For Democrats to overcome the Republican advantage in the struggle for control of the Senate, they will need a massive turnout effort and a wave election even more powerful than the one that won them the House in 2018.

But first let me backtrack for a minute.

The political landscape would seem, on the surface, to favor the Democrats. A key measure, the generic vote, gives Democrats a 7.7 point advantage over Republicans. In addition, of the 34 Senate contests at stake in 2020, Republicans have to defend 22, while 12 are held by Democrats. The intensity of animosity toward the Republican Party has fallen below the levels of 2017-18, but it remains high and could be rekindled.

These numbers conceal a structural imbalance, however, that makes the Senate more resistant to Democratic control than either the House or the presidency. This resistance could keep the Senate in Republican hands not only in 2020, but on into the next decade.

Why?

Political polarization and the partisan division that comes with it has become nationalized. More states — 23 by my count — are now various shades of red compared with 20 that are blue. Three factors have been crucial to this polarization and nationalization: race, cultural conflict and more recently, opposition to immigration. In no small measure, it is the fact that Trump ran the most racially divisive campaign in modern history that led to this development.

Polarization is currently “intense enough to predetermine most of the seats by party affiliation,” Larry Sabato, editor in chief of Sabato’s Crystal Ball — a political analysis and handicapping newsletter — wrote in response to my inquiry.

In practical terms, this means Republicans are favored in red states that have 46 Senate seats, while Democrats are favored in blue states that have 40. To understand the dynamics of Senate control, it is important to remember that the Senate in any given congress is determined by the results of three elections, since one third of the Senate is up for election every two years. This makes it quite different from the House and the White House.

In order to win a majority of 51 seats, Republicans need to win only five seats in the competitive purple states; for Democrats to win a majority, they need to win 11 seats in competitive states.

“The G.O.P. has a structural edge for the next several elections,” Sabato said by email. “In the Trump era and maybe a few elections beyond it, Republicans will normally be favored to hold the Senate majority as long as they nominate good candidates and are able to fund them appropriately.”

Charlie Cook, editor and publisher of The Cook Political Report, agreed: “All things being equal, there is definitely a hand on the scale for Republicans, especially compared to the House and to a lesser extent the Electoral College.”

In an email, Cook warned, however, that Republicans are undermining their own advantages:

If Republicans wanted to make purple, swing states turn against them, I don’t know what more they could do than what they are doing now. Republicans and President Trump are turning women who are hardly bra-burning feminists into voting Democratic.

James Hohmann, a Washington Post reporter, explored the strength of the Senate Republican structural advantage in a chapter of the forthcoming book “The Blue Wave: The 2018 Midterms and What They Mean for the 2020 Elections,” which was edited by Sabato and a colleague, Kyle Kondik.

In 2018, Hohmann wrote, Republicans

managed to pick up two Senate seats in the face of a blue wave. The upper chamber was a rare bright spot for the party in power during an otherwise abysmal election night. The G.O.P. triumphed over strong national headwinds in the Senate because the battles played out on one of the most hospitable maps a party has ever faced.

Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, is a dissenter from the view that the odds favor continued Republican control of the Senate. In an article headlined “Is GOP’s Senate Majority in More Peril Than We Think?” Trende argues that election simulations based on varying levels of Trump approval show that “42 percent job approval is basically the break point for the GOP holding the Senate.” At 43 percent, the simulation shows Republicans losing only two seats and keeping control but at 41 percent the simulation shows a four-seat setback and loss of control of the Senate.

One problem with Trende’s simulation is that the 2018 election was, by all accounts, all about Trump, whose job approval on Election Day was 43.5 percent. Trende’s model suggests that under those circumstances, Republicans should have lost two seats, when in fact the party gained two seats.

I asked Trende about this and he replied:

The 2018 playing field was fundamentally different. Republicans lost their two marginal seats [in Nevada and Arizona]. The seats they picked up were all heavily Republican, with the exception of Florida. This time they have to defend more seats that are marginally Republican/Democrat (Colorado, North Carolina, Maine, Arizona, maybe Georgia and Texas), and, with the exception of Alabama, don’t have the same sorts of pickup opportunities in Republican-leaning states.

Joel Sievert and Seth C. McKee, political scientists at Texas Tech University, document the linkage between a state’s presidential vote and its Senate vote in their 2018 paper, “Nationalization in U.S. Senate and Gubernatorial Elections.”

They write:

The relationship between the statewide presidential vote and the electoral fortunes of senatorial and gubernatorial candidates has increased markedly in just the last few decades. In addition, the greater correspondence between election outcomes has diminished the importance of candidate-specific factors.

The diminished role of “candidate-specific factors” has consequences. It means that a superior Democratic candidate in a red state or a Republican candidate in blue state will probably lose to a much less qualified opponent than was the case in the past. The 2018 re-election of Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, is the exception that proves the rule.

Cook described the political environment in red states:

The way things are, a deeply-flawed Republican can beat a decent Democrat in a lot of these states. That doesn’t help Democratic chances of winning and sustaining a Senate majority.

Sievert and McKee document the rising power of partisanship in Senate races in all five regions of the country.

In the Mountain and Plains states, for example, Senate candidates from the same party as the presidential winner were successful 58.14 percent of the time in the 1980s; by 2010-2016, this rose to 88.57 percent. The starkest example is in the South, where the percentage rose from 32.35 to 93.10 percent over the same period. In the Midwest, it rose from 44.12 to 66.67 percent; in the Northeast, from 47.37 to 82.14 percent; on the Pacific Coast, from 66.67 to 100 percent.

These patterns continued through the election last year.

“The 2018 midterm election may well have been the most nationalized midterm of the post-World War II era,” Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, writes in a 2019 paper, “Moderation in the Pursuit of Victory May Not Help: Evidence from U.S. House Elections, 1978-2018.”

Abramowitz provided The Times with the data for the accompanying chart illustrating the strong correlation between a state’s vote for Trump in 2016 and its level of support for Senate candidates in 2018.

The Ever-More Polarized Senate

Senators’ electoral margins in 2018 generally tracked Trump’s margins in 2016. Still, seven Democrats prevailed in Trump states, including popular incumbents in Ohio, Montana and West Virginia.

TRUMP VOTE MARGIN

(PERCENTAGE POINTS)

–50

0

+50

States

Trump

won

WY

+40

UT

REP.

WON

MS

NE

+20

TN

ND

MS*

2018

SENATE

G.O.P.

MARGINS

TX

MO, IN

FL

AZ

NV

MI

MT

WV

OH

NJ

MN*

PA

WI

VA

WA

ME

DE

CT

–20

MA

RI

NM

MN

DEM./

IND.

WON

MD

NY

–40

VT

HI

TRUMP VOTE MARGIN (PERCENTAGE POINTS)

–40

–20

0

+20

+40

States Trump won

+40

Wyo.

Utah

Rep.

won

Miss.

Neb.

+20

N.D.

Tenn.

Miss.*

2018

SENATE

G.O.P.

MARGINS

Mo., Ind.

Texas

Fla.

0

Ariz.

Nev.

Mont.

Mich.

W. Va.

Ohio

Minn.*

N.J.

Pa.

Va.

Wis.

Wash.

Conn.

Me.

Dem.

or Ind.

won

–20

Mass.

Minn.

R.I.

N.M.

Del.

Md.

N.Y.

–40

Vt.

Hawaii

By The New York Times | Source: Alan Abramowitz, Emory University | *Special elections were held in Minnesota and Mississippi. California not shown because it had no Republican senate candidate.

Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, picked up this theme in “Extreme Referendum: Donald Trump and the 2018 Midterm Elections,” published in the spring 2019 issue of Political Science Quarterly:

Five of the six Senate seats that switched parties in 2018 went to the party that had won the state’s 2016 presidential vote. As a result, the number of senators representing states won by their party in the most recent presidential election reached an all-time high of 89 for the 116th Congress, extending yet another gauge of increasingly nationalized, president-centered electoral politics.

In the long term, Charlie Cook suggested that demographic trends are likely to improve Democrats’ prospects in Senate races:

Maybe down the road a little further, the faster-growing Southern and western states — those with more nonnative state, heavily suburban populations — are going to get tougher for Republicans. We have seen that in Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and starting to see it in North Carolina and Georgia.

In the short term, however, Cook contends that

Democrats have to figure out a way, not to win but to cut their losses among small town and rural whites, and weekly church-going whites, so that in some of these tougher states in the South and Midwest, when they have outstanding candidates and Republicans nominate weak candidates, they can pick off those on occasion.

A continuing problem for Democrats, Cook noted, is that “they are increasingly seen as secular and more anti-religious among many white churchgoers, evangelical or mainline Protestant and Catholic.”

Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, pointed out a positive note for his party, in an email. The nation, he wrote, is “at the end of era of the G.O.P. fight against America’s social modernization” and that “2020 could prove to be part two of an election blue wave, like 2006 and 2008.”

Despite that, Greenberg warned that the “Senate will still be hard after that,” as long as the party’s presidential candidate continues to voice what Greenberg called “President Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) metropolitan triumphalism that drives away all working people.”

One of the Democratic Senate losers in 2018, Claire McCaskill, pointed to the historic roots of Democratic Party struggles in an interview with Nick Lemann in The New Yorker: “There was a cataclysmic shifting when we decided that civil rights was the cause of our party. Missouri, along with the traditional Democratic Southern states, began to shift.”

Abramowitz and Jennifer McCoy, a political scientist at Georgia State University, describe what they call “the transformation of the American party system in the 21st century due to the growing alignment of partisanship with race, religion and ideology” in a 2019 paper, “United States: Racial Resentment, Negative Partisanship and Polarization in Trump’s America.”

“Over the past four elections,” Abramowitz and McCoy write,

there has been a dramatic increase in support for Republican presidential candidates among the most racially resentful white working class voters. In 2000, only 62 percent of working class whites scoring high on racial resentment voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore. That percentage increased slightly to 68 percent in 2004 and 69 percent in 2008. In 2016, however, 87 percent of the most racially resentful white working class voters supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

In contrast, they write, the Republican share of white working class voters low in racial resentment “fell from 48 percent in 2000 and 41 percent in 2004 to 19 percent in 2008 and 24 percent in 2016.”

The growing influence on Senate races of the deep divisions between red and blue states puts the focus of both parties on turnout in purple states, particularly for the Democrats.

There is disagreement among political analysts in determining which states are purple or up for grabs.

For example, Taegen Goddard, who runs the blog Political Wire, lists seven: Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and New Hampshire. Paul Rader, a staff writer at Ballotpedia, would expand the list to also include Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia and New Mexico, while labeling Arizona as red.

Kyle Kondik at Sabato’s Crystal Ball ranks the states differently. He places four states — Arizona, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — in a tossup category. Six states “lean Democratic” (Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Michigan and Virginia) and six “lean Republican” (Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio).

What this means is that both parties will have to invest a large portion of their resources into some combination of these contested states. In terms of both the Senate and the presidential election, the determining factor will be voter mobilization. On this front, there are mixed signals on the Democratic side.

G. Elliott Morris, political journalist for The Economist, wrote on his blog, The Crosstab, that “the data indicate that the Democrats are retaining much of the momentum they had heading into last year’s midterm elections.”

But, he cautioned, “though it is not currently an election season, mobilization efforts seem to be wavering, or at best holding constant. This is especially true when compared to 2017.”

Morris cited trends in local special elections to fill empty seats in state legislatures, City Councils and other bodies:

Tracking these special elections from November 2016 to 2018, Daily Kos Elections found that Democratic candidates were running ahead of Hillary Clinton by about 11 percentage points. What is that number for special elections that have occurred since November 2018, you ask? A 7 percentage point swing to Democrats. That’s high, but not as high, as last year.

Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, has also cited some worrisome indicators for Democrats. On June 1, Grossmann noted on Twitter:

In 2017-18, we had several signs of a big leftward thermostatic move:

1) policy & values polls

2) mass protests

3) candidate & org mobilization

4) special elections

I don’t see much sign any of these are continuing to move left into 2019; looks more like stasis.

Leah Gose and Theda Skocpol, sociologists at Harvard, have been tracking on-the-ground mobilization efforts by over 100 resistance groups in Pennsylvania and they are more optimistic about Democratic prospects in 2020.

In “Resist, Persist, and Transform: The Emergence and Impact of Grassroots Resistance Groups in the Early Trump presidency” Gose and Skocpol argue that anti-Trump efforts “have remade American civic life and politics since 2016.”

The two observe that the anti-Trump mobilization has not been “restricted to liberal states or to ‘blue enclave’ areas where voters mostly support Democrats” but extends into “places where Democrats or liberals are a beleaguered minority.”

Skocpol sees little or no letup on the part of local resistance groups. In an email, she wrote:

Almost all groups plan to be very active going into 2020. The national media obsesses with the presidential horse race and the impeachment argument, but local groups are keeping at the fundamentals in many places.

Democrats who have been frustrated by Republican control of the Senate — from 1995 to the present Congress, Republicans will have been in the majority for 19 years to the Democrats’ nine — had better hope that Gose and Skocpol are right.

If not, Democrats can bank on more years of staring at what Will Bunch, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, described as “Mitch McConnell’s democracy-crushing smirk” while McConnell presides over a Republican majority that has become the fervent ally of a president determined to embrace and embolden a white America hostile to immigrants, committed to an immoral racial hierarchy and eager to eviscerate the social progress of the past 60 years.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: [email protected].

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.  @edsall

Source: Read Full Article