Revenge of the Generic Democrat

But Republicans are still favored to win the Senate.

Sen. Jon Tester has been trailing in recent polls. (Defense Department)

When Donald Trump arrived in Montana for a rally last week, he was met with considerable online mockery from liberal academics, writers, and lawmakers.

Montana, after all, isn’t generally seen as a national battleground: it has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate exactly once since 1964.

But the visit begins to make a bit more sense when you consider that Montana is currently the most likely state to decide control of the Senate.

Let’s do the math.

Democrats enter this cycle with 28 Senate seats not up for re-election; Republicans, with 38. Then, add in the 15 Democratic and nine Republican seats that are up for re-election but perfectly safe, with no chances of flipping to the other party. (We’re talking about states like deep-blue New Jersey and deep-red Wyoming here.) That brings us to 43 Democratic seats and 47 Republican seats, with 10 up in the air.

Republicans, as you can see, have the upper hand here — and a much cleaner path to a majority. Add in the two remaining Republican-held seats, Florida and Texas (where the incumbents boast five and seven-point polling leads, respectively), and West Virginia (a Democratic-held seat practically certain to flip after Joe Manchin’s retirement), and the party lands at an even 50 — enough for a majority if they win the White House (since the vice president breaks ties) and one seat away if they don’t.

That means the majority is likely lost for Democrats if they don’t win the presidency; even if they do, the party still needs to sweep the seven remaining seats to keep the Senate. If Republicans win just one of the seven, the Senate majority is theirs — with or without the White House.

One of the most interesting subplots of this election, though, is how well the Democratic Senate candidates are polling in most of those contested races.

Because of a mix of incumbency advantage, weak Republican candidates, and other factors, not a single poll has been conducted all cycle where the Democrat is trailing in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin — all traditional swing states or, in the case of Ohio, a Republican-leaning one.

That’s somewhat surprising, considering a fairly unpopular Democratic administration is in power, presiding over a deeply unpopular economy. And yet, as I wrote in November, throughout the Trump era, there has been no electoral juggernaut quite like “Generic Democrat.”

This has long been true in the Senate polls — and was also, theoretically, true in presidential polls, such as the New York Times survey from last year that showed Biden losing to Trump by five points, but “Generic Democrat” beating the ex-president by eight.

Many pundits scoffed at that result — there’s no such thing as a generic Democrat, they said, and besides, the nominee is going to be Joe Biden — but we now know that it was directionally correct, even if it was a bit exaggerated.

In the most recent Times polling, Harris was leading Trump by four points in each of the three most critical battleground states — performing much closer to Generic Democrat’s result than Biden’s.

The poll also showed the Democratic Senate candidates ahead in each state: by one point in Michigan, by eight points in Wisconsin, and by 14 points (!) in Pennsylvania. Unless the polls are very off, Democrats are consistently performing much better than you might expect, both in Senate contests and (with a new candidate) now in the presidential race as well.

But let’s get back to the math.

Even if you add all the swing seats where Democrats have consistently led in polls to the blue column — and even that might be a stretch, since some of them could trend more to the right as Election Day gets closer — Democrats are still only at 49 seats to Republicans’ 50 in our little count.

And the one seat left is — you guessed it — Montana, where Democratic Sen. Jon Tester is trailing Republican Tim Sheehy by an average of four points, according to RealClearPolitics. A poll came out yesterday showing Sheehy with a six-point edge.

Hence why you see Trump making a visit to Montana¹ and why you should pay extra-close attention to polling from the Tester/Sheehy race in the months ahead. Republicans could lose the Senate races in Arizona, Ohio, and other key states — and a win in Montana would still be enough for a foolproof Senate majority, with or without the presidency. Montana, therefore, is poised to be the tipping-point state for Senate control this cycle.

Tester, I’d also note, is running up against some pretty nasty history in his attempt to keep his seat. No matter what happens in the Senate race, Trump is sure to win Montana in the presidential contest (he took the state by 16 points in 2020); because of the steep decline in ticket-splitting, that alone makes Tester an underdog.²

Of the 69 Senate candidates on the ballot in the last two presidential cycles, only one (Susan Collins) has managed to win in a state where their party’s presidential candidate lost.

This graphic from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics gives a good idea of how rare ticket-splitting — once incredibly common — has become in recent cycles:

If the most likely outcome according to the current polls — a Democratic presidency with a 51-49 Republican Senate — comes true, it will mark a break with historic trends in its own right. Kamala Harris would be the first Democratic president to enter the White House without control of the Senate since Grover Cleveland in 1884.³

If you’re wondering how much that matters, consider all the legislation Joe Biden was able to ram through in his first two years with a unified government (Covid stimulus, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Respect for Marriage Act, the infrastructure package, plus major bills on gun control, chip manufacturing, and veterans aid) and compare it to how many of his priorities have passed in the last two years under divided government (pretty much just Israel/Ukraine aid).

And then remember that we’re talking about the Senate, not the House — so suddenly all of Harris’ Cabinet confirmations are thrown into jeopardy. Getting any judges through, much less a Supreme Court justice, would be even harder.

Suddenly, a lot seems to hinge on Montana and its 760,000 voters.

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More news to know

AP on last night’s elections:

Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the progressive House members known as the “Squad” and a sharp critic of how Israel has conducted the war in Gaza, has won her primary race in Minnesota.

Omar successfully defended her Minneapolis-area 5th District seat against a repeat challenge from former Minneapolis City Council member Don Samuels, a more centrist liberal whom she only narrowly defeated in the 2022 primary.

CNN on this morning’s inflation report:

Price hikes slowed more than expected in July, and, for the first time in more than three years, the Consumer Price Index has landed below 3%.

That paves the way for the Federal Reserve to cut rates next month after a yearslong battle with inflation that sent rates spiking to a 23-year high. America’s economy is showing signs of stress, and now that inflation appears under control, the Fed can reduce borrowing costs to try to get job growth booming again.

NYT with new Hunter Biden reporting:

Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.

The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.

Embassy officials appear to have been uneasy with the request from the son of the sitting vice president on behalf of a foreign company.

And a few more headlines:

• CBS: Abortion rights ballot measures to go before Missouri and Arizona voters in November

• NYT: Recent Voter Registration Data Offers Hint of Enthusiasm for Democrats

• NPR: Ukrainian forces attack a second border region in western Russia

• Bloomberg: US Considers a Rare Antitrust Move: Breaking Up Google

• Axios: Harris campaign’s Google ads rewrite news headlines

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The day ahead

• President Biden will speak on the phone with President José Raúl Mulino of Panama and drop into the White House Creator Economy Conference.

• Vice President Harris has nothing on her schedule.

• Gov. Tim Walz will headline fundraisers in Denver and Boston.

• Former President Trump will hold a rally in Asheville, North Carolina.

• Sen. JD Vance will hold a rally in Byron Center, Michigan.

1. There’s also the matter of Trump having a personal vendetta against Tester, dating back to a 2018 Senate investigation.

2. That historical trend is also working against Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, where Trump is also destined to win. Brown has been doing much better in recent polling than Tester, although it’s possible that the presidential and Senate polling in the state will converge as the election gets closer.

3. On the Republican side, it also happened to George H.W. Bush in 1988.