In my previous diary, I took a look at the data on Democratic performance in the House in the last three elections and what it tells us about the potential path back to a majority. (In a nutshell: if we take the Obama 2012 coalition as a starting point, the path looks narrow and dependent on a wave as long as we’re stuck with the current map, and waves don’t necessarily lead to sustainable majorities.) This time around, I’ll be taking a look at Democratic prospects for the Senate in the next two cycles.
To analyze the prospects for the next two Senate cycles, I start by looking at Democratic performance in the elections for each of these seats in 2012 as well as Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s numbers in the same states in 2012 and 2016. I also look at which seats might swing into the Democratic column with a 5-point improvement on each of these three “starting points,” i.e., the 2012 Senate numbers, Obama 2012, and Clinton 2016. Finally, I calculate a “best-case combination” in which Democrats win all of the seats that they would carry under any of these scenarios.
In 2018, 23 Democratic Senators and 44 Republican Senators will not be up for re-election. In addition, I’m assuming that the following seats will not be competitve, i.e. the incumbent (or the incumbent’s party in the event of a retirement) will win the seat easily:
Democrats (10): Feinstein (CA), Murphy (CT), Carper (DE), Hirono (HI), Cardin (MD), Warren (MA), Gillibrand (NY), Whitehouse (RI), Sanders (VT), Cantwell (WA)
Republicans (5): Wicker (MS), Fischer (NE), Corker (TN), Hatch (UT), Barrasso (WY)
(Note that I’m counting Angus King and Bernie Sanders as Democrats for the purpose of this analysis).
Needless to say, Democrats are facing a very unfriendly landscape in 2018, in that Republicans will essentially be guaranteed a minimum of 49 seats unless something unexpected happens in Mississippi, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah, or Wyoming. Here’s what the scenarios under consideration tell us about the potential outcomes in the states that may be competitive:
Several key points emerge here:
1) Five Democratic Senators — Joe Donnelly, Claire McCaskill, Jon Tester, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Manchin — will all need to outperform both Obama 2012 and Clinton 2016 by more than a 5-point margin to get re-elected. The good news is that all five of these Senators have done so in the past, but the bad news is that ticket-splitting seems to be on the decline. In fact, in 2016, every single state voted for the same party for both Senate and President.
2) If the Clinton Coalition of 2016 is what turns up at the polls in 2018, and if everyone votes the same way they did in 2016, Democrats will be facing a Rust Belt bloodbath: Donnelly, McCaskill, Manchin, Debbie Stabenow, Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey, and Tammy Baldwin would all lose, as would Bill Nelson, Tester, and Heitkamp. This would hand Republicans a 61-39 filibuster-proof majority. A 5-point shift to the Democrats from the 2016 Clinton Coalition would still only save Nelson, Stabenow, Casey, and Baldwin.
3) Even the best-case scenario in which all the Democratic incumbents hold their seats (not impossible if Trump is a disaster and a Democratic wave emerges) only gives the Democrats a net gain of 2 seats, leaving them stuck in the minority at 50-50 with a Republican Vice President breaking a tie. While we did see some real movement towards Democrats in Texas this year, a Democrat will need to outperform Hillary by about 9 points to unseat Ted Cruz.
So even in the event of a very favorable political landscape, Democrats would need all the stars to align to retake control of the Senate in 2018. But what about 2020? Stay tuned for my next diary.