GAME ON
WITH INFLATION AND GAS PRICES soaring and President Joe Biden’s approval ratings near historic lows, the Republican Party should have a strong wind at its back in its quest to retake control of the United States Senate. Yet as Labor Day, the traditional launch of general election campaigns, fast approaches, one big shock in American politics is that the stage appears set for Democrats to keep the upper house of Congress—and possibly even expand their current razor-thin control.
Such a prospect seemed far-fetched only a few weeks ago—before Republicans picked extremists as their Senate nominees in several states (“our parade of kooks,” one GOP insider calls it), before those candidates committed a series of political faux pas and before the U.S. Supreme Court redefined the stakes by overturning the constitutional right to abortion. What’s more, several GOP nominees earned endorsements from former President Donald Trump by embracing his lie that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and the January 6th attack on the Capitol was no big deal. Those views are popular among GOP primary voters but a major turnoff to independents and Democrats, polls show.
The same partisan divide seems to be forming around the August 8 search by the FBI of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence for classified documents he allegedly took with him when he left the White House—which Trump-backed Senate candidates swiftly condemned. Early polling shows Republicans are mostly sympathetic to the ex-president but a large majority of Democrats and a plurality of independents approve of the FBI’s actions and believe Trump broke the law while in office.
The result: political whiplash. The latest odds from the polling-data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight now put the chance of Democrats retaining control of the Senate at 61 percent; a flip from two months ago when the same gang gave the Republicans a 60 percent shot. Two other prominent prognostication sites are even more bullish on the Democrats’ chances: RaceTotheWH gives them a 62.45 percent chance and DecisionDeskHQ, 64.4 percent.
Against all odds, the Senate is suddenly the Democrats’ victory to lose. The FBI search, while dominating the news now and providing the GOP with a big fundraising opportunity, hasn’t had an impact on prognosticators’ expectations for the Senate.
THE LATEST NUMBER CRUNCHING PUTS THE ODDS OF DEMOCRATS RETAINING THE SENATE AT 61 percent vs. a 60 percent shot FOR GOP CONTROL IN JUNE.
The Democrats now control that chamber of Congress with a 50-50 split plus the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. To hold on, with 35 seats up for grabs and 10 of those races deemed competitive, the Democrats must make it through the 2022 election without a net loss. Earlier this year, success seemed unlikely, especially since four of the competitive seats
