Where Things Stand
As we await a debate and other big news, I take quick stock of our too-close-to-call election cycle
We’re all expecting a deluge of political news in coming days: multiple major Supreme Court rulings; the bizarrely early Presidential debate; and, according to the latest buzz, maybe the unveiling of Donald Trump’s running-mate. (On this last, my money is on Gov. Doug Burgum, mostly because I can’t think of a good reason Trump would be promoting him as a finalist unless he’s intent on picking him.)
So, let’s pause to take a quick look at where things stand in the national elections, as I see ‘em.
President
The New York Times debuted its poll tracker this week, and it shows what most of the other poll trackers show: a really close national race, with Trump holding small leads in all the battleground states. That’s not great for Team Biden.
This is the dynamic that drove the Biden campaign to challenge Trump to this weird June debate. And it is really weird—no other Presidential general election debate in the television era has taken place earlier than late September. Obviously this is an unusual cycle—a President versus a former President—but one would think that this makes the debates less important, because voters know these two so well.
Yet the Biden camp clearly thinks it’s very important to have a debate super early, even before the nominating conventions, to re-set the dynamic of the race. Take your pick of logic: it’s to get voters to accept that it’s really a choice between these two; it’s to remind people of how much they dislike Trump; it’s to remove the image of Biden as old and decrepit.
I have proven obstinately immune to these arguments from campaign-adjacent contacts. I don’t believe this debate will accomplish anything on any of that—and I assume that whatever dynamic does change, will be forgotten and re-re-set by Labor Day anyway. We’ll see.
Senate
Democratic Senate candidates and their allies have already pre-booked an astonishing $346 million in fall ad reservations, according to AdImpact Politics—way more than Republican bookings, as the fundraising gap I wrote about two months ago has continued. It’s going to pose some problems on the GOP side.
The problem has been mitigated, however, by the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC) strategy—and it was a strategy—of recruiting and assisting super-rich dudes who, along with their super-rich friends, are going to spend plenty of money in Ohio, Montana, and Wisconsin. Elsewhere, not so much. Notably, Sam Brown in Nevada and Eric Hovde in Wisconsin are starting well behind the eight ball.
So is likely Michigan nominee Mike Rogers. That state’s primary isn’t until August 6, which might be why, according to the Detroit News, the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC) isn’t planning to start running ads until August. But why wait, when the NRSC has already been airing general election “hybrid ads” with Kari Lake in Arizona, well in advance of her late-July primary? (Hybrid ads, which attack both the specific opponent and the opposing party generally, allow the national committee to share the cost at the discounted rate reserved for candidates. This is today’s lesson in campaign finance law workarounds.)
The bottom line remains that it’s a very tough road for the Democrats to hold the Senate, although individually I can see the path for holding each of the seats in peril (other than West Virginia of course).
House
Democrats are way out ahead on pre-booking fall ads for the House too, and it sure looks to me like a lot of the key races are in awfully expensive markets. Also bear in mind that Democrats in those battlegrounds are going to have allies looking to spend whatever it takes to define the opponent as an abortion foe; I don’t see a comparable movement coming from the right.
And defining House races that way won’t be difficult in most cases, because the party is determined to make anti-abortion men the dominant faces for the voter. I wrote about this back in April; the trend has continued since. We now have (through Tuesday night) nominees chosen in about 70 percent of House districts; only 17 percent of the GOP’s nominees so far are women—and most of those are either incumbents returning or sacrificial lambs in solidly blue districts. Only six GOP women nominated so far have any chance of entering Congress in January—compared with 18 men already nominated in open solid-red districts, and 10 more in battleground races.
The other thing Democrats are hoping for, of course, is a resurgency of national revulsion toward Donald Trump, energizing Democratic voters and disincentivizing Republicans. No significant signs of it yet, but it’s still early—even if they are debating already.