The stakes in November could not be higher. Even if Joe Biden wins the White House and reinstates decency, his legislative agenda and federal court nominations will be DOA if the GOP still runs the Senate. Mitch McConnell has already said it. In 2019 he told a Kentucky audience, “If I’m still the majority leader of the Senate after next year, none of those (Democratic) things are going to pass the Senate. So think of me as the Grim Reaper.”
But unfortunately for Mitch, Donald Trump is doing everything he can to help Democrats recapture the chamber. If he’s going down, he seems intent on taking Mitch and his motley crew down with him.
Not long ago, it was hard to imagine how Democrats could snatch the Senate in 2020. Trump’s servile party has a 53-47 majority, and if we rightly assume that Democrat Doug Jones loses in Alabama (he won in a fluke last time, running against an accused child molester), that means that if Biden were to win the presidency, Democrats would need to defeat four Republican incumbents in order to get to 50-50 (with Biden’s veep breaking the tie votes). Four seemed like a very high bar – especially since two of those wins would have to happen in red states.
But today, Trump is an anvil roped to Republican necks. His coattails are more tattered then his intellect.
Virtually every polling firm, including Rasmussen (Trump’s fave), shows him trailing Biden nationally by more than 10 points, and the latest Fox News poll shows him not only cratering in the battleground swing states but trailing Biden by a point even in Texas. Which I guess is what happens when a “president,” by dint of rank incompetence and magical thinking, kills off 125,000 Americans in a pandemic and crashes the economy.
Peggy Noonan, the veteran Republican columnist, writes today in The Wall Street Journal: “Something shifted this month. Donald Trump’s hold on history loosened, and may be breaking. In some new way his limitations are being seen and acknowledged, and at a moment when people are worried about the continuance of their country and their own ability to continue within it. He hasn’t been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows.” (Memo to Noonan: Some of us have known this since the dawn of his candidacy.)
Republicans have feared this scenario for a while. Back in April, Whit Ayres, a prominent GOP pollster warned: “The president’s standing in each of these states is every bit as important or more important than the senator’s standing.” That was a diplomatic way of saying that some Senate incumbents on the ballot might pay the price for Trump’s serial failures.
For starters, we’re talking about Republicans Cory Gardner in blue Colorado, Susan Collins (finally!) in blue Maine, Martha McSally in red Arizona (which might go blue for Biden), and Thom Tillis in red North Carolina (where Biden is also polling well). At least two other Republican incumbents appear to be imperiled. Steve Daines in Montana is being challenged by Steve Bullock, the popular Democratic governor; and slavish Trump acolyte Joni Ernst is trailing a rookie Democratic challenger in Iowa, a state that Trump won last time by 9 points.
As one Republican strategist closely involved in Senate races recently told The Washington Post, “It’s a bleak picture right now all across the map, to be honest with you. This whole conversation is a referendum on Trump, and that is a bad place for Republicans to be.” True that. The conversation is all about Trump because he needs it to be all about Trump; his fatally damaged psyche can’t tolerate anything else.
He has basically given up on fighting the pandemic – he’s even cutting the federal funds for testing – and has taken refuge in blather. The grim tally of the jobless continues to spike, and his response to the Black Lives Matter protests has been a racist mix of warmed-over Nixon and banana republic demagoguery. His dark shadow looms over the imperiled senators on the ballot – all of whom, lest we forget, voted during the impeachment trial to keep this menace in office.
At this point, I almost have to wonder whether Trump is doing it on purpose. Is he trying to enlist the Senate Republicans in a suicide pact? I entertained that thought yesterday when the news broke that the Trump regime has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to kill off Obamacare. Wow. Obamacare has twice been upheld by the high court, but apparently Trump is deaf to that. And it’s politically insane to go after people’s health care in the midst of a pandemic, but apparently Trump is deaf to that, too.
Indeed, Joe Biden highlighted this issue during a speech in Pennsylvania yesterday. He assailed “Trump’s twin legacies – his failure to protect the American people from the coronavirus, and his heartless crusade to take health care protections away from America’s families…I cannot comprehend the cruelty that is driving him to inflict this pain on the very people he is supposed to serve.” (CNN, which lavished hours on Trump’s toxic Tucson show, did not cover Biden’s speech. Just saying.)
Democratic senatorial candidates in Colorado, Maine, Arizona, North Carolina, Arizona, Montana and Iowa should keep asking the Republican incumbents one simple question: “Do you stand with Trump on his mishandling of the pandemic? On killing health care? On crashing the economy? On demagoging the protestors? Yes or no?” Mirroring Biden, Democrats could do a lot worse.
John Thune, the Senate Majority Whip (perhaps only for the rest of this year), is well aware of the problem. He said earlier this week that Senate Republican candidates would be in better shape if Trump can “perform better in terms of his own standing with the voters.” And Trump can indeed perform better with “a change in probably strategy as far as the White House’s messaging is concerned…Not only a message that deals with substance and policy, but I think a message that conveys, perhaps, a different tone.”
A different tone. Yeah right. He’d have more luck teaching a chimp to play the cello.
And that’s why the GOP could lose the Senate in November.