Maine, Michigan scramble the Senate picture
Facts on the ground are changing rapidly in two must-win states for Democrats.
Note: This column was originally published in National Journal on Monday, July 6. An updated report on the Senate after Graham Platner's withdrawal is forthcoming.
These are supposed to be the midsummer doldrums of this campaign year, but you sure wouldn’t know it from all that is going on. On Monday afternoon, Politico broke the story of an alleged rape committed less than five years ago by the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, Graham Platner. Shortly after the story broke, Platner issued a denial—but he also posted a video to social media saying that he would “take the time to reflect” on this latest turn of events. Given all of the previous stories about Platner’s alleged misconduct, a story like this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, undermining any argument that he is still politically viable.
Should Platner drop out of the race by July 13, the state Democratic Party has until July 27 to name a replacement on the November general-election ballot. The easiest choice would be for the state Democratic committee to replace him with Gov. Janet Mills, who finished a distant second to Platner on primary day. Another, less likely option would be for them to turn to one of the four runners-up in last month’s Democratic primary for governor. The echoes of the July 2024 Democratic presidential change of horses may well be heard again. A good case can be made that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who backed Mills from the start, has better judgment than many in the Democratic base, who seem to mistake themselves for general-election swing voters.
Just the day before, on Sunday, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow suspended her campaign for Senate in Michigan, a move that potentially could advantage the more establishment-oriented candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens, over the progressive former state health director Abdul El-Sayed. GOP Rep. Mike Rogers lost the open-seat race in 2024 by just three-tenths of a percentage point to Sen. Elissa Slotkin. Republicans believe that Rogers can get over the line this year against the leftist El-Sayed.
Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chris Van Hollen have endorsed El-Sayed, as have Rep. Ro Khanna, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other members of “The Squad.” While Stevens has been relatively unexciting as a candidate, she would very likely be able to hold the Democratic vote together and have a realistic shot at the tiny slice of swing voters in the middle, something El-Sayed would have great difficulty doing. An El-Sayed nomination would be a classic case of Democrats seizing defeat from the jaws of victory, this being the kind of year when a Democrat would have a better-than-average shot at winning this prime swing state.
So far this year, the Democratic base has picked many nominees who were the most pugilistic in their anti-Trump rhetoric, as if the decibel level of their rhetoric were a substitute for an ability to win over that sliver of swing voters that rests between the parties, voters who tend to be less ideological and don’t look or sound at all like the base of either major party. They may not despise Trump, but they have clearly grown tired of him, and they are impatient with Republicans who have enabled him.
Over the last two weeks we have seen a flurry of new, high-quality polls in battleground Senate races that paradoxically underscore both the challenges facing Republicans as the party of an unpopular president and how steep the incline is for Democrats in their efforts to win back the majority they lost in 2024.
The macro-political forces amount to a millstone around the necks of Republican candidates even in some very red states and districts that Trump won by double digits.
But, of the four Senate races that The Cook Political Report rates as “Toss Ups,” Trump carried three out of four in 2024 (Alaska, Michigan, and Ohio, losing only Maine). Of the nine races deemed competitive—those in the “Lean Democrat,” “Toss Up,” or “Lean Republican” columns, Trump won seven out of nine—the three Toss Ups, Georgia and North Carolina (both currently rated Lean Democrat), and Iowa and Texas (both now in the Lean Republican column). The only two of the nine in states Kamala Harris won are in Maine, from the Toss Up column, and New Hampshire, which leans Democratic. In other words, seven of the nine states are road games for Democrats; they have a home-court advantage in only two.
Interestingly, of the nine most competitive states with Senate races, Democrats are in the best shape in the open-seat contest in North Carolina, a state that Trump has won in all three of his White House bids, and New Hampshire, which has elected Republican governors in five consecutive elections. The last Republican to carry Maine in a presidential race was a part-time resident of the state, George H.W. Bush.
The recent flurry of Senate polls includes New York Times/Siena surveys in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas; and Fox News polls in Georgia, Iowa, and Maine. The Fox polls were conducted by a bipartisan team of pollsters from Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company (R). The AARP poll in Ohio, the first in a battleground series that AARP is commissioning from its own bipartisan team of Impact Research and Fabrizio Ward, is notable because Impact Research was the primary polling firm for the 2020 Biden campaign while Fabrizio Ward was the lead pollster in Trump’s three presidential efforts. (None of these polls were conducted in Michigan, as it is the one key state yet to hold its primary.)
New York Times/Siena polling showed that freshman Sen. Jon Ossoff had a 13-point lead over Rep. Mike Collins in Georgia, 56 to 43 percent, and former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was running 7 points ahead of former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley in North Carolina. In the other nine surveys, the races were within 4 points.
While some have suggested that the polls collectively indicate the Senate is out of reach for Democrats, I would quibble with that characterization; a Democratic majority is not out of reach, but they would need a lot of breaks. My National Journal colleague Jeff Dufour looked at this issue in his column over the weekend.
Having watched about 26 midterm elections since I first started working in, around, and covering Congress and races for the Senate and House, none come to mind that are as volatile as this one. It doesn’t look like we’ll get back to “normal” any time soon.