DYLAN: Hi. This is Dylan from Fort Collins, Colorado. Gearing up to leave tomorrow for a three-week trip to Asia that culminates in Kyoto, Japan, with me asking my girlfriend Leah (ph) to marry me.
DEIRDRE WALSH, HOST:
Wow.
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Oh.
DYLAN: This podcast was recorded at…
MCCAMMON: 12:34 P.M. Eastern Time on Tuesday, October 22, 2024.
DYLAN: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, with the exception of my love for travel and soon-to-be fiance. All right, here’s the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
MCCAMMON: Oh, I just hope she doesn’t hear this before he proposes.
WALSH: Congrats, Dylan.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, HOST:
I guess she’s not a fan, and I hope he’s not jinxing it. I doubt it.
MCCAMMON: Yeah. Congrats in advance. Hey, there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign.
WALSH: I’m Deirdre Walsh, I cover Congress.
MONTANARO: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
MCCAMMON: And before we get started, just a reminder to hit the follow button wherever you’re listening to us. That way, you’ll get notifications whenever we have new episodes for you. On today’s show, which party will control Congress? With such narrow majorities, just a little bit of movement in either direction by voters, something that’s totally possible with such a tight race at the top of the ticket, that could change control of either chamber. We’re going to start in the House, where there is currently a narrow Republican majority. And Deirdre, you’ve been covering Congress for many years now. Both party leaders have been keeping up a heavy travel schedule this campaign. Let’s start with Republican Speaker Mike Johnson. Where’s he going and what’s his message?
WALSH: He’s been kind of all over the place. Republicans have a very narrow majority. Democrats would have to pick up a total of four seats to win back control of the House of Representatives. And Johnson has raised a ton of money, and he’s only been speaker a year this week.
MCCAMMON: Right.
WALSH: Basically marks the one-year anniversary of his, sort of, surprise rise to get the gavel. And he’s been, sort of, in all the places where there are competitive House races, Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska, California, Pennsylvania. He’s focused a lot on, sort of, the overall message we hear at the top of the ticket, talking about border security, immigration. He’s also talking a lot about crime and the economy. I think there is some tailored messaging going on in certain places where he’s been campaigning, but he’s – you know, it’s a very aggressive travel schedule and, you know, there are – I think he’s out west this week in Washington and Oregon. And I think he’s, you know, going to continue to, sort of, talk about what Republicans can do if they keep control of the House, and he is very optimistic that they will keep control and that President Trump will win the White House and Senate Republicans will flip control of that chamber.
MCCAMMON: I mean, for Johnson, this isn’t just about his party loyalty, right? This is about his job.
WALSH: Correct. I mean, he has to constantly be worried about his job, that’s sort of the nature of a slim Republican majority, where he’s faced divisions since he was elected speaker. But in terms of his campaigning and fundraising, he is getting high marks from House Republicans in terms of his ability to get out there and raise a ton of money and to be able to campaign in all these competitive places.
MONTANARO: These House races get far less attention than the presidential race, but, you know, the race for Congress is super important because the fact that it’s such a razor-thin majority with so few seats, you know, it makes it vitally important for either party to be able to win control.
MCCAMMON: Obviously, Democrats would love to win control. Deirdre, you’ve spent some time on the campaign trail with Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. He’s been able to go some places that previous Democratic leaders might not have been able to go.
WALSH: Right, I caught up with him recently in Northampton County, Pennsylvania. It’s the swingiest county in the swingiest state of Pennsylvania. Susan Wild is the Democratic incumbent there that he was campaigning for, and she told me that there are some previous Democratic leaders, she didn’t name-check some of them, but I think we know she’s talking about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that were viewed as sort of too divisive. And she said those types of leaders were not, sort of, super helpful to come in and campaign in a district like hers. She said Jeffries can campaign anywhere. He understands seats that are unlike his own. He represents Brooklyn.
If Jeffries is successful and helps Democrats win those four seats that they need to retake control, it’s worth noting he would become the first Black Speaker of the House. He did not want to go there when I asked him about that issue in my interview with him. He just said, you know, I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. And then he quoted John Lewis saying he needs to keep the eyes on the prize. But House Democrats have been talking about that issue. And the other thing that they were talking about when I caught up with Jeffries, and in other House Democratic competitive seats, is the issue of voting rights. That was an issue that Jeffries said he would put a priority on, as well as focus on housing costs, but voting rights has become sort of an issue that we’re hearing more and more about in these closing weeks of the race for the control of the House.
MONTANARO: You mentioned Pennsylvania, obviously, and being out there. And, obviously, that is the state that everybody is, sort of, focused on in the presidential election. More money has been spent there than anywhere else, almost half a billion dollars on ads. I mean, there are five seats in Pennsylvania, five congressional seats that the Cook Political Report has deemed to be either toss-ups, meaning they could go to either party, or that they lean in the direction toward one party or the other, or that they’re likely maybe in one direction or the other, for Republican or Democrat.
But, you know, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, they all have, you know, House seats that are up. Those are also part of those big seven swing states that we talk about in the presidential election. But, you know, lesser talked about, you know, when people talk about, well, why should I go and vote? It doesn’t really matter. There’s only these seven states that people are talking about. When you think about the race for Congress, California and New York have 17 seats between the two of them that really could determine the outcome of the – of control of the House. So, really big, big deal and really important, even in places where people may think their vote doesn’t count as much.
MCCAMMON: And Deirdre, you mentioned Susan Wild in that race, the congressional race in Pennsylvania. I mean, that is a race in which Liz Cheney, former Republican congresswoman, has endorsed the Democrat, just for a sense of how swingy that area is. I’m curious, what is it about Jeffries that has made him someone who can, as you say, go and campaign in an area like that, a purple area, where maybe somebody like Nancy Pelosi couldn’t?
WALSH: Well, Republicans for years and many election cycles featured Pelosi in ads. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars working to demonize her and sort of paint her as a sort of San Francisco liberal out of step with candidate X, candidate Y, whatever, who was campaigning in a lot of these competitive seats. So that was something that was a deliberate Republican strategy. Jeffries is not as known as a quality. I think he’s also tried to keep more of a bottom-up approach among his members, and so members feel like he listens and understands their district and is able to sort of come in and talk about the issues they think are important in their districts. And I think that’s why Wild invited him to a Black church in Easton, Pennsylvania, to talk about the issue of voting rights.
Getting back to Domenico’s point about California and New York, New York could make or break Jeffries’ bid to potentially become the first Black speaker of the House, and he knows it. He and other top Democrats in the state created this coordinated campaign because of that group of roughly five House Republicans that won in 2022 that they’re trying to flip back. That is a big order to try to oust that many incumbents when you have such a small margin. That’s one place we will be watching on election night, New York. We could know a lot about how the House is moving. But because so many of those races, as Domenico mentioned, are out in California, we are not likely to know which party will control the House of Representatives on election night. And we – it may be days.
MONTANARO: I think that’s a super-important point to remember, that a place like California, when they have so many of these kinds of races and so many voters, slow vote counting is not unusual. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong that’s going on. I mean, this takes place almost every election cycle, 2020, 2022, we were waiting for days, if not weeks, for the final result out of a lot of these California districts in particular because they’re just so close and so tightly contested.
MCCAMMON: We talk a lot about how Election Day isn’t the beginning of voting. It’s really the end of voting. Well, it’s in some cases, not the end of vote counting, not remotely. So I guess the message once again is we have to be patient. OK, we’re going to take a quick break, then we’ll head over to the other chamber, metaphorically, and talk through what the campaign looks like for the U.S. Senate.
And we’re back. The Senate, currently controlled by Democrats, seems very likely it’ll flip over to Republican control. Domenico, why is that?
MONTANARO: Well, because this is probably the worst map in modern political history for any party in, you know, having to defend as many seats as Democrats are. And so few of the seats that Democrats are targeting are actually competitive at all. I mean, Republicans have a lot of seats that they’re looking to try to flip from Democratic incumbents. We’re talking about places like Montana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. They’re already favored to win the seat that Joe Manchin retired from, the senator from West Virginia. They just need one more seat to be able to take control of the Senate and the Montana Senate race, where Jon Tester is the incumbent, the Republican challenger Tim Sheehy is favored to win there in Montana.
So Democrats are really facing an uphill battle here in trying to retain control, which is so, so close, and Republicans need to net just two seats for full control outright, no matter what the presidential election outcome is, or one seat if Donald Trump wins, and then the vice president would be able to be the tie-breaking vote in a 50/50 Senate. But having this many seats up, you know, a slight breeze could push this thing from, you know, a two-seat flip for Republicans to something like six seats. And Democrats really have to watch the margins.
MCCAMMON: You know, we’ve been saying this for a while. We’ve known that the map is tough for Democrats in the Senate. Why is it such a tough year for Democrats in terms of the map?
MONTANARO: Well, I mean, first of all, I think it’s just the luck of the draw or the bad luck of the draw as far as the seats that are up. I mean, Democrats are defending 23 seats that they hold. Republicans are only defending 11. And of those seats, the 23 that Democrats are defending, I mean, you’ve got, you know, half a dozen or more that are competitive. And when that happens, and Republicans have so few that seem to be up for grabs, I mean, almost all of their seats are likely to go their way, except for lean Republican category of Texas now because Democrat Colin Allred, a congressman from the Dallas area has been spending so much money over Ted Cruz. But that race is still seen to be something that’s probably a 3 to 4-point race in favor of Republicans. And, you know, there’s an independent in Nebraska that has made that seat suddenly come online. But a lot of people think that because of the slant of the – how the presidential election’s likely to go in Nebraska toward Donald Trump, that Republicans are favored to continue to hold that.
MCCAMMON: OK. Deirdre, outside of Montana, which I think everybody has known for a long time has – was going to be close. Some of these races have maybe turned out to be closer than expected, and that’s true in both bluer and redder states. Why is that?
WALSH: I think that they’ve tightened, and it just shows, you know, where our politics are as a country. For months and months, Democratic incumbents in states like Ohio, Sherrod Brown is running for reelection against Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno. He was outperforming Joe Biden when Joe Biden was on the ticket. In Pennsylvania, Bob Casey was outperforming Biden. They continued to outperform Vice President Harris when she became the Democratic nominee for a while. But it seems that all of those races have tightened. I mean, you just saw it with the Pennsylvania Senate race this week. The Cook Political Report, which Domenico mentioned earlier, they changed the rating on that race as a toss-up. And it just shows you that as the race tightens for Harris and Trump in Pennsylvania, it’s also affecting down-ballot races.
MCCAMMON: Right.
WALSH: I think the fact that Bob Casey, who is a very well-known Democratic incumbent in Pennsylvania, is now facing a toss-up race, where he had been leading for months, is potentially a bad sign for the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania. And I think you see this dynamic also in Michigan. There’s an open Senate race in Michigan, where the Democrat, Elissa Slotkin, had a narrow advantage but an advantage for a while over the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, the former House Republican. It’s neck and neck, and you see that at the top of the ticket.
MONTANARO: You know, this idea of ticket-splitting has just become more and more rare, which is why I think a lot of us were kind of looking a little bit skeptically at the numbers that were showing people like Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, the Democrat there who Deirdre was just talking about, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, the Democratic incumbent there. Any number of these seats, being able to see those Democrats outperform the presidential ticket by as much as they were, that seemed like it was unlikely to continue to be the case, and as people have started to focus more on what they’re going to do in this election, whether it’s the presidential or the Senate, it’s pretty normal to see this kind of tightening where the margins get to mirror somewhat each other.
And maybe a Bob Casey runs a point or two better than Kamala Harris. But to outperform the presidential line by more than, you know, 6, 7, 8 points is very, very difficult, which is why it makes it hard for somebody like Sherrod Brown, who is very popular in Ohio, to be able to outperform, you know, Kamala Harris by a lot. It’s why it’s so difficult for Jon Tester, despite his popularity in the state, to outrun, you know, Trump, you know, who’s going to probably win the state by double digits or more. It’s really, really tough to be able to do that, especially nowadays when people are so divided.
MCCAMMON: Before we go, I want to talk a little bit about the issues. Deirdre, you mentioned in the House some of the issues like immigration and crime, which sort of mirror some of the issues in the presidential campaign. They’re coming up a lot. What about in the Senate? Is it the same thing? Is it something different?
WALSH: I think the economy has become a bigger issue in a lot of the Senate races. I think House races can be more localized. In a contest like the one in Montana, Tester is really trying to make it about local issues. He’s talking about farming and development and jobs in Montana that he has helped secure. His Republican opponent is nationalizing the race, linking him with images of him with Biden, with Harris and the economy. You see people like Bob Casey running ads about his plan to combat price gouging because the issue of high prices and inflation continues to be an issue that is resonating in a lot of these races, just like it is in the presidential race. So…
MCCAMMON: Everywhere I go, I hear about it.
WALSH: Exactly. And I think that Democrats are walking a tough line on that issue because the Biden-Harris campaign is the incumbent administration, and they are being blamed for high prices, and it – they are trying to proactively say, here’s how I’m going to combat inflation and high prices and look like they are addressing an issue that is front and center on the kitchen table.
MONTANARO: You know, Montana is such a difficult state for Democrats. Jon Tester didn’t even go to the Democratic National Convention. He wanted nothing to do with the national party platform. He wanted to say, hey, I’m a local guy. That’s why you like me. It’s really interesting that in this day and age in 2024, we’ve had such a shift in the types of senators we wind up seeing from different states. You know, it’s not that long ago – 2008, for example – you could have a Democratic senator in a very conservative state, and it’s just not the case anymore, and people have become much more ideologically aligned.
MCCAMMON: All right, we’re going to leave it there for today. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign.
WALSH: I’m Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.
MONTANARO: And I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
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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