really wonky dude. He likes to talk about trade policy, economics and labor. But he also electorally has a very unique history of keeping his wins and getting votes for him as a Democrat in parts of the state that other Democrats running at the same time, whether it’s, you know, former President Barack Obama, former candidate Hillary Clinton or current President Joe Biden didn’t get. So he has been able to see some Democratic wins where other Democrats weren’t…
MCCAMMON: Outperform the top of the ticket.
BUSTILLO: Correct. Now, Bernie Moreno is the Trump-backed candidate. He is a car salesman. He’s Colombian. He’s from the country of Colombia. His campaign has been really focused on immigration and drug trafficking. And, you know, the primary was very expensive between Republican candidates. And he beat out other Republicans that had been more well-known across the state that had previously won state-wide races. And he is relying on his connection to Trump to get support.
MCCAMMON: You mentioned that Senator Sherrod Brown outperforms the top of the ticket. How does he do that? What’s his strategy?
BUSTILLO: He definitely has his own brand, separate from the brand of the broader party and any presidential race that might necessarily be happening at that time. You know, he is needing to already win some voters that might not be voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, you know, kind of like this whole idea of some might be split ticket voters. But he also needs to turn out folks for himself, like, beyond just broadly mobilizing Democrats for a down-ballot race. His campaign told me that they’ve brought on even more volunteers than they did in 2018, which is the last time that he ran. Granted, that was a midterm year, so things are a little slower during midterm seasons. But they’re knocking on every door. They’re trying to reach every county and really looking into the areas outside of the metropolitan, you know, three C’s – Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland.
DAVIS: Brown is a really interesting test case in this election to the question of whether you can cultivate an independent political brand anymore in American politics. And increasingly, the answer to that question is no. Because not too long ago, even in like 2000-era elections, oftentimes a state would vote one way for Senate and one way for the presidential. People would split tickets all the time. People knew their senators, they voted separately. And as polarization has exponentially grown larger and larger, that doesn’t really happen anymore.
I think the only sitting senator that has outperformed the top of the ticket when it went the other party is Susan Collins of Maine. Like, she still has a brand within Maine that people don’t associate her with the Republican Party. Sherrod Brown’s close to that in Ohio. He clearly is very well-known. He’s very well defined. He has been very progressive on a lot of issues that are mainstream now but he was sort of a leader on back then. And to me, he’s sort of, like, does the only thing that ultimately matters is the D or R after your name, and voters don’t differentiate anymore and…
MCCAMMON: Don’t like franchising, branding.
DAVIS: Exactly. Like, if you’re a Democrat, that’s the only thing people see when they go to vote and when they go and look at the ballot. And he’s enjoyed something that’s the opposite of Tester, where Tester has trailed his opponent all year long for the most part. There’s obviously been some polls that showed him ahead. Brown’s the opposite. He has been leading Moreno in almost all polls the entire year by three to five points. So he’s in a good position right now. But the question is, how many split ticket voters are there really in Ohio? And we don’t know.
BUSTILLO: And that is the challenge for him is not only can he keep an independent brand, but just the voting trends in Ohio since he last ran or even first ran have completely changed and completely flipped. If you look at the map in, you know, 2006, the first time he ran, even 2008 and 2012 with Obama, you know, there were swaths of the Ohio River Valley that were completely blue. Like, that was strong union labor, strong support for Democrats. Since then, that’s totally gone away. And so even when he was picking up, you know, more margins, can he really change that? You know, does the D on his name turn people away? Do people not vote at all? You know, what does that look like at a time when there is a presidential race? Trump is at the top of the ticket. That might mobilize enough Republicans or folks to just vote down ballot the other way.
MCCAMMON: Well, and last time he ran – 2018, right? – he would have had historical fundamentals in his favor, right? But coming off of the 2016 election, the midterms usually go to the other party. But this is the first time in – what? – more than a decade when he’s had to run during a presidential election year.
DAVIS: And he’s never appeared on a ballot with Donald Trump.
MCCAMMON: One more question about this race, Sue. Moreno was endorsed by Trump in the Republican primary. We were talking a minute ago about Trump’s role in the party. I mean, how likely is that to translate to success in a general election?
DAVIS: Well, I think it depends on what the outcome is. If Bernie Moreno wins this race, I think the Trump endorsement and brand will be seen as critical. Moreno is not really running as anything other than a Trump Republican. He is proudly running as a rubber stamp for the Donald Trump agenda. If he loses, I think it’s going to be another data point in many Senate elections since 2016 that the Trumpiest (ph) candidate causes a problem in the general election.
This is something that – Senate Republicans have had many attempts to win the majority and lost because they didn’t run the best candidate. And often, they were a more far-right, more Trumpy candidate. So in a state like Ohio, which they should absolutely be able to win, if they’re not able to pull off that win, I think that it’s going to cause another round of, like, soul searching, at least within the Senate Republican wing of the party of, like, why do you keep losing these races who really should be winning?
MCCAMMON: Let’s leave it there for today. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign.
BUSTILLO: I’m Ximena Bustillo. I also cover the campaign.
DAVIS: And I’m Susan Davis. I cover politics.
MCCAMMON: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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