President Trump’s wavering reelection campaign is increasingly dragging the Republican Senate, giving Democrats their best hope in more than a decade of winning control of both houses of Congress and the White House.
Democrats now threaten Republican Senate headlines in Georgia, Iowa, and Montana, states that looked confidently red, in addition to Colorado and Arizona, where Democrats have held the lead for months, and Maine, where Republican Senator Susan Collins faces the more difficult choices. in her long career
The challengers have been flooding Republican rivals in fundraising and moving ahead in polls, prompting independent analysts to mark their assessment of the Democrats’ chances.
“After Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016, there is a temptation to avoid making political projections,” wrote Nathan Gonzales, a nonpartisan analyst and editor at Inside Elections. “But the result of an election should not make us ignore the data. And right now, the preponderance of data points to a big pick for Democrats, including the Senate takeover. “
New campaign finance reports submitted to the Federal Election Commission this week show that most Democratic Senate challengers outperformed their Republican rivals in the past three months, some up to 3-to-1.
In Georgia, where both seats in the Senate are occupied, polls have tightened so much that the Trump campaign and other Republican committees have begun to advertise in a state that has not endorsed a Democrat for president or senate in more than 20 years .
Worse still for the incumbent Republicans – their fate is largely in the hands of the President. The political environment dominated by Trump, sour for his party for its handling of the coronavirus crisis and national protests against racism, has made state-by-state Senate contests a unique and nationalized campaign.
Republicans currently control the Senate from 53 to 47. Democrats need a net profit of four seats for the majority, or three if Biden wins. When the Senate is divided 50-50, the vice president is the tiebreaker.
But Democratic ambitions have grown: Biden said this week that he could see his party win 55 seats. Many Republicans fear that this may happen.
“Panic is taking over Senate races,” said Rob Stutzman, a California Republican political strategist who is a critic of Trump. “Many candidates are in a really difficult situation.”
A sign of how the Senate elections have been nationalized: An analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Sensitive Politics reveals that a record 69% of the money contributed to Senate candidates now comes from outside their states. That’s a 59% increase in 2018, as donors across the country are treating individual races as a referendum on control of the Senate by Trump and the Republican Party.
Nowhere is the national profile of a breed as high as here in Maine. Sara Gideon, the speaker of the state House of Representatives who won the Democratic primary on Tuesday, can earn about $ 4 million raised in a national fundraising campaign to the benefit of any Democrat who won the nomination to challenge Collins.
The headline is a rare Republican with a history of supporting abortion rights, but her vote to uphold Brett M. Kavanaugh before the Supreme Court despite her opposition to abortion rights has attracted donations and attention to her race of coast to coast.
“We are following all the campaigns where there is a chance to give Democrats a seat,” said Sonia Cairns, an 80-year-old Minneapolis retiree who plans to donate to Gideon. “Of course I need to know more about Sara Gideon, but I want a Democrat to win that seat in the Senate.”
The Center for Responsive Policy’s analysis by principal investigator Doug Weber found that both parties saw an increase in out-of-state donations, but was more pronounced for Democrats. Republicans got 64% of their contributions from out of state; for Democrats it was 72%.
A major monetary advantage based on out-of-state support may be an unstable political base, said Sheila Krumholz, the center’s executive director.
“It’s great to raise money, but only voters can cast votes,” he said.
Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the Republican National Senate Committee, expressed the best side of his party’s money deficit: “Democrats will have to spend every penny to defend the records that disqualify them in the eyes of conventional voters,” he said, accusing the party. supporting “a socialist agenda”.
However, some analysts said money problems are not as problematic for the Republican Party as having Trump on top of his ticket.
“This is about Trump,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. “If Trump loses those states, the Republican candidates for the Senate will surely fall.”
Even before Trump, the ticket division had become increasingly rare. Then, in 2016, for the first time, it completely disappeared at the Senate level: not a single state elected a senator from one party while favoring the presidential candidate from the other.
That’s an important force working against Republican Senator Cory Gardner, who is seeking reelection in Colorado, that Biden is the favorite to win. But it also works against Democrats in some states, such as Montana, where Governor Steve Bullock is the Democratic Senate candidate. Trump won the state by 20 percentage points in 2016, and while current polls show the Senate run side by side, Biden is unlikely to seriously discuss the state.
The connection between the presidential and senatorial fortunes could be crucial in North Carolina and Arizona, Trump claims in 2016 that Biden is seriously contesting. Republican Senator Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Martha McSally in Arizona have long been seen among the most vulnerable headlines.
But Trump’s recent political struggles also appear to be affecting formerly safer red state senators.
In Iowa, which Trump easily won in 2016, a Des Moines Register poll in June found Republican Senator Joni Ernst, whose career was not considered competitive just a few months ago, narrowly following his Democratic rival, real estate developer Theresa Greenfield. The poll also found that Biden was essentially linked to Trump.
A senior Republican strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity to evaluate his party’s candidates, said he continued to trust Montana, Georgia and Iowa. He was more concerned with Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina, he said.
If those three states fall, Senate control could be reduced to Maine, he said, and Collins’ ability to resist a possible anti-Trump wave.
Collins is trying to keep his distance from Trump and promote his record as someone who can deliver for Maine.
“There is no one who knows the state of Maine better than me or fights harder,” Collins told reporters in Gorham, outside Portland, the day after primary.
When asked about Trump, she said, “In parts of this state, President Trump is very popular. In some parts of the state, it is very unpopular. I’m running my own race. “
That argument draws Collins supporters like Mary Ann Lynch, a longtime Democrat in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, who said Senate control is less important to her than endorsing a senator who she thinks is one of the few builders. of remaining legislative bridges in Congress.
“Democrats are conveniently forgetting that because they want to take control of the Senate,” said Lynch, 65, a retired attorney who plans to vote for Biden for president.
Gideon, by contrast, used his main night victory speech to accuse Collins of having “empowered and excused” Trump.
She is gaining the support of voters like James Gertmenian, a retired minister on Great Cranberry Island, who is disappointed that he has stayed with Trump on important issues like the 2017 tax law and Kavanaugh’s nomination.
“Collins should bow her head to all the Mainers who trusted her to respect her principles rather than fall into a party line,” Gertmenian wrote on Facebook. “She deserves to be called home permanently.”
Times writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report from Los Angeles.
