The source of Democrats’ Senate confidence? Flawed GOP candidates
By Michael Jones
My back was turned to them as they walked in, but I didn’t need to see them to feel their energy.
I’m talking about Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who met with reporters this week before the third night of the Democratic National Convention to discuss why they’re so confident they’ll hold the Senate in November.
Democrats writ large can thank the nominee switcheroo from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris for the enthusiasm that permeated through Chicago as a who’s who of elected officials, celebrities, relatives, and content creators made the case for why Harris is the right candidate at the right time to defeat Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement for the second presidential cycle in a row.
But for the trio of senators I joined at the Loews Hotel about five miles west of the United Center, where Harris would accept her party’s nomination the next night, their pep is also due to what they believe to be a gift from the other side of the aisle come November: Poor Republican Senate candidates.
“There’s no question that candidate quality was really a deciding factor for us last cycle and it’s going to be a deciding factor again this cycle,” Peters, who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2022 and is chair for 2024, said. “Because voters, they go into a voting booth, they have a choice between two individuals with strengths and weaknesses and it’s important that a great campaign highlight those strengths and weaknesses.”
Among the key liabilities for Republicans is the question of residency.
“If you look at Republicans’ recruitment for their candidates, they tend to recruit folks who are very wealthy and who can self-finance, and so they like to have them because they can write big checks,” Peters said. “But the problem is they also tend to have fairly tenuous relations with the Senate and the state they’re running in.”
Peters pointed to Dr. Mehmet Oz’s and John Fetterman’s race two years ago.
“That was a big part of [Fetterman’s] victory was that Oz had some issues —one, he didn’t actually live in the state so that’s a problem when you’re running for the Senate,” Peters said. “Plus, a lot of other mistakes that he made, inconsistencies and the issues that were simply wrong for the folks in Pennsylvania. And there’s no question that was the deciding factor there.”
This cycle, Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s other senator, is running against David McCormick, another wealthy Republican who Democrats accuse of parachuting into the state just to run for office.
McCormick voted for the first time in 16 years when his name was on the ballot in the 2022 primary election he ultimately lost to Oz. Three months after announcing that campaign, he reportedly sold a $6.5 million home in Fairfield, Connecticut. And despite buying a home in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood in 2022 and owning a family farm in Bloomsburg, he still rents a multimillion-dollar home on the harbor in Southport, uses his Connecticut address as a mailing address, and has conducted interviews from his Connecticut home. (McCormick says he returns to Connecticut because his youngest daughter lives with his ex-wife.)
Meanwhile, Casey has served in the Senate since 2006. He is the son of a former governor of Pennsylvania and is the first Democrat to win three straight terms in the Senate. He is also the current dean of the state’s congressional delegation.
We see a similar story with Eric Hovde, the Republican challenging Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who was a California banking executive before running for Senate and still spends significant time at his Laguna Beach mansion.
“Don’t underestimate how powerful that is, again, for voters who say this is not somebody from our state, this is not someone who’s going to care about me,” Peters said.
Beyond the questions about residency, Democrats believe their candidates are also on the right side of the issues.
Democracy is on the ballot with Project 2025 proposing Republicans centralize presidential power and erode voting rights. And, as was the case in 2022, reproductive freedom will also be a salient factor for voters in this election.
“You have candidates coming in from out of state to move there, to run and then lean into this idea about preventing women from getting an abortion, they, already on the wrong side of issues,” Cortez Masto, who chaired the DSCC in 2020 before winning the tightest Senate race in 2022, said.
Several key states from Arizona to Montana to Nevada have abortion-related ballot initiatives that Democrats believe will boost their candidates.
Many of the candidates running in open seats or challenging vulnerable Republican incumbents also bring rich gender and racial diversity to their races, reflecting that of the nation.
Reps. Elissa Slotkin, who’s running to succeed Debbie Stabenow, and former Rep. Debbie Muscarel-Powell, who’s looking to beat Rick Scott in Florida, are women. Ruben Gallego and Andy Kim, two members of Congress running in open seats in Arizona and New Jersey, are Latino and Asian American respectively. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland hope to become just the third and fourth Black women to serve in the Senate. And if Colin Allred pulls off an upset of Ted Cruz in Texas, he would be the first Black man to represent the state in the Senate.
“It’s like that saying: A rising tide lifts all boats. What we hear is that’s the work you get when you have people from diverse backgrounds coming together to focus on policy and solutions that benefit everyone and they don’t leave anyone behind,” Cortez Masto told me after the event. “Contrast with the Republicans: They’re fear-mongering and they want to pick people and they want to pick winners and losers. That is the difference and that’s the contrast between the Democrats and a future Harris-Walz administration versus those folks.”
But it’s not enough for Democrats to have strong candidates who are right on the issues. They also have to run winning campaigns, a subject Warnock, who was on the ballot in five straight elections in Georgia—a special election in 2020, a runoff in 2021 and a primary, general and runoff election in 2022—knows something about.
“We tried to lean into the concerns of ordinary people and center their concerns,” Warnock said. “And I think I won two Senate races in a row in Georgia because people could see that I was focused on them and not on myself.”
Despite these factors, Republicans have their own reasons to feel hopeful they’ll flip the Senate.
Democrats currently hold a two-seat majority and are defending three states Trump won in 2016 and 2020. Meanwhile, Republicans are defending zero seats in states Biden won in 2020.
Joe Manchin, the independent senator from West Virginia who caucuses with Democrats, is retiring from the Senate, which makes the deep-red state a virtual lock for Republicans. If the GOP wins West Virginia, it would only need to flip one of the other Trump states—Ohio or Montana—to win control.
To win in those states, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester will require a substantial amount of voters to split their tickets between them and Trump when split-ticket voting has seen a drastic decline in recent elections. (Susan Collins (R-ME) is the only senator in the past two presidential cycles to be elected in a state won by the presidential nominee of the opposite party.)
“Sherrod Brown is Ohio. And Ohio may be trending red largely over the last few years. But there’s a reason why he wins in that state over and over again: The people of Ohio know that Sherrod Brown will fight for them,” Warnock said.
The Georgia senator feels the same way about Tester.
“Jon Tester is Montana through and through,” Warnock said. “People ask me, ‘How do you pastor a church and serve as a senator?’ Jon Tester’s got a whole farm.”
But the good news for Democrats is that four of their five most vulnerable incumbents—Casey, Baldwin, Brown and Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) are leading their opponents in the polls and outrunning Harris at the top of the ticket.
For more proof of how bullish Democrats are that they’ll hold the gavels after Nov. 5, look no further than Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who at the DNC this week outlined the contours of the 100-day agenda he would pursue with Harris if she’s victorious.
“I’m confident we are going to keep the Senate,” Schumer told us before the Senate left Washington for recess at the beginning of the month. “You know, when we had this break two years ago, you all said to me, ‘Oh, you’re gonna lose four or five seats, look at the map.’ I said, ‘We’re going to break even and maybe pick up a seat.’ Folks, we’re going to break even and maybe pick up the seat or two.”
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
