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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.
— 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: 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.
FreshRSS 