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— In last night’s high-stakes state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, Democratic-aligned Janet Protasiewicz comfortably dispatched former Justice Daniel Kelly, giving liberals a 4-3 majority on the court.
— Compared to some previous Democratic-aligned judges, Protasiewicz had a more “nationalized” voting coalition, although she still carried several Republican-leaning parts of the state.
— A liberal state Supreme Court could revisit redistricting-related matters, to the benefit of Democrats, although there are a lot of moving pieces. With that in mind, we are downgrading our rating for southeastern Wisconsin’s 1st District from Safe Republican to Likely Republican.
| District | Old Rating | New Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Bryan Steil (R, WI-1) | Safe Republican | Likely Republican |
In Wisconsin last night, Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly in what became a nationally-watched (and very expensive) race. Importantly, Protasiewicz will be replacing the retiring Pat Roggensack, a conservative veteran of the court — this will give the court’s liberal bloc a 4-3 majority on the bench. During the campaign, Protasiewicz was clear that, if elected, she would side with Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) over the Republican leadership in the legislature when it came to high-profile issues like abortion or gerrymandering (more on that later).
In our write-up last week, we called Protasiewicz a mild favorite: though the race was hard to nail down exactly, we wrote that we expected anything from a double-digit Protasiewicz win to a slight Kelly win. A commanding Democratic win would have followed the pattern of 2 of the last 3 state Supreme Court races (2018 and 2020) while the 2019 race offered a template for a Republican-aligned upset.
The result last night was nearly a carbon copy of the 2018 and 2020 results: Protasiewicz won by 11 points, or about the same margin as now-Justices Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karoksfy, who she will soon join on the bench.
Though former President Trump’s indictment happened a day after we put out our analysis last week, it was something that would, according to some punditry, rally Republicans. But, as we’ll explore here, last night’s returns offered scant evidence that Kelly disproportionately benefited from any Trump-inspired backlash.
One of our other pre-election predictions held up well: high turnout was a hallmark of last night’s election. In February’s primary election, roughly 960,000 votes were cast. As of this writing, that number roughly doubled in the second round, with close to 1.84 million votes cast. 2023 featured the second highest-turnout April state Supreme Court race of the last decade, falling only behind 2016. About 1.95 million votes were cast in that 2016 race — importantly, it was held in conjunction with the presidential primary that year, where both sides saw competition.
Though turnout was down slightly from 2016’s contest, it rose in 10 counties. Dane County (Madison), which is one of the two Democratic powerhouse counties in the state, was among those 10 — it easily had the largest increase, casting 23,000 more votes than in 2016. The county that saw the largest decrease was actually the state’s other blue bastion, Milwaukee, which tallied 45,000 fewer votes this year. But that Milwaukee decline was not necessarily to Democrats’ detriment. Kelly earned only half as many votes in Milwaukee (124,000 compared to 63,000) as Justice Rebecca Bradley, the conservative that year, while Protasiewicz garnered 17,000 more votes there than JoAnne Kloppenburg, the liberal candidate who lost statewide by 5 points.
As noted earlier, in terms of the percentage margin, 2023 lined up nicely with the toplines from 2018 and 2020: in all 3 instances, the Democratic-aligned judges won by about 11 points.
Conveniently, for the sake of comparison, Kelly was the conservative candidate in both the 2020 and 2023 elections. Last week, we wondered whether the increasingly partisan nature of state Supreme Court elections, coupled with the expected high turnout this year, could lead to a more “presidential” coalition. As Map 1 shows, that was basically the case.
Protasiewicz fared about half a percentage point better than Karofsky overall but lost ground in 59 of the state’s 72 counties. The 3rd District, which takes up a large swath out west, illustrates some of the gains Kelly made in non-metro Wisconsin. According to our rough unofficial calculations, Protasiewicz carried the district by about 10 points — which is quite respectable, considering it gave Trump a 5-point margin and flipped to Republicans last year. But in 2020, Karofsky would have carried the 3rd District by closer to 15 points (the seat was barely altered in redistricting).
Though we flagged the area as a potential Democratic cause for concern — mostly because it torpedoed their chances in 2019 — Protasiewicz performed well in metro Milwaukee. As the third image on Map 1 illustrates, Milwaukee County was the sole county where Protasiewicz improved by more than 10 points on Karofsky’s showing. In fact, Protasiewicz swept all 19 municipalities within the county — this has likely not been done by a Democratic or liberal candidate since 2017, when Evers was reelected in a 40-point landslide to his previous position, state Superintendent of Public Instruction.
In an era when, from election to election, Democrats have seen their most obvious gains come in the suburbs, last night’s result represented something of a change of pace. Compared to Karofsky, Milwaukee proper was one of the municipalities that shifted most to Protasiewicz, as Table 2 shows.
To be clear, Table 2 is not meant to single out Karofsky as a poor performer in Milwaukee (her numbers were quite robust), but it is more to emphasize how strong Protasiewicz’s showing was. In fact, Protasiewicz’s 81.9% within the city of Milwaukee was even stronger than the 80.1% two-party share that Joe Biden received there.
Aside from Menominee County, a small county in the north that consists of an American Indian reservation, the county that shifted most to Democrats since February’s first round was Waukesha, one of the Republican-leaning “WOW” suburban counties that border Milwaukee County. Six weeks ago, Waukesha County gave the Republican-aligned candidates a combined 64%-36% share over the Democrats. Kelly’s advantage there last night slipped to 58%-42%. In February, Kelly’s GOP rival was Judge Jennifer Dorow, who had a base in Waukesha and performed better than him in most Milwaukee metro counties. Given last night’s result, we have to wonder if Dorow would have been a stronger conservative candidate than Kelly. At minimum, Kelly likely suffered some defections from Dorow voters.
A notable result from last night — and one that Democrats will certainly try to replicate in actual partisan races — was that Protasiewicz narrowly carried the City of Waukesha, the largest municipality in the similarly-named county.
The victory by Protasiewicz opens the door to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to potentially intervene against the state’s congressional map, which is a version of a Republican partisan gerrymander. Other state courts have done so in recent years against both Republican and Democratic gerrymanders.
This has national implications given the closely-divided U.S. House. Despite being one of the nation’s most competitive states, Republicans now hold a 6-2 advantage in the state’s U.S. House delegation. After losing the red-trending Obama-to-Trump WI-3 in western Wisconsin last year, Democrats are now confined to just a pair of heavily blue enclaves centered around Madison and Milwaukee.
The current congressional map is actually one drawn by Evers. Following Evers’s decision to veto the Republican legislature’s maps during the post-2020 census round of redistricting, the state Supreme Court and its 4-3 Republican majority asked both sides to submit maps, but they asked for only minimal changes to the existing map. So the map, which is a Republican partisan gerrymander from a decade ago, was just tweaked. The court, in a 4-3 decision reached by the 3 Democratic-aligned justices as well as Republican-aligned Brian Hagedorn, picked Evers’s map. But, again, it’s still functionally a Republican gerrymander, although Wisconsin’s political geography also lends itself to Republican advantages in redistricting. Our understanding is that one might not expect a “fair” map, however defined, to produce 50-50 outcomes in a 50-50 political environment in the state, although we also don’t think a 6-2 Republican advantage in the congressional delegation and huge Republican state legislative majorities really reflect the political makeup of Wisconsin. (We analyzed the current map in depth last year.)
So we’ll see if the court decides to intervene now that Democratic-aligned justices are in charge. Protasiewicz does not take office until August, and litigation that would eventually lead to the state Supreme Court ruling against the congressional map remains only a hypothetical at this point, although a progressive law firm plans to ask the state Supreme Court to hear a redistricting case once Protasiewicz takes office, the New York Times reported.
Still, we are not going to necessarily assume that Wisconsin will have a new U.S. House map next year. There are a number of hurdles to be jumped first. That could include the Moore v. Harper U.S. Supreme Court case, which could end up constraining the ability of state Supreme Courts to intervene in cases regarding congressional gerrymandering. That case concerns the formerly Democratic North Carolina state Supreme Court’s intervention against a Republican congressional gerrymander there. But now that the North Carolina court flipped to Republican control last November, the new state court is rehearing a related case and may reverse the old decision. So it’s possible that the U.S. Supreme Court will just punt on Moore v. Harper following the change on the North Carolina court.
However, consider this possibility: What if the U.S. Supreme Court stands down on Moore v. Harper, and then the Wisconsin Supreme Court intervenes against its state’s congressional map? Couldn’t Moore v. Harper be revived, only this time as a Wisconsin case, as opposed to a North Carolina one? That is one of the moving pieces we’re keeping in mind as we think about the Wisconsin congressional landscape.
One other thing: As part of last night’s election, Republicans narrowly held a state Senate seat in a Trump +5 seat in a special election, which gives Republicans a supermajority in the Senate. That gives Republicans the power to potentially convict officials, such as Supreme Court justices, as part of an impeachment process initiated in the state House. State Sen.-elect Dan Knodl (R), who won the state Senate race last night, suggested the possibility of impeaching Protasiewicz in a pre-election interview. So a high-stakes battle over redistricting could also involve the “I” word. (And that doesn’t even get into abortion, the issue that likely played a huge role in Protasiewicz’s victory.)
We are making one rating change following the liberal takeover of the Wisconsin court. Rep. Bryan Steil (R, WI-1) moves from Safe Republican to Likely Republican. We considered listing Steil — Paul Ryan’s successor in the House — in our initial ratings, as he holds a district that is competitive on paper (Trump only won it by 2 points, and Protasiewicz carried it with about 53% in last night’s contest). The added uncertainty of redistricting gives us more reason to list it, as it’s possible that if the court imposes a new map and if it is in place for the 2024 election, both WI-1 in southeast Wisconsin and WI-3 in western Wisconsin could take on blue chunks of the Milwaukee and Madison areas, respectively. Those changes could seriously imperil newly-elected Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R, WI-3) and Steil in WI-1.
So they’ll both be Likely Republican for now, with the potential for much more dramatic changes down the line depending on how what appears to be a looming redistricting legal battle goes.
— In one of the biggest elections of the calendar year, a Democratic-aligned justice appears favored in next week’s Wisconsin state Supreme Court election. But that was also true in 2019, when a Republican-aligned justice pulled an upset.
— Democrats often underperform in such races in Milwaukee, so that is a key place to watch.
— Judicial voting patterns largely reflect voting in partisan races, but there are some key differences.
Next week, Badger State voters will head to the polls to weigh in on what has been billed as the most important judicial election of the year. If Democratic-aligned Judge Janet Protasiewicz prevails, liberals will assume a 4-3 majority on the state’s highest court. If voters send Daniel Kelly, a former justice who is effectively the GOP nominee in the contest, back to the body, conservatives will retain control.
From what we can tell, Protasiewicz is a favorite, although given the marginal nature of Wisconsin, we wouldn’t rule out a Kelly win. One indicator has been fundraising. Given the stakes, the race has been expensive: the two sides have combined to spend at least $26 million. Protasiewicz has significantly outspent Kelly, although the latter is getting a late boost from third party groups. Though there has been no public polling, Protasiewicz reportedly leads in private surveys. Early voting has been in progress for over a week, but Wisconsin is a largely Election Day-voting state, so we would not read much into early tallies — indeed, one map that considered the early vote, posted yesterday, has a decidedly “choose your own adventure” feel.
With that, we are going to look at a few areas of the state that may be useful to watch next week. We are assuming anything from a double-digit Protasiewicz win to a narrow Kelly win is possible.
But first, a bit of context. For the tables in this article, we’ll consider returns from 4 recent statewide races. In the 2019 state Supreme Court race, liberal judge Lisa Neubauer was seen as a tenuous favorite but lost to now-Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative, by fewer than 6,000 votes. The 2019 result is reason enough to not rule out a conservative win this time. The following year’s election, 2020, went better for Democrats. In the spring, Democratic-aligned Jill Karofsky defeated Kelly, who was appointed to the court in 2016, by a better-than 55%-45% margin. Then, in November, as Joe Biden patched up the Democrats’ Midwestern “Blue Wall,” he narrowly beat Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Though this was not a court contest, we’ll examine some differences between coalitions in partisan and judicial races. Finally, we’ll consider results from late February, which was the “first round” of this contest. As we covered at the time, in a 4-person race, Democratic-aligned candidates combined for 54% of the vote to 46% for the GOP-aligned candidates.
To start, Wisconsin’s two most populous counties are Dane (where Madison is located) and Milwaukee — both are deep blue. As a pair, they typically cast about a quarter of the votes in statewide elections, which gives Democrats a relatively high “floor.” In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden netted just over 180,000 votes out of each county. While both counties have voted heavily Democratic in most recent state Supreme Court races, the turnout dynamics don’t always mirror those of presidential (or partisan) races. Table 1 breaks down the 4 recent races there.
One pattern is that Democratic-aligned state Supreme Court candidates overperformed Biden in Dane while running a few points behind him in Milwaukee. The simple explanation for this seems to be that the Madison electorate is made up of higher-propensity voters. The Democratic base there — including students, University of Wisconsin faculty, other state employees, and white collar professionals — has a front row seat to state government (and all the tumult that has come with it over the past decade or so). In recent presidential elections, Milwaukee County cast upwards of 100,000 more votes than Dane, but in each of the last 3 supreme court races, the pair has been much more evenly balanced (when Karofsky won in 2020, for example, Milwaukee cast 200,000 ballots to Dane’s 196,000). Even while losing statewide, Neubauer came close to surpassing 80% of the vote there, a few ticks better than Biden’s showing 19 months later.
Table 1 separates Milwaukee City, which makes up about 60% of the county’s population, from the rest of the county, which includes a diverse selection of suburbs. Neubauer’s share was 7 points lower than Biden’s in the city itself and 5 points lower in the suburbs — something that proved costly in a close race. Though Karofsky carried the suburbs by a better-than 60%-40% spread, she underperformed Biden in Milwaukee City. As a result, despite doing about 10 points better than Biden statewide, Karofsky did 5 points worse in Milwaukee County.
So the bottom line here is that, if Protasiewicz wins next week, she’ll likely clear 80% in Dane County, but will probably fall short of 70% in Milwaukee County, even if she wins by double-digits. In February, the Democratic performance in Milwaukee tracked closely with Karofsky’s showing — which should put Protasiewicz in a strong position if it holds. If Protasiewicz is stuck in the low-60s in Milwaukee County, though, Kelly may have a path to win.
Though each is exhibiting distinct trends, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties are often grouped into the memorably-named “WOW” counties category — and it is hard to discuss Wisconsin’s electoral landscape without mentioning them. Generally speaking, the WOW counties, which border Milwaukee and take in many of its exurban communities, have been the state’s “GOP heartland” for much of recent history. The area was former Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) electoral bread and butter, and its voters boosted Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) in his come-from-behind reelection win in 2016. In fact, in 2019, Neubauer’s weakness in the Milwaukee area was not limited just to the city and its closer-in suburbs: as Table 2 shows, Hagedorn outpaced subsequent conservative candidates there.
Though Table 1 considers all 3 WOW counties, Waukesha County, which is the most populous, often tracks closely with the group as a whole. Essentially, Ozaukee and Washington counties seem to cancel each other out — the former, which is directly north of Milwaukee City, has seen some blue trends, while Washington, which has a more exurban character, is the reddest of the three.
In February’s result, Republican-aligned candidates combined for 64.5% of the WOW vote, which was an improvement from either of the 2020 contests listed on Table 2. However, both Kelly and his leading GOP-aligned rival, Judge Jennifer Dorow, hailed from Waukesha County, so it seems possible that Kelly has room to fall if Dorow’s voters are not enthusiastic. Put somewhat differently, 15.1% of the total votes in round 1 came from the WOW counties. As Hagedorn won in 2019, that share was a slightly lower 14.9%, suggesting that any Republican enthusiasm from February may be hard to maintain next week, although Dorow was quick to endorse Kelly.
As with the blue counties we discussed earlier, Kelly’s path to victory would be to basically replicate Hagedorn’s showing by carrying the WOW counties by a roughly 70%-30% spread. If Democrats are having a good night, Protasiewicz could keep Ozaukee County within single-digits (actually carrying it may be too heavy a lift) — in that scenario, she would likely be close to 40% among the group as a whole.
As an aside, another important contest will be taking place in the WOW counties on Tuesday, although one on the legislative front. If Republicans win a special election for state Senate District 8, located in the northern Milwaukee metro area, they will claim a supermajority in the chamber. While they could not override Gov. Tony Evers’s (D-WI) vetoes (they are a few seats short of a supermajority in the state Assembly), state Senate Republicans could theoretically impeach officers in other branches of government. In fact, the GOP nominee, state Assemblyman Dan Knodl, recently threatened to vote to impeach Protasiewicz, should he be elected. Donald Trump carried SD-8 by 5 points in 2020, so a Knodl win would not be a surprise.
So, thus far in our survey, we’ve learned that Dane and Milwaukee counties should heavily favor Protasiewicz while Kelly should sweep the 3 suburban WOW counties — in other words, the allegiance of those counties is not in question, it’s just an issue of margin and turnout.
But moving further north, the BOW counties — a moniker that is, by now, well known to followers of state pollster Charles Franklin — are a more marginal group of counties. Sometimes referred to as the major counties of the Fox Valley, the BOW counties consist of Brown (Green Bay), Outagamie (Appleton), and Winnebago (Oshkosh). This manufacturing-heavy stretch usually accounts for 10% of the ballots cast in most statewide elections. Table 3 considers the BOW counties’ voting patterns.
In each race, every BOW county has voted at least a point or so more Republican than the state. They typically vote together, but not always, and they have some interesting idiosyncrasies. Biden, for example, despite winning the state, performed slightly worse than Neubauer did there a year earlier — a fact that speaks to Biden’s relative strength in the Milwaukee area.
If next week’s vote is close (either way), expect Kelly to carry all 3 by relatively modest margins. But if Democrats are replicating their first-round performance, Protasiewicz will likely at least carry Winnebago, the most Democratic of the trio. In 2012, Barack Obama won the state by a comparable 7-point margin — he carried just Winnebago County while keeping the other 2 very close. Finally, if Prostasiewicz is running away with the race, the dam may break, as it did in 2020 when Karofsky swept the BOW counties.
Finally, in something of a catch-all category, don’t be surprised if Protasieiwicz carries at least a few Trump-won rural counties — this will probably be necessary, but not sufficient, for a Democratic win. Specifically, keep an eye on the state’s western border. If she is carrying most of the counties in the southwestern corner, that would be a great start, but if she sweeps most of the western border counties, that would probably signal a win.
We say this because, in 2019, Neubauer won over several Trumpy counties in western Wisconsin — she even carried the Obama-to-Trump 3rd District — but was done in by her underperformance in Milwaukee. Map 1 shows the difference.
So, for Protasiewicz, we’d expect some strength in southwestern Trump counties like Crawford, Grant, and Vernon. In Karofsky’s 10-point 2020 win, she added a few Trump-won counties around the Eau Claire region to her coalition, like Dunn, Jackson, and Pierce — all 3 of those counties favored Democratic-aligned judges. Even further north, Iron County was 1 of 2 Kerry-to-Romney counties in the state, with the other being Pierce. Iron County is smaller and considerably more rural than Pierce, though — Karofsky didn’t carry Iron County, but it narrowly favored Democrats in February. If Protasiewicz holds Iron, it could be another sign that Democrats are beating expectations in rural areas.
Throughout this survey, we’ve emphasized Democratic softness in the Milwaukee metro in past state Supreme Court races, as it has typically manifested to at least some degree. But it’s possible that this year’s contest is so nationalized that a more “presidential” coalition takes form, with Protasiewicz making considerable gains in urban areas while doing worse than expected in the west and north — this would essentially be the opposite of Neubauer’s result.
Finally, to name one last county we’ll be watching, we’ll sneak a more urban county into the non-metro section of the article. We flagged this one in our initial February write up, but Kenosha County, in the southern orbit of Milwaukee, will be interesting. Typically a purple-to-light blue county in state races, it was the scene of nationally-watched riots in the summer of 2020. It has since not voted for any statewide Democrats in partisan races, although Republicans have not carried it in blowouts. Democratic-aligned candidates took a small 50.6% majority there in February, so if Kelly is making up ground, look for Kenosha to turn red again.
Next week’s contest will be the most closely-watched Wisconsin state Supreme Court race since 2011. A dozen years ago, conservatives narrowly came out on the winning side of a contest that was seen as a referendum on then-newly minted Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation. This time, issues like abortion and gerrymandering seem to be animating the electorate, if asymmetrically so, to the benefit of Democrats. Still, again, we cannot rule out a conservative win.
With that, we’ll end on something that we can be fairly certain of: next week’s race will be a high turnout affair, at least for a judicial race. In February, 961,000 ballots were cast, which was a 36% increase from the 2020 spring primary — it dwarfed the 2016 and 2018 primaries by even larger amounts.
— The calendar year before the presidential primary voting begins is often defined by winnowing, as contenders emerge and then fade.
— But Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are taking up so much oxygen that we may already have the top contenders, with everyone else who runs essentially an afterthought.
— DeSantis is polling well for a non-candidate, but we need to see how he actually performs before assuming that his support is solid.
— If another candidate supplants DeSantis (or Trump), or at least vaults into their stratosphere, don’t necessarily assume it will be someone who is currently well-known now or has a lot of formal political experience.
It feels late — and also early — in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
It may be late because despite the fact that we are still nearly a year away from the actual voting, the top 2 contenders seem to be so clear. The winnowing process that so often defines the year in advance of the primary voting may have effectively already happened – it’s just that the winnowed candidates, some of whom aren’t even candidates yet, don’t know that their fate is already sealed.
And yet it may be very early because the person who seems like Donald Trump’s chief rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), is both in an enviable, impressive position but also is unproven as a national candidate, which means he is not guaranteed to have staying power.
Donald Trump already served a single term as president, lost reelection, and is seeking to be renominated, putting him in the position of being a quasi-incumbent. In national polls of the GOP presidential primary that ask about multiple candidates, Trump typically registers in the 40s, sometimes getting into the 50s. That is a strong starting point, but he is not the undisputed leader of the party, like he was in 2020 when he was an incumbent running for reelection. He also may be coasting to some degree on name ID. Still, Republicans have long struggled to actually land punches on him — to the extent they have even tried.
Meanwhile, DeSantis remains an undeclared candidate, but he is acting very much like an actual candidate. He just released a book, and he embarked on a national tour recently, including speaking at one of the great Republican forums in the country, the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. While he generally polls considerably lower than Trump in national polls, DeSantis still registers a level of support ranging from the mid-20s to the low-to-mid 30s. That is impressive for someone who has never before run for president or been part of a presidential ticket, as Nate Cohn recently documented in the New York Times.
In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Trump and DeSantis together get about 75% of the total support. That’s a little bit more than what national polls showed in the early days of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, which turned into a 2-way contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: At this time in 2007, Obama and Clinton generally shared about 60%-65% of the support in national polls. Maybe this race will just end up looking a lot like that 2008 Democratic contest — one in which many candidates competed, but only 2, Clinton and Obama, ever really showed much ability to actually win the nomination.
But this race is not guaranteed to follow the Clinton-Obama model. The composition of the debate stage — or stages, depending on the number of candidates — at the first Republican presidential primary debate in August remains a mystery. Political scientist Seth Masket has identified 14 potential Republican candidates, but only 5 of them have announced bids — and only 2 are people we would consider prominent national politicians. There is Trump, of course, as well as former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Beyond them, there is businessman Perry Johnson, who was last seen failing to secure a place on the Michigan gubernatorial ballot; Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and author; and Corey Stapleton, the former Montana secretary of state who has previously lost several primaries for higher office. Meanwhile, a couple of potential contenders have said they will not run: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and former Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD).
That still leaves several other possible candidates who are technically undecided but have been behaving as though they might become candidates. DeSantis obviously leads that list, but we would also add former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others.
Whether those candidates can get any traction depends very much on the first of 5 questions and observations we have about the GOP field.
As mentioned above, DeSantis is in an unusually strong position for a newcomer to presidential politics. In addition to garnering a quarter or more of GOP support in national polls, DeSantis has arguably been even more competitive with Trump in state-level polls. He even sometimes leads Trump in polls of key states that ask about multiple candidates, as opposed to just a hypothetical head-to-head with Trump (where DeSantis often fares better). DeSantis has led Trump in recent multi-candidate polls of likely or registered voters released since Feb. 1 in California, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, while Trump has led DeSantis in Arizona, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (we used the latest polls list from FiveThirtyEight to track these surveys). So the individual polls vary, but both Trump and DeSantis backers can point to good results for their candidate in individual states.
Say what you want about Trump, and we have said plenty, but he is basically a proven commodity at this point. He has won, he has lost, he has been at the center of politics for almost 8 years now and has been a well-known figure in American life for much longer than that. He is well-defined. He continues to face several ongoing legal questions — Insider laid all of them out here. These cases are obviously worth monitoring but we’re not going to assume in advance that any of them will ensnare him or cause his campaign serious damage. That is not to say that we should assume Trump’s level of support will be static in the primary — he may rise or fall depending on his own performance or the performance of his rivals — but at this point we think it’s less likely that he experiences huge gyrations in his level of support.
DeSantis is different — or at least might be different. We have no idea how he will perform as an actual presidential candidate, and the public’s perception of him is less solid. Maybe he enters the race, is well-received, and emerges more clearly as Trump’s chief rival, perhaps even surpassing the former president. Or maybe he flames out, as other seemingly formidable but ultimately unsuccessful candidates before him, like then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry after he was a relatively late entrant to the 2012 GOP presidential race. Perry skyrocketed to the top of the GOP field but then fell off quickly as he performed poorly as a candidate.
Current polling numbers are not going to help us project how DeSantis will actually perform. We don’t know what to expect — all we know is that we don’t know.
How well DeSantis campaigns is really the key to the question posed at the start of the article, whether it is late or early in the primary process. If DeSantis is as strong as he now appears, there just is not much oxygen for anyone else besides Trump.
The astute political journalist Ron Brownstein long ago coined the term “wine track” versus “beer track” to analyze presidential primary coalitions. He recently discussed the history of the dynamic and how it has often applied to Democratic primaries, but now is very salient on the GOP side (we recommend his CNN piece for a fuller exploration of this dynamic).
Basically, on the GOP side, the “wine track” means having a 4-year college degree, while “beer track” means not having a 4-year degree. Trump won in 2016 by not only doing better among beer track voters than wine track voters, Brownstein writes, but also because wine track voters were more divided in 2016 among different candidates than beer track voters were.
This blue collar/white collar divide is evident in polling. For instance, a recent national survey from the GOP firm Echelon Insights showed Trump leading DeSantis 46%-31%, with Pence at 9% and Haley at 6%. Trump dominated among those who do not have a bachelor’s degree, 54%-27%, but DeSantis led Trump, narrowly, 36%-33% among those who had a bachelor’s degree or more. The Pence/Haley combo also got more support among college graduates — 22% combined compared to 11% among the non-college group. This poll — and others show similar findings — illustrates the basic dynamic: Trump is stronger with the non-college group than the college group, and the college group is more divided than the non-college group.
We can see this at the state level, too. The GOP firm Differentiators polled likely Virginia GOP primary voters in late February, finding DeSantis up 37%-34% in a multi-candidate field. But the regional splits were telling: DeSantis led Trump by 14 points in the highly-educated Washington, DC suburbs/Northern Virginia region, while Trump led DeSantis by 17 points in rural, western Virginia, where 4-year college attainment is not nearly as high. This reflects the pattern we saw in Virginia in the 2016 primary: Trump beat the second-place finisher, Rubio, by about 3 points statewide. Rubio won the core DC suburban counties, as well as Richmond and its most vote-rich suburban counties. Trump won almost everywhere else, including landslide margins in many western Virginia locales.
So one can see the outlines of a dynamic similar to 2016, and how in order to defeat Trump, a single candidate likely needs to consolidate the “wine track” (college-educated) vote at least as well as Trump consolidates the “beer track” (non-college) vote. That candidate very well may be DeSantis but, again, we’ll just have to wait and see.
While individual states varied, exit polls in many GOP contests in 2016 pointed to an overall electorate that was basically split 50-50 between those who held 4-year college degrees and those who did not. Non-college voters more clearly outnumber college-educated voters in the broader electorate, but remember that primaries (even very competitive ones) are going to have lower turnout than presidential general elections, and that people with degrees are likelier to vote than those who do not have degrees. That said, it’s also possible that exit polls, which have a reputation for overstating the education level of the electorate, may have suggested that the 2016 electorate had a bit higher of an education level than it did in reality.
Trying to determine the education level of the likely GOP electorate is going to be a challenging but important task for pollsters in the leadup to the primary season, because there is likely to be a difference in the preferences of college graduates versus non-graduates, with Trump drawing more support from voters who do not have a 4-year degree and his main rival, or rivals, doing better with those who do have a 4-year degree.
Though the 1988 presidential election is most remembered for its largely negative general election campaign between then-Vice President George H. W. Bush (R) and Gov. Michael Dukakis (D-MA), it was also the first of 3 attempts that Joe Biden made at the White House. While Biden ended up dropping out before the first primary votes were cast, there were a handful of other Democrats in the running — the press sometimes referred to the group of hopefuls as the “Seven Dwarfs.”
Some primaries that have taken place more recently — namely the 2016 GOP and 2020 Democratic contests — have felt more like watching 101 Dalmatians, to use another Disney reference. In the latter primary, roughly 2 dozen candidates ended up participating in at least one debate.
The ballooning number of candidates in recent cycles has been driven, at least to some degree, by the entrance of lesser-known, electorally inexperienced candidates. Could one or more of them break through, at least for a time, in 2023 or 2024?
Trump is the ultimate example of what has become a familiar dynamic on the Republican side: Someone with no previous elected experience achieving prominence within the party. But there were other examples in recent GOP presidential primaries. In late October/early November in 2011, the late businessman Herman Cain took a lead in national GOP primary polling. Four years later at almost the exact same time in the GOP primary, Trump very briefly relinquished the national polling lead to Ben Carson, a prominent former neurosurgeon. Neither first-time candidate lasted at the top for very long, and both ended up as afterthoughts when the voting actually began, but we do wonder if we may see similarly shocking rises this time.
It may be that the dominance of Trump and DeSantis prevents anyone else from breaking through. But if someone does, it may not necessarily be the most obvious, or most experienced, alternatives who do.
One thing to watch out for, especially as candidates enter the race, will be the strength of candidates in their own home states. Throughout the past several primary cycles, some candidates have been able to perform well in their home state, or region, despite having limited support elsewhere. For someone trying to actually win a nomination, doing well in one’s home state seems like a prerequisite.
One of the more recent examples, on the Republican side, came in 2016: Kasich carried his home state by 11 points over the then-ascendent Trump. Though it earned the governor a less-than flattering nickname — after that mid-March contest, Trump derided him as “1 for 38 Kasich” — it did give the Kasich campaign some credibility, in that he became 1 of only 3 candidates in a wide field to actually beat Trump in a nominating contest. The Ohio primary that year also previewed some of the dynamics that took hold in the general election: Kasich took majorities in several metro counties, but Trump won almost every county in the state’s post-industrial Appalachian east. Still, on that same primary day, Trump easily won Florida over home-state Sen. Rubio, which pushed Rubio out of the race.
In past cycles, the “favorite son” effect has made some contests that occur earlier on the calendar less predictive. In 1992, the Iowa caucus, which kickstarted the campaigns of future presidents Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008, got little attention. That year, its home state senator, prairie populist Tom Harkin, was running. As other Democrats eschewed Iowa, and Harkin won with close to 80% of the vote. But in the next contest, the New Hampshire primary, Harkin’s fourth place showing cast doubt on his national viability. Bill Clinton, a southerner who finished second to former Sen. Paul Tsongas of neighboring Massachusetts, meanwhile spun his relatively strong showing by famously declaring himself the “comeback kid.”
South Carolina — which has, all things considered, been one of the more predictive early states — has also occasionally been impacted by home region candidates. In the 2004 Democratic contest, Sen. John Edwards, from next door North Carolina, won the contest handily but struggled in subsequent primaries, although he remained competitive in some other southern contests — most notably, he won his home state’s caucus despite having dropped out. Edwards, of course, eventually found his way onto the national ticket that year. In early 2012, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) seemed to have some momentum but similarly stalled out — he carried South Carolina and then his neighboring home state, Georgia, on Super Tuesday. Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) then emerged as the most viable conservative alternative to eventual nominee Mitt Romney (R-MA). Had Gingrich not been in the running, would things have been different if his voters consolidated behind Santorum?
The 2024 GOP field might include at least 2 South Carolinians, each of whom could conceivably have some similar home-state appeal: former Gov. Haley entered the race last month, while Sen. Scott has been sounding like a candidate in recent months. Still, with presidential politics becoming more nationalized, the home state bonus candidates receive has been lessening. In the 3 most recent South Carolina polls (all from conservative sources), Trump and DeSantis were first and second in the state, with Haley and Scott behind them.
In our home state, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) has been widely rumored to be an eventual national candidate. While he gets a near-unanimous (87%) positive favorability from Republicans in the commonwealth, the aforementioned Virginia poll from the Differentiators found him taking just 6% against a field of potential candidates (another February poll from Roanoke College found Youngkin also at 6% in Virginia). Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH), a Trump critic and potential candidate, polled at just 7% in a recent Emerson College survey of his home state. To the extent that any of these announced or potential candidates break through, one would think they would first have to show significant strength at home.
Trump is effectively in an unprecedented position in the modern history of presidential nominations, a time period that covers basically the last half-century, when presidential nominations became much more about winning primaries and caucuses as opposed to using backdoor wheeling and dealing to win the nomination at the convention. In that timeframe, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Trump lost reelection bids. None of the prior trio later sought a return to the presidency, although Ronald Reagan and Ford did discuss the latter joining his ticket as the vice presidential nominee in 1980. So what Trump is attempting is unfamiliar, as is so much else about his political persona.
In a webcast held shortly after the 2020 election, longtime Almanac of American Politics co-author Michael Barone looked to history when evaluating the GOP’s future. One of Barone’s conclusions was that past Republican presidents were typically popular with their party while in office, but had difficulty winning over their fellow partisans when trying to stage a comeback.
The best example of that phenomenon was from over a century ago (which, again, speaks to how rarely former presidents seek a return to the White House). After leaving office, Teddy Roosevelt remained a popular figure, and actually finished first in most states that held Republican primaries in 1912 — but he could not convince Republican convention delegates to dump his successor, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt famously ran as an independent “Bull Moose” candidate in the general election, which handed the presidency to Democrats. Pundits have discussed the prospect of a third-third party run by a snubbed Trump since at least 2016, but looking to 2024, Trump may face some logistical hurdles if he opts to go that route.
While history has not been a perfect guide in today’s politics — a recent example being Democrats overperformance in last year’s midterms — Trump’s standing with Republicans is not as strong as it once was — a sign that the party may be ready to move on.
Trump is probably the favorite to start, if only because — as mentioned above — we need to see how DeSantis performs. If the Florida governor does enter, and does maintain or grow his level of support after becoming a candidate, then the battle for the nomination becomes more of a coin flip.
| Dear Readers: This is the latest edition of Notes on the State of Politics, which features short updates on elections and politics.
— The Editors |
The 2020 election came fairly close to ending in an Electoral College tie. While Joe Biden won the national popular vote by about 4.5 points, his margins in several key states were much narrower. Specifically, Biden’s 3 closest wins were by 11,779 votes (or .24 percentage points) in Georgia, 10,457 in Arizona (.31 points), and 20,682 (.63 points) in Wisconsin. Had these states voted for Donald Trump and everything else had been the same, the Electoral College would have produced a 269-269 tie, leaving both candidates short of the magic number of 270 electoral votes.
If this ever happens, the U.S. House of Representatives would have to decide the election — we’ll have more about how this would work in tomorrow’s Crystal Ball. But before we do that, we wanted to look at whether there are plausible paths to 269-269 in 2024.
Changes to the electoral vote allocations as a result of the 2020 census have altered the overall math slightly. Using the new allocation based on the 2020 results, the election would have been slightly closer: 303-235 Biden, instead of the 306-232 edge he enjoyed in reality. The 2020 map with the new Electoral College totals is shown in Map 1.
This also would have changed what would have happened had Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin voted for Trump. Under the new allocation, that map would produce a 272-266 Republican victory as opposed to a 269-269 tie.
So the new apportionment of electoral votes alters the potential Electoral College tie scenarios and, as we assess the map, makes such a scenario less likely, because the specific pathway apparent back in 2020 is now closed. But a tie is still possible, even if one restricts hypothetical Electoral College scenarios to only include changes to the states that were the closest in the 2020 election. In other words, one doesn’t have to go to absurd lengths — such as a blue Wyoming or a red Massachusetts — to come up with a tie.
Using 270toWin — our go-to site for Electoral College strategizing — we played around with realistic scenarios for an Electoral College tie. We locked most of the 2020 Electoral College results into place, not altering any states beyond the 7 from 2020 that were decided by less than 3 points (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). As part of this scenario, we also locked in the 2020 electoral vote allocations from Maine and Nebraska, the only 2 states that award electoral votes by congressional district. Both states split in 2020, and under the new district lines, Donald Trump would have carried Maine’s 2nd District by about 6 points, with Joe Biden carrying Nebraska’s 2nd District by about the same margin.
So that set a baseline electoral vote floor for each side at 226-219 Democratic, with 93 electoral votes from the 7 most competitive states outstanding. Using these Electoral College puzzle pieces, we came up with 3 scenarios, although scenarios 2 and 3 are very similar.
Map 2 shows the first tie scenario. This one would effectively be a realigning map, where Democrats lose the old “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — states that Donald Trump won in 2016 but not 2020 — as well as Nevada, a state that Trump never carried but where Democrats only won by a little under 2.5 points in both 2016 and 2020. Meanwhile, Democrats would hang onto Arizona and Georgia and also flip North Carolina, which was Trump’s closest win in 2020. We don’t find this scenario that plausible because we don’t envision a world in which Democrats are winning Arizona but not its usually bluer northwestern neighbor, Nevada. Nor do we see North Carolina — clearly, to us, the reddest of these 7 states and the only one that backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 — going blue while 4 of the others go red. The Tar Heel State also is the only one of these 7 states where Democrats had no statewide success in 2022, losing both an open-seat Senate contest and a pair of high-profile state Supreme Court races, making it even harder to imagine it voting Democratic while any of the others are going Republican.
Map 3 shows another scenario — and this one seems a bit more plausible. Democrats again hang onto Arizona and Georgia. They also keep Nevada and lose North Carolina. All of those states would be replicating how they voted in 2020. Meanwhile, Republicans claw back Michigan and Pennsylvania, but Democrats hold Wisconsin. While this doesn’t require North Carolina to vote blue, it does require Michigan and Pennsylvania to both vote more Republican than Wisconsin, which neither did in 2016 or 2020 (although Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had almost identical margins in 2016). Wisconsin still seems the shakiest for Democrats of these 3 states — Republicans did, after all, defend Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) there last cycle and kept the gubernatorial race much more competitive than in Michigan or Pennsylvania, and Biden’s margin was under a point there in 2020. But these states still vote similarly enough that scenario 2 is not out of the question.
Finally, Map 4 is identical to Map 3, except North Carolina votes blue while Georgia votes red. This one seems less likely than the second scenario, as Georgia has pretty clearly trended blue in recent years while North Carolina has not.
Overall, an Electoral College tie remains unlikely — landing on a specific 269-269 outcome is something we would not rule out, but we wouldn’t bet on it, either, without getting great odds.
Again, we’ll have more to say about how an Electoral College tie would be decided in tomorrow’s Crystal Ball. But we first just wanted to say that, yes, it’s possible, even under the new Electoral College allocation and even if you just focus on the states that were most competitive in 2020.
In January, the first Democratic Senate retirement of the cycle came in a light blue state. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who has held elected office in the state since the 1970s, announced that she would not seek a 5th term. Though Stabenow’s retirement announcement was, in some reporting, considered to be an ominous sign for her party’s prospects, it came at a time of triumph for Michigan Democrats: They had a nearly perfect 2022 cycle. Democrats won most of the marginal House districts, flipped the legislature, and won each of the state’s 3 statewide races with comfortable majorities — their biggest disappointment was the Macomb County-centric 10th District narrowly slipping away.
Surely, with the Michigan Democrats’ large bench, there would be a flurry of candidates ready to get into the open-seat Senate race, right?
Instead, the past several weeks were relatively quiet on that front. If anything, the Democratic “shadow primary” seemed defined by the process of elimination. Almost immediately, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was just reelected to a second term, ruled out a run. Other prominent Democrats followed, with the more notable exceptions of 7th District Rep. Elissa Slotkin and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Though Benson and a few other notable Democrats are still considering the race, Slotkin announced her campaign on Monday.
The Republican field, meanwhile, remains in flux, although Rep. John James (R, MI-10) — the party’s nominee in the 2018 and 2020 Senate races — recently filed for reelection to the House. While that deprives Senate Republicans of a potential recruit, it does give House Republicans an incumbent to seek reelection in a swingy seat next year.
Slotkin, who was first elected amid the 2018 blue wave that crashed in the House, ran after serving in the Obama administration and has a background in the U.S. Intelligence Community. In the House, she has been part of a bloc of center-left Democrats that have taken an interest in national security issues — other examples from the 2018 class include Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D, VA-7) and Mikie Sherrill (D, NJ-11), both of whom could also be future statewide candidates.
Slotkin’s district, which is essentially the successor to a seat that Stabenow held in the late 1990s, is centered on Lansing but extends into the Detroit metro area. Numbered MI-8 last decade, Slotkin flipped the seat by 4 points in 2018 after it gave Donald Trump a 7-point margin 2 years earlier. As Trump carried the district again in 2020, Slotkin replicated her 2018 margin, making her one of only 7 “crossover seat” Democrats that year.
For 2022, redistricting turned Slotkin’s seat into a Biden-won seat, although his margin there was narrow (he would have carried it by less than a percentage point) and it would have narrowly voted against Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) in 2020. Though the district was a bit friendlier to Democrats, Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett represented much of the area that was new to Slotkin, making him almost a co-incumbent in the race. Overall, the MI-7 contest turned into 2022’s most expensive House race. But as Map 5 shows, the result was a clear win for the (actual) incumbent: Slotkin won a third term by just over 5 points.
Note: Map 5 uses unofficial data, but the official result was almost identical
Source: Jackson Franks
Barrett is running again, and his candidacy could deter other GOP entrants (he was unopposed for the nomination in 2022). Democrats have several prospects for the seat, but it seems possible that whomever they nominate will have a home base in Lansing’s Ingham County — the blue bastion of the district, it gave Slotkin over two-thirds of the vote each time she was on the general election ballot. Aside from running up the score in Ingham County, one of the keys to Slotkin’s electoral success has been keeping Livingston, the district’s second-largest county and the one directly east of Ingham, relatively close. Livingston County essentially consists of the exurban communities between Detroit and Lansing, and Slotkin has held the GOP margin there to under 20 points. The Crystal Ball is starting the open MI-7 race as a Toss-up.
The last time Michigan saw an open-seat Senate contest, in 2014, now-Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) had no opposition to succeed the late Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). A competitive primary may force Democratic contenders to better establish themselves with Black voters, although any statewide Democratic campaign in Michigan worth its salt should emphasize outreach to minorities. At the time of his election to the Senate, Peters was in the odd position of being a white member who represented a Black-majority House district — the credibility that he established with the Black community likely helped him in 2014 and 2020. Slotkin’s district is only about 7% Black by composition, a number half the statewide 14%, so look for her campaign to aggressively court that key demographic.
Speaking of majority-minority districts, let’s take a quick detour to our home state. Last week, we wrote about the special election in the 4th District, a heavily Black seat that elected Rep.-elect Jennifer McClellan (D), who will be leaving the state Senate to enter the U.S. House. McClellan’s victory was not a surprise but her margin was — her roughly 3-to-1 edge was notably better than what most Democrats get in the district.
Turnout dynamics often are different in special elections than typical general elections, which sometimes accounts for odd partisan results. In one fairly recent example, Louisiana had a special election for state treasurer in 2017. The treasurer runoff election was held concurrently with a mayoral runoff in heavily Democratic New Orleans. With the mayoral election on the ballot, Orleans Parish cast close to a quarter of the votes in the statewide treasurer’s race (the parish usually casts more like 10% of the state’s votes). With New Orleans exerting a disproportionate influence, the Democratic nominee for treasurer, Derrick Edwards, took close to 45% against now-Treasurer John Schroder (R). Considering the lean of the state and his lack of funding, Edwards’s showing was respectable. But when the office was up again, in the regularly-scheduled 2019 election, things looked more typical — Schroder was reelected by 25 points.
Along those lines, we wondered if McClellan’s margin was padded by a disproportionately strong showing in her home area, Richmond. As it turns out, that wasn’t really the case. Richmond City and neighboring Henrico County are 2 of the largest, and bluest, localities in the district. Last week, the pair cast exactly half the total vote in the election — that was up only slightly from the 49% they accounted for in 2022. So McClellan’s showing was more of a broad-based overperformance than anything else.
As a bit of a thought experiment, we took the 2022 result from the 4th District and applied a uniform swing. In other words, last year, the late Donald McEachin (D) was reelected by 30.1 points; last week, McClellan did 18.9 points better, winning by 49%. How would an across the board 18.9% swing towards Democrats compare the actual result? Table 1 considers this.
As it turned out, McClellan ran slightly behind “expectations” in both Richmond and Henrico, although she obviously carried them overwhelmingly. Her biggest overperformance was actually from another locality that she currently represents in the state Senate: Charles City. One of the smaller counties in the district (it only has 3 voting precincts), it was the commonwealth’s most Democratic county in 1990s-era presidential elections, but its blue lean has eroded in recent years. McClellan’s 44-point margin there was 33 points better than what McEachin earned, and 14 points more than what a uniform swing would suggest.
McClellan ran ahead of expectations in several rural Southside counties, one of which was Surry. Just south of Charles City County, Surry County has been undergoing similar larger-scale trends. In 2021, now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin became the first modern GOP nominee for governor to carry this historically deep blue locality (although he did so by just 12 votes).
When McClellan is next on the ballot, in 2024, it seems likely that she’ll have a more “typical” Democratic coalition. Next year, a much larger presidential electorate may be in a more straight-ticket mood. The 110,000 votes that were cast in last week’s election represent just a quarter of the nearly 400,000 ballots the district would have cast in the 2020 election. Still, we’ll be watching to see how McClellan’s initial rural appeal translates with an election held under more “normal” circumstances.
| Dear Readers: Tonight’s event with Bill Kristol and David Ramadan has been postponed, although we are hoping to reschedule it for some time in the spring.
— The Editors |
— In Virginia, Democrats have held the Richmond-area 4th District with state Sen. Jennifer McClellan. Her nearly 50-point win represented a notable overperformance.
— The most important judicial race of this year will be in the closely-divided state of Wisconsin, where control of the state Supreme Court is on the line.
— In last night’s judicial primary, Democratic-aligned candidates took 54% of the two-way vote in Wisconsin. This could bode well for liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz, who will face conservative Daniel Kelly in April, although there have been surprises in past state Supreme Court elections.
Last night, in what was probably the most widely followed election night so far this year, Democrats overperformed in several special elections across the country. With the 2022 general election out of the way, last night almost seemed like a return to form: After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in summer 2022, Democrats routinely overperformed President Joe Biden’s margins in a string of congressional elections leading up to November.
Kicking off last night’s electoral festivities — yesterday was Mardi Gras, after all — was a special election in our backyard. Following the untimely passing of then-Rep. Donald McEachin (D, VA-4) last year, his district, the heavily-Black VA-4, was left open. Shortly before Christmas, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan won the Democratic nomination in a “firehouse primary” with a smashing 85% of the vote.
In the special general election for VA-4, McClellan again ran extremely well. Though there was no question that Democrats would retain the seat, her overperformance was notable. In a district that reelected McEachin by a 65%-35% margin last year, she prevailed by a nearly 75%-25% vote. Though McClellan is from Richmond, she carried some GOP-trending Southside localities by comfortable margins. In the process, McClellan will also make some history, as the first Black woman to represent the commonwealth in Congress.
Does McClellan’s landslide win mean that Democrats are on track to make gains in Virginia’s legislative elections later this year? Not necessarily. But McClellan, despite standing for election in a safe seat, obviously ran an active campaign. This could be a model that both parties may want to follow: candidates in noncompetitive races should not simply rest on their laurels.
In any case, with VA-4 slated to be filled soon, Congress will be back up to its full 435 members for a time. We say “for a time” because yesterday, Rep. David Cicilline (D, RI-1) announced that he will be resigning from Congress on June 1. Cicilline’s departure will open up another deep blue seat — last year, Republicans made a serious attempt at the more marginal RI-2 but fell about 4 points short. Any number of Democrats could run for the open seat, and we would start it as Safe Democratic.
Now, back to last night’s elections. The most closely-watched election was actually not for anything federal. Wisconsin, one of the nation’s most quintessentially purple states, has spring elections for its state Supreme Court. The court’s 7 justices each run for staggered, 10-year terms. Though judicial elections are nominally nonpartisan in Wisconsin, the parties (and other political groups) get involved on behalf of candidates.
Importantly, the stakes this year are especially high in Wisconsin: currently, 4 justices are Republican-aligned while 3 were elected with Democratic support. The seat up this year is held by the retiring Justice Pat Roggensack, a conservative who was first elected in 2003. If Democrats can flip the seat, they will take control of the court. A friendly court would be a major boost to Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI), who was reelected last year after battling with an overwhelmingly Republican legislature for much of his first term.
Under Wisconsin’s rules, if only 2 candidates file to run for a seat, a single election is held in April — this was the case in 2015 and 2019. But if 3 or more candidates run for the seat, an initial February election is held, and the top 2 candidates meet in April. Last night’s field featured 4 candidates: 2 liberals and 2 conservatives.
Democrats largely coalesced behind Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz. Throughout the campaign, she emphasized her stances against gerrymandering and for abortion rights — two issues that the court may weigh in on in the near future. Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell tried to position himself to Protasiewicz’s left but did not get much traction.
With Protasiewicz essentially a lock for first place, a pair of GOP-aligned judges battled for second place. Judge Jennifer Dorow presided over the trial that ensued after the 2021 Christmas parade attack in Waukesha County. The trial gave her some national exposure, and Roggensack endorsed her. Daniel Kelly was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2016 by then-Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) but lost decisively when the seat came up in 2020. Shortly after leaving the bench, Kelly was involved in the state GOP’s “fake elector” scheme after the 2020 presidential election. Democrats have taken this as evidence of his willingness to subvert the democratic process in the pursuit of his partisan goals. Democrats also preferred him as an opponent instead of Dorow (a liberal group attacked her on television in advance of the first round of voting in what was effectively a bid to boost Kelly).
Map 1 shows the result of last night’s primary.
Protasiewicz finished a clear first, taking just over 46% of the vote. Aside from dominating in the 2 usual Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison — she took 55% in the former and close to 70% in the latter — she also fared well in rural western Wisconsin, an area that has been drifting away from Democrats in partisan races. In fact, she took majorities in some counties that voted against Evers last year (although, again, these judicial races are somewhat different from partisan contests).
Dorow’s base of strength was in the Milwaukee suburbs, an area that has been the backbone of the state GOP coalition in recent years. But Kelly took second place overall due to his strength in the rural areas. In what may be a sign of the times, this dynamic is becoming a pattern in state Republican primaries. Republicans like Scott Walker in 2010, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016 all prevailed in contested primaries because of their margins in the Milwaukee area. But as with last year’s GOP primary for governor, the victor was the Republican who had the more rural coalition. A slight caveat is that the blanket primary format Wisconsin uses for judicial races is different from that of a partisan primary, but it will be interesting to see if this pattern holds going forward.
As the second image on Map 1 shows, Democratic-aligned candidates combined to outpoll their GOP counterparts by a roughly 54%-46% margin. One county to note may be Kenosha, the state’s southeasternmost county. In 2020, it was the scene of some high-profile protests over policing. It was a swing county until then but has since not voted for any statewide Democrats in partisan races, even some of the successful ones (although its margins have been close). So since 2020, it seemed that the Democratic brand there had taken a hit. But Democratic-aligned candidates took a slight majority there last night.
So, what do last night’s results portend for the second round? While they certainly seem promising for Democrats, we do not have a large sample of recent court races to look back on.
The 3 most recent GOP victories came in 2016, 2017, and 2019. In 2016, the second round was held in conjunction with the presidential primary. As Republicans outvoted Democrats by just over 4 points, now-Justice Rebecca Bradley won by that exact margin — she also finished slightly ahead of her main Democratic opponent in the initial round. In early 2017, Democrats, who were apparently still in shock from Donald Trump’s upset in the state, didn’t even field a challenger to now-Chief Justice Annette Ziegler. In 2019, conservatives scored something of an upset when Brian Hagedorn beat liberal Lisa Neubauer by less than 6,000 votes. But for our purposes, 2019 may not be very informative, as there was no initial February round (with only two candidates, the sole bout was in April).
On the other side of the court, none of the 3 most recent Democratic wins were close. In 2015, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, now the body’s most senior member, was easily reelected by 16 points. Democrats are probably hoping that the open-seat 2018 race will be most comparable to this year’s result. The February round, where Democratic-aligned candidates took 54% of the combined vote, lined up nicely with now-Justice Rebecca Dallet’s 11.5-point win in April. In 2020, Kelly, running for the seat in his own right, took a majority in the February vote — but unfortunately for him, Wisconsin does not use Louisiana-style rules and that early result was less predictive. In what was one of the first pandemic-era elections, Democratic-aligned Jill Karofsky prevailed by a margin similar to what Dallet got. That the Democratic presidential primary was still nominally active at the time of the election (even as Joe Biden was clearly on his way to the nomination) also likely helped Democratic turnout.
Finally, with control of the court on the line, it seems likely that turnout will be high in April. Last night, close to a million votes were cast in the primary — this is significantly higher than the 2020 primary, and is almost double what 2016 and 2018 saw.
Note: There were no state Supreme Court races in 2021 or 2022.
Source: Historical data from OurCampaigns, 2023 unofficial data from DecisionDeskHQ.
Wisconsin, which was the tipping-point state in the last 2 presidential elections, will almost certainly be one of 2024’s top electoral prizes. But even in a sleeper year for electoral politics, Wisconsin will remain center stage, at least until April.
| Dear Readers: Join us next Wednesday, Feb. 22 for “A Conversation with Former/Future Republicans Bill Kristol and David Ramadan.” Kristol, a longtime political commentator, and Ramadan, a Center for Politics scholar and former member of the Virginia House of Delegates, will discuss the past and future of the Republican Party and their concerns about the state of our democracy.
Their conversation will be held from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. eastern at the Colonnade Club Solarium on the Grounds of the University of Virginia. It is free and open to the public with advanced registration through Eventbrite, and it will also be streamed at https://livestream.com/tavco/defendingdemocracytogether. — The Editors |
— It has been over a decade since an incumbent senator was successfully primaried in a regularly-scheduled election; though a few senators may be vulnerable, 2024 may continue that streak.
— Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) decision to retire removed one vulnerable senator from the primary conversation; Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-AZ) decision to leave the Democratic Party removed another. Among the other incumbents who are still deciding whether to run for reelection, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) stands out as someone who could hypothetically be vulnerable in a primary.
— The open-seat Senate contests are all in various stages of flux. Indiana, the sole GOP-held open seat so far, seems to be the most straightforward, as Rep. Jim Banks (R, IN-3) is a heavy favorite to replace Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN).
One of the peculiarities of the 2022 election cycle was that, despite a good deal of political turbulence the past few years, incumbents thrived. Only a single incumbent governor lost (Democrat Steve Sisolak of Nevada), and not a single incumbent senator lost, either in the primary or general elections.
In fact, no sitting senator has lost a primary in any of the last 5 regular elections — they were undefeated for renomination in 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. That ties the 1982-1990 stretch for the longest string of regular elections since World War II where no senator lost a primary, per the Brookings Institution’s Vital Statistics on Congress.
The only incumbent blemish in recent years came in an irregularly-scheduled special election, when appointee Luther Strange (R) lost to Roy Moore (R) in the 2017 Alabama special election primary.
Besides that, the last incumbent senator to lose a primary was way back in the 2012 cycle, when long-serving Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) lost to then-state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R). (Notice that both of the most recent Senate primary defeats saw GOP primary voters swap out a probable general election winner for a loser.)
As we look ahead to the 2024 Senate primary season and ponder whether any incumbent is in jeopardy, it’s worth remembering this history: Incumbent senators are hard to unseat in a primary setting.
Part of what might keep the incumbents’ streak going this cycle is the early decisions by a couple of senators not to pursue renomination next year.
On Tuesday, long-serving Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) announced her retirement: There have been questions for years about the elderly Feinstein’s capacity to serve, and it appears she is finally bowing to reality. A couple of California House members helped nudge her towards the door by announcing their bids before she announced her plans (more on that below).
Late last year, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona left the Democratic Party, opting to become an independent despite continuing to caucus with Democrats. She too would have had trouble in a primary given some high-profile breaks with President Biden and other Democrats over the past few years.
So with those moves, the two senators who might have had the hardest time getting renominated are not running for renomination (or, at least in the case of Feinstein, not running at all — Sinema’s future plans remain a mystery).
So what other primaries merit watching? Let’s go through some others we are monitoring:
— Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has not announced his 2024 plans. During his term, Romney has emerged as a key member of the Senate’s centrist bloc. Romney may have frustrated state partisans last year, as he was not seen as a “team player” — he was the only sitting Republican senator who did not endorse his home-state Sen. Mike Lee (R) for reelection. Lee, who was elected in 2010, actually is the most recent senator who made it to the chamber via a successful primary challenge (remember, Mourdock in 2012 and Moore in 2017 lost). And Lee’s case was special: he defeated the late Sen. Bob Bennett at a convention. Under the rules at the time, Bennett placed third at the May party convention, so he could not advance to the June primary. But under Utah’s current system, Republicans who don’t earn the party’s endorsement at the convention can petition to appear on the primary ballot. In fact, in 2018, Romney placed second at the party convention but went on to easily win with a broader primary electorate.
With Feinstein and Sinema out of the picture, Romney is hypothetically the most vulnerable incumbent in the 2024 primary season (assuming he runs). Bryan Metzger of Insider had a good rundown recently of Romney’s challenges; he quoted an unnamed Utah Republican consultant who said that polling suggested Romney was in the low 40s in a hypothetical primary. That might be enough to win if his opposition is splintered, but Romney may struggle against a single, strong opponent.
— The most recent addition to the Senate has been from Nebraska: after wrapping up 2 terms as governor, Republican Pete Ricketts was appointed to replace fellow Republican Ben Sasse, who began leading the University of Florida earlier this month. Ricketts will run in a special election next year, alongside Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), whose seat was already set to be up. We are not expecting Fischer to have much competition in her primary. Fischer is running for a third term despite previously supporting a two-term limit for senators — but many members who did not abide by their own term limit ideals have been reelected anyway.
Ricketts, meanwhile, may have to at least break a sweat in his primary. Businessman Charles Herbster, who was last seen losing the GOP primary for governor last year, is openly considering the race. In the 2022 primary, Ricketts endorsed now-Gov. Jim Pillen over Herbster, who had Donald Trump’s support. One of Pillen’s first acts in office was to appoint Ricketts to the Senate. Ricketts would be the favorite in a primary, although appointed incumbency is not always the same as elected incumbency, and a challenger could try to capitalize on the circumstances of Rickett’s appointment, perhaps by arguing it seemed transactional. Lingering questions over his selection seemed to hurt Luther Strange in his primary. Before Ricketts, Nebraska’s most recent appointed senator, the late Republican Dave Karnes, actually drew a serious primary challenger when he ran in his own right, in 1988. He beat then-Rep. Hal Daub (R, NE-2) by 10 points in the primary, but had the bad fortune of running against Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who was then a popular former governor, in the general election (Kerrey won by 15 points). Democrats do not have a Kerrey-type figure waiting in the wings, so Republicans would still be favored in the general election this time.
— While there is no sign he faces a competitive primary, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) was just endorsed by the Club for Growth, which often acts as an anti-establishment force in Republican politics. Following an unsuccessful tenure as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Scott failed in a challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for leadership of the caucus. McConnell has criticized Scott for a plan the latter released during last cycle that included a proposal to force Congress to re-approve federal programs, including popular ones like Social Security and Medicare, every 5 years — a proposal that Democrats, including President Biden in last week’s State of the Union, have highlighted. Scott was recently kicked off of the Senate Commerce Committee — as this was likely a form of retaliation from leadership, Scott has spun it as evidence of his anti-establishment credentials in his fundraising appeals.
— On opposite sides of the Delmarva peninsula, Sens. Tom Carper (D-DE) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) are both mulling whether they will run again. Both would likely be fine in both primary and general elections if they run again, although there also are deep benches in both states that would relish the opportunity to compete for an open seat. It is worth noting that Carper attracted a left-wing challenger in 2018, now-state Rep. Kerri Evelyn Harris. With memories of now-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D, NY-14) upset primary victory over the then-No. 4 House Democrat, Joe Crowley, still fresh, the race generated some attention that summer, but Carper won convincingly with a little less than two-thirds of the vote.
— Speaking of Ocasio-Cortez, she decided to pass on challenging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in last year’s primary, and there’s not much indication that she or any other Democrat of note would want to challenge Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) this cycle.
— Back in 2018, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) scored an unimpressive 62%-38% primary victory over a little-known activist, Lisa McCormick (D). This came a year after Menendez survived a federal corruption trial, and Menendez is reportedly under investigation again for a separate matter. Menendez has already drawn a couple of challengers, the more notable of whom is Joe Signorello III (D), the mayor of a small town, Roselle Park.
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) would likely be fine in a primary, although Politico’s Massachusetts Playbook did recently float Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D, MA-4) and Ayanna Pressley (D, MA-7) as possible challengers. Both suggested that they weren’t interested. Massachusetts was the site of a big Senate primary in 2020, when Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) fended off then-Rep. Joe Kennedy III by a little over 10 points (Auchincloss succeeded Kennedy in the House). With memories of that divisive 2020 primary still fresh in the minds of state Democrats, there simply may not be much appetite for a Warren challenge — as with Markey, she has not committed any obvious partisan apostasies.
— Arizona, an odd situation where Sinema is now an independent who caucuses with Democrats, may be one of the biggest question marks on the map. For at least the last year or so, it has been evident to all observers that Sinema would have a hard path to renomination — a reality that likely prompted her to leave the party. Even though she’s not running for renomination, we thought her race merited mention, too.
Towards the end of last month, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D, AZ-3) got into the race and has fundraised well. Though Gallego may not have the primary field to himself, he has probably been Sinema’s most vocal intra-party critic over the last few years. It seems likely that most Democratic primary voters will at least identify with his frustrations — he is selling buttons that read “Adios Sinema.” Since her switch, Sinema has kept reeling in donations, although if she pursues reelection as an independent, her path to victory would seem narrow. Republican Sen. John Thune (R-SD) has implored Sinema to go further, and actually cross the aisle. But Sinema’s numbers with Republicans are not impressive, so it’s unclear how GOP partisans would react to a Sinema candidacy, especially if more conservative options enter.
It’s early in the cycle, so undoubtedly there will be more primary action involving incumbents to watch. Beyond the races featuring incumbents running for renomination, let’s close by looking at the 3 states that are hosting open-seat primaries:
— Last year, Republicans bungled a seemingly golden opportunity to flip the Senate due in large part to the poor quality of their candidates in key states. But for the 2024 cycle, there are signs that Senate Republican leadership will take more of an active role in the primary process, with the goal of precluding another 2022-style debacle.
Let’s take Indiana as an example. With first-term Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) forgoing reelection to run for governor, the Hoosier State is the only open GOP-held seat on the map so far. Rep. Jim Banks (R, IN-3), who has represented the Fort Wayne area for 4 terms in Congress, announced his bid for Braun’s seat in mid-January. When former Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN), who had been toying with the idea of a Senate run, passed on a run, the NRSC almost immediately threw its weight behind Banks. The NRSC’s endorsement may have also deterred some other Republicans from entering the race — most notably, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R, IN-5) was reportedly exploring a 2024 statewide run, but she (surprisingly) opted to retire from office altogether. So, with these early-cycle developments, Indiana’s open-seat race seems to be a coronation for Banks.
Indiana is a state that Republicans will probably win by double-digits at the presidential level, and we expect our Safe Republican rating for the Senate contest would have applied even if the outlook for the primary was messier. But, using Indiana as a template, it seems that this cycle’s NRSC wants to leave as little to chance as possible.
— If the Indiana seat seems settled, Michigan’s contest still seems relatively fluid. Since Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s (D-MI) retirement announcement last month, no major candidates have officially jumped in, although several are reportedly considering. We explored the dynamics of that race a bit more last month.
— Even before Feinstein announced her retirement Tuesday, Democrats from the state’s House delegation weren’t waiting for her to step aside. Two Southern California Democrats, Reps. Adam Schiff (D, CA-30) and Katie Porter (D, CA-47), were already running, and Rep. Barbara Lee (D, CA-12), who represents Oakland, has reportedly been preparing to enter the race. Though Schiff, Porter, and Lee each have their own followings, it’s important to remember that, as members from the House’s largest delegation, they only represent small pieces of the state. State senators in California actually have more constituents than U.S. House members do — there are 52 of the latter, but just 40 of the former.
Coincidentally, the last time this seat was truly open, way back in 1982, was also a rare contest that featured 3 sitting House members — they all lost the Republican primary to then-San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. Wilson won in 1982 and 1988 before resigning in 1990 to become governor; Feinstein defeated John Seymour (R), who Wilson appointed to replace him in the Senate, and she has held the seat ever since. One change from 1982, though, will be that the state now uses a top two primary system. With most of the major contenders likely to be Democrats, a pair of Democrats may ultimately face off in November — this was the case in 2016 and 2018.
— President Biden’s successful State of the Union address suggested he’s full speed ahead on running for a second term.
— Despite polls showing that even many Democrats would prefer Biden not to run again, he has no real opposition within his own party — and the State of the Union is unlikely to help generate any.
— Biden’s best friend is weakness within the Republican Party, which was on display once again on Tuesday night.
There are competing realities at the heart of the president’s annual State of the Union address. It is both typically unmemorable, yet also is probably the biggest scheduled event on the political calendar. This is particularly true in odd-numbered years, in which there are few elections of national import.
Content-wise, State of the Union addresses are typically formulaic, a laundry list of presidential accomplishments and asks. While many inaugural addresses have stood the test of time, State of the Union addresses typically have not. The Library of America’s American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton includes only a single State of the Union address in its collection: Franklin Roosevelt’s Jan. 6, 1941 address to Congress in which he laid out his famous “Four Freedoms” — Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. That is not to say that other iterations of the speech, which was revived as an in-person address by Woodrow Wilson a little more than a century ago, are not without memorable moments — see here for some — but rather that the forum is usually not remembered in the annals of American oratorical brilliance.
Still, tens of millions of Americans watch the speech. By this time next year, the nation’s focus will have turned to the presidential primaries. So President Biden’s speech last night may have been the last time for a while where he will have the public stage squarely to himself — and he clearly tried to make good use of it to a broad audience. Biden’s State of the Union last year got about 38 million viewers, up from 27 million for his quasi-State of the Union the year before (technically, the president’s address to Congress right after taking office is not a proper State of the Union). The viewership for Biden’s first State of the Union was lower than that of his most recent successors, who generally got somewhere in the range of 45-52 million viewers (the viewership for Tuesday night’s address was unknown at the time of publication). Some of this, likely, is the splintering of the media environment, from which it seems only the National Football League is immune. But part of it, too, is that Biden himself does not seem to be the kind of lightning rod figure that at least his four most recent predecessors were: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. This sort of dynamic likely helped Biden and Democrats in last year’s midterms — even though Biden’s standing was underwater, the public did not treat the election as an all-out referendum on the president.
Some recent iterations of the speech have sent signals, and last night’s did too. Clinton gave a typically long-winded State of the Union in early 1998, shortly after details emerged of his affair with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In the lead-up to the speech, many thought Clinton might resign; Clinton’s SOTU, in which he made no reference to the affair, helped muzzle that talk. In his 2002 State of the Union, George W. Bush first referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the “axis of evil.” The following State of the Union, in 2003, he was making the case for the soon-to-come American invasion of Iraq. The signal Biden likely was trying to send last night was this: His plan is to run again, despite his advanced age and sometimes shaky public appearances (although despite some characteristic flubs, Biden was clearly on his game last night).
Beyond that, the speech has sometimes recently provided famous moments — produced by people other than the president. After President Obama scolded the Supreme Court for its Citizens United decision in his 2010 State of the Union, Justice Samuel Alito seemed to mouth the words “not true” in response to the president. In 2020, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a big show of ripping up the physical copy of the speech that then-President Trump had just given. Rep. Joe Wilson (R, SC-2) shouting “you lie” at Obama in 2009 was not during the State of the Union — rather, it was during a speech on health care that Obama was giving to a joint session of Congress in September 2009.
But Wilson’s outburst was front of mind last night anyway, because what may be remembered most from last night was the rowdy “House of Commons” feel that Biden’s address took on — the U.K. Parliament has a reputation for being much more raucous than the U.S. Congress, but that distinction may be getting less sharp. At points during the speech, Biden veered off script, chiding and baiting Republican members. Biden’s ad hoc public bargaining may have had some success — with talks over increasing the debt ceiling looming, he, apparently got Republicans to agree not to touch Social Security and Medicare (although some Republicans had already been suggesting this in the days leading up to the speech, perhaps prompted by former President Trump on the matter). Biden was continually heckled by far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA-14), who Speaker Kevin McCarthy visibly tried to hush at some points. In what became something of a meme on social media, Greene’s white, fur-lined coat drew comparisons to the Disney villain Cruella de Vil.
In 2015, one of President Obama’s most memorable rhetorical nudges in the Republicans’ direction came with the line, “I have no more campaigns to run… I know because I won both of them.” Though some of Biden’s lines received similar reactions from across the aisle — he told members who would like to see the Inflation Reduction Act repealed, “As my football coach used to say, lots of luck in your senior year” — it certainly seems like Biden intends to run one more campaign. Despite his age, little in Biden’s address suggested that he was ready to step aside. In fact, throughout the speech, one of his most repeated lines was “let’s finish the job.” With his second formal State of the Union address in the books, Biden will now embark on a very campaign-like trip, visiting several key states across the country — today, he is taking his message to Wisconsin, which happened to be the tipping-point state in the last 2 presidential elections and will surely be hotly contested again.
Still, as he gears up for a 2024 run, Biden’s standing with the electorate remains subpar. According to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregates, while Biden’s approval spread is not deep in the double-digit negative category, as it was last summer, he stands at an upside-down 43%/52% rating. Tinkering with FiveThirtyEight’s model settings, when only considering polls of registered voters (not just adults), Biden’s disapproval number briefly fell below 50% last month — it had been over 50% since October 2021. The GOP infighting over the protracted speaker vote likely made Biden’s image look better by comparison. With that spectacle over, and Biden dealing with some negative headlines related to his handling of classified documents, Biden’s disapproval number crept back up over 50%.
Though Biden has had a (somewhat surprisingly) productive tenure in office so far and key economic metrics have been largely positive, concerns about inflation and the broader economy persist — while inflation has slowed, prices are still higher than when Biden first took office. A national poll from CBS News, released just before Biden’s address, found that a majority of voters feel his policies have made inflation, gas prices, and the economy as a whole, worse. Gallup also recently reported that 50% of Americans feel like they are worse off financially now compared to this time last year, a high mark last seen in the “great recession” era of 2008 and 2009.
Concerns about Biden’s age do seem to have fostered at least a degree of reticence among Democratic partisans when it comes to his renomination. An Associated Press poll from this week found that just 37% of Democrats want him to run for a second term. Though Biden gets the coolest reaction from younger voters — a group that never seemed his natural constituency in primaries — only about half of Democrats who are over 45 say he should move ahead with reelection plans.
But if and until Biden receives a major primary challenge — and most big names seem to be deferring to him — he starts as a prohibitive favorite for renomination, and he may not have much opposition at all. As Biden himself is fond of saying, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” And at this point there really is no alternative. This is the same sort of dynamic we sometimes see in horserace polls – an incumbent may be shown trailing against a generic unnamed opponent, but leading against a named opponent. It may also be that the president’s generally well-received speech last night could help tamp down whatever problems Biden may have in his own party.
While Biden is not strong at the moment, the alternative to him running again could be a fractious primary that reveals divisions in the party that Biden (and opposition to Trump and Republicans) has papered over for now. A fear of the unknown may also keep Democrats behind Biden, even if it’s possible a new candidate would raise the party’s electoral ceiling — particularly if Republicans opt for a third Trump nomination.
In her State of the Union response, newly-elected Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) argued that American politics was no longer about left vs. right, but rather normal vs. crazy. She may have something of a point, although mostly in a way that she did not intend, as her party’s problem of late has been producing too many candidates who end up on the wrong side of that divide. One of the GOP’s challenges for 2024 is sanding down some of the party’s rough edges, which have turned off some key swing voters. Not that it likely matters much overall, but did Sanders’s base-focused speech paired with GOP House members heckling the president serve to soften the party’s image? Surely not.
In the end, Biden won in 2020 because enough key voters were fed up with Trump and his antics. Democrats held the line in 2022 for much the same reason. His 2024 fate is likely contingent to at least some degree on this very same dynamic — do Republicans offer up a better alternative? On this particular question, Biden is more bystander than participant.
— Senate races are increasingly converging with presidential partisanship, to the point where the huge overperformances that were so common a decade or two ago have become much less common.
— Since 2000, the number of senators who have run more than 10 points ahead of their party’s presidential nominee has decreased sharply.
— This trend helps explain why we currently rate Democratic-held West Virginia as Leans Republican and started off Montana and Ohio as Toss-ups.
Last week, when we put out our first look at the 2024 Senate map, we issued a rare rating: We started an incumbent off as an underdog. Specifically, we put the West Virginia contest in the Leans Republican category. Though Sen. Joe Manchin has not officially announced his plans, the reality is that any Democrat, even as one as successful as Manchin, faces a daunting challenge in West Virginia.
Some of Manchin’s worries are state-specific. One of the (several) unexpected success stories for national Democrats last year was their showing in state legislative races: They gained governmental trifectas in several states and held their own in the overall state legislative seat count across the nation. But the Democratic floor continued to sink in West Virginia. In the state legislature, Republicans now hold an astonishing 88 seats in the 100-member state House and 31 of 34 state Senate seats. When Manchin first entered office as governor, after the 2004 elections, Republicans only held about a third of the seats in the legislature.
But, as we have discussed in previous articles, there has been a larger trend driving recent elections for Senate: realignment along presidential lines. Between the 2016 and 2020 Senate elections, only one state, Maine, voted for presidential and Senate candidates of opposite parties. Though this trend would obviously imperil Manchin, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jon Tester (D-MT), if they seek reelection, also will run in states that Donald Trump or the eventual GOP nominee will likely carry, although neither states has become as ruby red as West Virginia (Brown says he will run again, Tester has not yet announced).
But, if Manchin were to run again — and win — how much of an exception to the recent trend would he be? Assuming West Virginia votes for the GOP nominee by roughly 40 points, as it did in 2016 and 2020, a Manchin win would surely be predicated on a high level of crossover support.
We’ve gone back through the 6 most recent presidential elections examining that question. The short answer is that in the Senate of the early 2000s, 40-point or more overperformances actually occurred with some regularity. Even in 2012, Manchin himself posted such a showing. But since 2016, no major party senatorial nominee has run more than 25 points ahead of their party’s presidential nominee.
So a 40-point overperformance would be a massive outlier in today’s electoral environment. But even loosening our criteria somewhat, even a 10-point overperformance — in the ballpark of what Brown or Tester likely will need to win — would be something of a rarity. Table 1 goes back to 2000 and tracks how many senators performed at least 10 points better than their party’s presidential nominee.
Note: Compares the 2-party vote for Senate to the 2-party vote for president. Table excludes the following Senate races: Arizona 2000, Idaho 2004, Arkansas 2008, Maine 2012, Alaska and California 2016, and Arkansas 2020.
Source: Dave Leip’s Atlas of U. S. Presidential Elections.
In both 2000 and 2004, about 70% of Senate races featured a difference of 10 or more percentage points in margin compared to the top of the ticket. But by the Obama era, that number hovered around 50%. As straight-party a year as 2016 was, Table 1 shows that 2020 was actually more so in some ways: Though no states actually produced a split-ticket outcome, more than a third of the Senate races featured a double-digit difference with the presidential race. But by 2020, just 3 Senate races did — meaning that more than 90% of the total Senate races had a 2-party margin within 10 points of their respective state’s presidential race.
With that, we’ll look at each presidential cycle since 2000 and identify the top overperformers.
2000 saw 6 incumbent senators, 3 from each party, run 30 points or more ahead of their presidential nominee.
By the late 1990s, New England had emerged as a Democratic-leaning region in presidential politics. Between the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, most New England states swung to then-President Bill Clinton by double-digits. Many of Clinton’s gains stuck in 2000, as his then-Vice President, Al Gore, carried 5 of the region’s 6 states — Gore only barely missed out on New Hampshire, making him the most recent Democratic nominee to lose a New England state. But in the 2000 Senate elections, the region’s traditional affinity for moderate Republicans was still evident down the ballot. In Vermont, Republican Jim Jeffords won a final term by running 55% ahead of then-candidate George Bush’s showing in the Green Mountain State. Citing the GOP’s increasingly conservative direction, Jeffords became a Democratic-caucusing independent less than a year into his new term — Jeffords’s switch gave Democrats control of the Senate for much of the 107th Congress. In nearby states, Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee and Maine’s Olympia Snowe outran Bush by 47 and 43 points, respectively.
The top 3 overperformers on the Democratic side were all long-tenured incumbents with popular local brands. Though Bush’s 52%-46% victory in West Virginia came as a surprise on Election Night, Mountain State voters remained overwhelmingly loyal to Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd — a fiddler who was first elected in 1958, he was known for steering resources to his state and was something of a folk hero. Byrd took nearly 80% of the vote. Manchin currently holds Byrd’s seat. In North Dakota, a small state that lends itself well to retail politicking, Sen. Kent Conrad (D) first won a Senate seat in 1986 and won comfortably in the pro-GOP 1994 cycle (he had effectively switched seats in 1992). Republicans seemed to feel Conrad was too entrenched to defeat. Finally, Massachusetts’s Ted Kennedy, with his seniority and golden surname, easily dispatched a scandal-plagued Republican.
As the 21st century got underway, voters’ ticket-splitting habits began to wane. In 2004, Bush, then an incumbent, ran well in the South and his coattails helped Republicans flip 5 open Senate seats there. Bush’s 60%-38% showing in South Dakota also helped topple then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D) in a squeaker. But, in 2004, there were still over half a dozen senators who ran 30 points or more ahead of their party’s presidential nominees.
In Arizona, the late Sen. John McCain (R) was at the peak of his popularity. After running against Bush for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000, the two Republicans had buried the hatchet. McCain’s credentials as a “maverick” on some issues, most notably campaign finance, likely helped his crossover appeal. He took over three-quarters of the vote against weak opposition. In Iowa, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R) annual 99-county trips around the state had made him a political institution in the state. And going back to New England, Sen. Judd Gregg (R) benefitted from token opposition — after a scandal sidelined Democrats’ preferred nominee, they were left running a 94-year-old liberal activist.
For 2004, a North Dakota Democrat again makes the list of top overperformers. Sen. Byron Dorgan had represented North Dakota in Congress since the 1980 election: as the farm crisis hurt Republicans electorally in the region that decade, Dorgan was always reelected with massive margins. He made the jump to the Senate in 1992. Hawaii’s Dan Inouye was in much the same category as Byrd in 2000: Though Bush performed well for a Republican in the state, the senator’s seniority paid electoral dividends. In Indiana, Sen. Evan Bayh, one of the chamber’s key moderate Democrats, comfortably won a second term.
One other notable overperformer in 2004 was not an incumbent — Barack Obama easily won his first and only term in the Senate in Illinois against carpetbagging conservative activist Alan Keyes, who had replaced a previous, scandal-plagued nominee. In fact, Obama turned in the largest overperformance of any non-incumbent during the 2000 to 2020 timespan (Map 1).
In 2008, Democrats had an undeniably strong cycle — they were aided by then-candidate Obama’s voter mobilization efforts and a pervading anti-George W. Bush sentiment.
Though Democrats tried to tie Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins to the outgoing president, New England ticket-splitting was again on display. Democratic Rep. Tom Allen, who represented the Portland-based 1st District, made the Iraq War a central issue of the campaign. But Collins had cultivated an image as a parochial, bipartisan senator. On the campaign trail, she could point to high ratings from usually liberal-leaning groups: in 2007, she had a perfect score with the League of Conservation Voters, for example. Collins won a third term with over 60% as Obama carried Maine comfortably. In Tennessee and Wyoming, Sens. Lamar Alexander and Mike Enzi were veteran officeholders in overwhelmingly red states. Their races attracted little attention. Alexander had a habit of winning Shelby County, which includes Memphis — over his career, he had been the GOP nominee in 6 statewide races and carried it each time. In 2008, as Obama carried Shelby County by close to 30 points, Alexander carried it 51%-47%..
The biggest overperformer in 2008 was Montana’s Max Baucus. Though the Democrat was a key player in the Senate — by 2008, he chaired the Finance Committee — his margin was padded by weak GOP opposition. His Republican opponent, Bob Kelleher, was a perennial candidate who had run under multiple partisan affiliations in the past — his institutional support was nonexistent. Like Byrd, Jay Rockefeller, West Virginia’s other senator, had a long career in state politics. A Democrat from a famously Republican family, he came to the Senate in 1984 immediately after serving 8 years as governor. As the state’s leader during a tough economic times, Rockefeller had to work hard to win that 1984 contest, but he quickly became entrenched. In the early 2000s, Republicans did not have much of a bench in West Virginia, and Rockefeller got the same underfunded challenger he ran against 6 years earlier. Sen. Tim Johnson represented South Dakota for 5 terms in the House before making the jump to the Senate. In 2006, Johnson suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and spent the better part of a year recovering. Constituents seemed to rally around their senator, and in 2007, when he returned to work, he was greeted with a standing ovation in the Senate chamber. Though Baucus, Rockefeller, and Johnson all scored impressive margins, it may be worth noting that Obama’s showing in each of their states was respectable, too.
In 2012, with Obama successfully running for reelection, some of the biggest overperformers in the Senate were actually losers. In Hawaii, Republicans ran their strongest candidate, former Gov. Linda Lingle. The Senate contest turned into a rematch of sorts: Rep. Mazie Hirono (D, HI-2) emerged from the Democratic primary — she had lost the 2002 gubernatorial race to Lingle 52%-47%. But the difference in the outcome was a prime illustration of the differences between state-level and federal races. Obama carried his native state by over 40 points for a second time, helping Hirono to a 25-point win. In Massachusetts, Sen. Scott Brown won a come-from-behind special election victory in 2010 to replace the late Ted Kennedy — his Democratic opponent ran a lazy campaign and Brown’s image as pickup truck-driving everyman fit the moment. In 2012, Brown was initially ahead in polls and cast himself as an independent Republican. But Democrats consolidated behind law professor Elizabeth Warren, who fundraised well. Warren pulled ahead by the end of the campaign to beat Brown 54%-46%. Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker would have won easily in most circumstances anyway, but he faced a controversial Democrat who the Washington Post mused could have been “2012’s worst candidate.” (we may add that there was ample competition for that title)
The biggest overperformer, from either side, in 2012 was actually Joe Manchin. In 2010, he was initially expected to waltz into Byrd’s old seat in a special election but got something of a scare from businessman John Raese, who pulled ahead in some polls. But Manchin took advantage of Raese’s gaffes and won by a larger-than-expected 10 points. Raese filed for a rematch against Manchin, but after his 2010 loss, he attracted little outside help. Though voters did not have much of an appetite for a Raese candidacy, West Virginia continued its rightward lurch at the presidential level: Mitt Romney became the first Republican presidential nominee in history to sweep all the state’s counties — something Donald Trump replicated in 2016 and 2020, but the state’s totally-red map came as at least a slight surprise at the time. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who made a strong debut in 2006, kept strong approval ratings and did not draw a top-tier opponent. She carried all but 2 counties in her state, and as a presidential candidate in 2020, had good reason to stress her “electability.” Finally, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill seemed to have a tough race for a second term in her red-trending state. In September, a poll from SurveyUSA showed her trailing the newly-minted GOP nominee, Todd Akin, by a 51%-40% margin. But shortly afterwards, Akin made his infamous “legitimate rape” comment when he was asked about abortion — Akin’s comment was roundly denounced and he became something of a pariah.
When political analysts discuss the types of gains that Donald Trump made in 2016 over Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing, much of the attention, rightfully, goes to several marginal states bordering the Great Lakes. But the state that swung hardest to Trump that year was actually just west of that region: North Dakota. Indeed, things were so tough for North Dakota Democrats in 2016 that, in some of the races for lower statewide offices, Libertarians performed better than Democrats. After being elected three times as governor, Republican John Hoeven won Dorgan’s open Senate seat in 2010. From 2000 to 2010, Hoeven expanded his margin all four times he was on the ballot: he continued that pattern in 2016. The presidential race in Utah was an odd situation: Trump, with his in-your-face attitude and less than pious personal record, was not a natural fit for Utah’s Mormon community. As Trump carried the state with 45% in a 3-way race, Sen. Mike Lee performed more like a “normal” Republican in the state. Going back to the Great Plains, though Democrats initially tried to mount a serious effort against Grassley, his local brand remained popular — although his still-strong 60%-36% margin was closer than his past reelection races.
In New York, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D), who was known for his media savvy and the special attention he gave to the Upstate region, was a chronic overperformer. He was reelected with over 70% of the vote for the second time in his career. In Hawaii, Hillary Clinton’s margin was several points lower than Barack Obama’s but Sen. Brian Schatz (D), who replaced Inouye, continued the trend of incumbent overperformance there. Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian-ish Republican, always seemed like an unorthodox fit for his demographically-Trumpian state. As Trump carried the state by 30 points, Paul’s opponent, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, ran over 50 points better than Clinton in parts of the traditionally Democratic east (although Paul still won overall by about 15 points).
As an aside, 3 of 2016’s top overperformers — Hoeven, Grassley, and Schumer — were up last year, and all posted less impressive performances. In fact, each took just about 56% of the vote. Schumer’s role as Democratic leader likely would have hurt his crossover appeal anyway, and his weak margin was part of an underwhelming showing for New York Democrats overall. Grassley, who was reelected at age 89, may have paid an “age penalty” and got a decently-funded Democratic challenger. Hoeven’s margin was hurt by the independent candidacy of Rick Becker, a state legislator who ran to his right. Becker took close to 20% of the vote. But even if all of Becker’s votes were transferred to Hoeven, Hoeven’s margin would have still been slightly down from 2016. So these examples show that some senators are electoral juggernauts until they aren’t.
The most recent cycle saw the Senate outcomes closely linked to presidential results. In Maine, Collins made a return appearance on the list of top overperformers, although she was in a much more competitive race. As is apparent in the table, the top overperformances on both sides are just a lot smaller than they were in previous cycles. By 2020, Maine had transitioned to a ranked-choice system of voting — a fact that, for the Senate race, wasn’t very relevant because Collins, impressively, won an outright majority. On paper, Collins beat her Democratic opponent, state House Speaker Sara Gideon, by a 51%-42% spread. However, it is worth pointing out that a liberal third party candidate, Lisa Savage, took 5%. She encouraged her voters to rank Gideon second — in Savage’s absence, it is easy to see Gideon doing a few points better. In Nebraska, Sen. Ben Sasse (R) kept strong approval ratings in his own right, but faced a scandal-plagued Democrat who received no party backing. Louisiana, with its jungle primary, reelected Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) outright — he took 59% but had several opponents from both parties. Republican candidates in the jungle primary outvoted Democratic candidates by 27 points, or about 8 points better than Trump’s 2-party margin in the state.
On the Democratic side, veteran Sen. Jack Reed, who has represented Rhode Island in the Senate since the 1996 elections and currently chairs the Armed Services Committee, ran furthest ahead of Biden. Still, there were signs presidential realignment was catching up to Reed: his margin was down 8 points from his 2014 spread, and 2020 was his first reelection result where he failed to carry all the state’s towns. Staying in New England, as Biden was expected to carry New Hampshire, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen led her Trump-endorsed opponent, Corky Messner, in every poll of the race. Republicans made a serious effort to unseat Shaheen in 2014, but by 2020, she did not have a top-tier race. Finally, Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, who was reelected in 2016 even as Republicans won all other statewide offices in Montana, challenged first-term Sen. Steve Daines. Bullock ran 7 points ahead of Biden, but had the same issue as Linda Lingle: he was a governor seeking a Senate seat in a state that leaned the other way in federal races.
One commonality among many of these overperformances is that there were established incumbent senators facing weak, underfunded opponents. While the eventual strength of the challengers to Manchin, Brown, and Tester remains to be seen, Republicans surely will be focused on defeating all 3 of them and will be working to recruit the strongest possible candidates and provide substantial outside spending support.
If Manchin and Tester run for reelection, something that may help them is that small-state senators tend to be more likely to overperform. Of the 36 Senate elections we featured in the tables from 2000 to 2020, 27 of them were in states with fewer than 10 electoral votes.
Beyond that, the trend in the relationship between presidential and Senate results in recent elections is clear: The differences between the 2 races on the ballot are generally getting smaller, and even in just the last couple of decades, there has been a huge decline in the amount of ticket-splitting we see in these races. That does not automatically mean Manchin, Tester, and Brown are going to lose, but the challenge each faces is clear.
— Crystal Ball interns Victoria Mollmann and Evelyn Duross assisted in the research for this article.
— North Carolina’s open-seat race is clearly the marquee contest of 2024’s gubernatorial races. It starts as a Toss-up.
— The other contests start with clear favorites despite several open seats.
— If popular Republican incumbents run for another term, the GOP should be in great shape to hold New Hampshire and Vermont. But they would be great Democratic opportunities as open seats.
— Mississippi moves to Likely Republican following the entry of a credible Democratic candidate after our initial 2023 rating release last week.
| Governor | Old Rating | New Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Tate Reeves (R-MS) | Safe Republican | Likely Republican |
Following up on our initial 2023 gubernatorial ratings post from last week, we’ll look a bit further down the road with a survey of 2024’s races. Our home state, Virginia, will be at the center of the action — sort of. This year, the key contest will be our neighbor to the west, Kentucky. In 2024, our southern neighbor, North Carolina, will likely be the most hotly contested gubernatorial contest.
The 2022 cycle proved to be a banner year for incumbent governors: it was the first gubernatorial midterm since 2002 that saw all incumbent governors who ran secure renomination. The general election featured incumbents in 28 of the 36 states that held contests — all but one, Steve Sisolak, a Nevada Democrat, were reelected. Though there will be far fewer gubernatorial contests on the ballot in 2024, it will be a cycle defined by open seats, not incumbents. Five of its 11 contests feature term-limited incumbents and there is at least some chance several other incumbents may step aside.
We’ll start in North Carolina. As we’ve mentioned in past articles, despite the state’s persistently light red hue in federal races, Republicans have struggled in gubernatorial contests: by 2024, they will have held the Executive Mansion for just 4 of the last 32 years. Current Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) got to office in 2016 by defeating then-Gov. Pat McCrory (R), who was left holding the bag for some of his conservative legislature’s actions. Cooper, then the sitting state Attorney General, ran about 4 percentage points ahead of Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016, just enough to get him past McCrory. Cooper won by 4.5 points in 2020, or close to 6 points ahead of Joe Biden’s showing.
As Cooper, who is now term-limited, was outperforming his party’s presidential nominees, so was his protégé, Josh Stein. Before spending several years in the state Senate representing Wake County (Raleigh), Stein served as an assistant Attorney General under Cooper. In 2016, he succeeded his former boss, winning by half a point. In 2020, Stein posted another similarly close margin. Stein got into the gubernatorial race yesterday, although his ambitions for the office have been an open secret in state politics for some time. Stein’s template may be similar to another Democratic Josh who was just elevated from Attorney General to Governor: Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. Like Stein, Shapiro compiled a winning electoral record in his own right, but was helped by a controversial opponent. In North Carolina, Republicans also seem likely to produce such a candidate.
In 2020, even with Cooper atop of the ticket, North Carolina Democrats were disappointed in the race for the state’s second-highest job. Mark Robinson, a first-time candidate, won the open race for lieutenant governor with close to 52%, getting more raw votes than Donald Trump. Robinson, a Black Republican, got involved in politics as a gun rights advocate. Despite a trail of problematic comments, Robinson has established a strong rapport with Republican primary voters — a December poll from the Differentiators (a GOP firm) found him polling at 60% in a hypothetical primary scenario. Other Republicans whose names have come up include Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and state Treasurer Dale Folwell, both of whom would be “safer” choices than Robinson but may also be harder sells to a GOP primary electorate. At this point, Stein against Robinson clearly seems the likeliest general election scenario — tellingly, in his announcement video, Stein singled out Robinson.
Is it possible Robinson becomes the next Doug Mastriano? Yes. Still, North Carolina is a tougher state for Democrats than Pennsylvania — at this point, we’d probably pick Biden to lose the former in 2024 while he’d have a good shot at the latter. Though Robinson was running for a lower-profile office in 2020, and likely got less scrutiny than he would have as a candidate for governor, some of his more divisive statements were already public. We are starting North Carolina off as a Toss-up.
Aside from North Carolina, the 2 other Democratic-held gubernatorial seats up next year will be Delaware and Washington state. Both are Safe Democratic.
In the president’s home state, Gov. John Carney (D-DE) is term-limited — before running for the job in 2016, he served 3 terms in the House. There are several Democrats who could easily lock down the seat.
Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA), who is in his third term as the Evergreen State’s top executive, is not term-limited. Inslee got some national attention as a 2020 presidential candidate; in a crowded field, he emphasized climate change and environmental sustainability. Since his initial election, in 2012, Inslee has won by increasing margins: going from 3% to 9% to 13%. Though his approval ratings are not especially high — an October SurveyUSA poll had his approval spread on slightly negative ground — Washington is a state that the Democratic presidential nominee is expected to carry by double-digits. Inslee has been fundraising like a candidate who is seeking reelection, but if he doesn’t, Democrats should not have trouble finding a candidate. Though depending on the strength and number of candidates, Washington’s blanket primary system could produce an intraparty general election.
This past cycle, Oregon’s long history of electing Democratic governors — and whether Republicans could break that streak — got a lot of attention in what was a competitive race. Democrats ultimately won that election, meaning that Republicans have not won a gubernatorial race in Oregon since 1982. Washington’s streak of electing Democrats goes back slightly further — Republicans have not won the governorship since 1980, although they did come within about 130 votes of winning the achingly close 2004 race. We’ll see if Republicans can make this a contest during this cycle; as of now, it seems like a solid Democratic hold in a presidential year.
Republicans currently hold a pair of governorships in states that Biden carried in 2020 and is expected to again. Govs. Chris Sununu (R-NH) and Phil Scott (R-VT) are each on their fourth 2-year term in office, and both are eligible to run again. Even as Democrats overperformed in 2022’s gubernatorial contests nationally, both won easily. Scott won by nearly 50 points last year, and while Sununu’s showing was down markedly from his 2020 result, he still took a commanding 57%. For now, our Likely Republican rating in these states is acting as somewhat of a placeholder: if either, or both, run again, they will be favored, but open seats would probably start off as at least Toss-ups.
Both New England governors have been critical of Trump — not surprising, given their states — but if Sununu forgoes reelection, it may be to run for president himself. Scott, the more liberal of the pair, does not seem to have presidential ambitions.
Moving to Trump-won states, Republican governors will be term-limited in a trio of reddening states. In West Virginia, a crowded GOP field is already forming to replace Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican. Justice is considering a run for Senate. In Indiana, Republican Sen. Mike Braun will try to take the opposite trek, as a senator running for governor. Finally, Republican Gov. Mike Parson’s departure may generate a competitive GOP field, and Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe is already running for a promotion.
In 2012 and 2016, Democrats were winning, or were at least competitive, in gubernatorial races in Indiana, Missouri, and West Virginia. In 2020, Republicans won each by double-digits. All start this cycle as Safe Republican.
North Dakota, which has not elected a Democratic governor since 1988, passed a state constitutional amendment last year limiting its governors to 2 terms. Importantly, the amendment, which goes into force this year, is not retroactive. In other words, previous service will not be counted. Though Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND), who is already on his second term, endorsed the amendment, he seems to be gearing up to run for a third term. Former Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) benefitted from a similar legal quirk in his state. Brown was elected governor in 1974 and 1978, but opted to run for Senate in 1982. After the state passed a measure limiting the governor to 2 terms in 1990, he came back in the 2010 elections to serve another pair of terms (he is now ineligible to be governor).
Finally, Montana and Utah both feature incumbents who are apparently running for reelection and are Safe Republican. Of those, Montana seems likelier to eventually end up on the board. If Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) runs for reelection, his effort may boost the Democratic nominee. Montana, though a red state in presidential politics, also has more of an openness to Democratic governors — if current Gov. Greg Gianforte is reelected, it will be the first time since 1996 that Montana has given a GOP governor a second term. Gianforte also could hypothetically run for Senate, which would open up the governorship.
Last week, when issuing our initial 2023 ratings, we put Mississippi’s contest in the Safe Republican category, but added that if Democrats could produce a quality candidate by the state’s Feb. 1 filing deadline, we’d reconsider. Well, we didn’t have to wait until February, as Mississippi Democrats immediately made us follow through on our promise. Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley got into the race Thursday morning. A populist Democrat who cites Franklin Roosevelt as a role model, Presley is probably the party’s best possible recruit. However, Mississippi is still a very Republican state, and having a strong nominee in 2019 — then-state Attorney General Jim Hood (D) — was not enough to allow Democrats to win back the governorship then.
There was also a bit of good news for incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) last Thursday, too. A national gubernatorial poll from Morning Consult found his approval spread on positive ground, at 49%/41% — while he is under 50%, those numbers were effectively a reversal of his spread in the same group’s October 2022 poll. But the bottom line from last week’s developments in Mississippi is that, with a credible candidate in Presley and the possibility that Reeves could get pushed in his own primary, we are moving the race to Likely Republican.
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