38 Republicans decided not to run again this year. Professional prognosticators like the Cook Political Report or Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball think that more than 60 Republican House seats are in serious danger of flipping from red to blue. Democrats only need to flip 23 to make a majority. According to Gallup, the party of a president whose approval rating sits below 50% loses an average of 36 House seats in an off-year election. [Keep reading for a few crucial races to watch.] For Republicans, the numbers are much better in the Senate, where only three GOP senators decided to retire. Thirty-five Senate seats are on the ballot, and 25 of them are in the hands of Democrats. Ten of those Democrats represent states that Trump carried two years ago. This disparity between the number of states Democrats and Republicans have to defend has been the “Fun Electoral Fact” for Republicans all year, consoling them amid all the talk about a blue electoral wave. The Senate, split 51-49, is the Republican dike. Ask any Republican. Go ahead. Others aren’t so sure. In politics, a “wave” is a term of art with no fixed definition. A large number of Democratic gains in the House – say, 40 seats or more – would almost certainly mean that enthusiasm and voter turnout among Democrats were so great that all the close races would break their way and the Senate would flip too. A wave election lifts all boats: Races that seemed all but lost become victories. As the year has gone on, the blue wave has seemed more and more plausible. Less so in the Senate than in the House, but consider those three retiring Republican senators. Each represents a Republican state – Tennessee,
Utah, Arizona – yet this year only Utah is all-but-certain to stay Republican as the other two are real races with strong Democratic challengers. Once upon a time, most of those Democratic Senate seats in Trump states were considered ripe for Republican picking, and most still are, but several – West Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, and Indiana – are trending blue. The battle for the Senate, says Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, will be a “knife fight.” What are the stakes? Very high, for Democrats and Republicans alike. A Democratic Senate would stop Trump’s single most consequential achievement dead in its tracks: Not another federal judge (much less a Supreme Court justice) with conservative leanings would take the bench until at least 2021. Meanwhile, impeachment aside, a Democratic House would become a dizzying cineplex of round- the-clock hearings and investigations into executive branch malfeasance, real and imaginary. Already Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee say they have a list of 22 investigations they hope to undertake. The mischief that can be done during a standoff between the executive and legislative branches is hard to calculate. But it’s enough, certainly, to paralyze whatever reforms are being enacted in agencies and departments under the Trump administration. We’ve seen it happen before. Bill Clinton arrived in Washington in 1993 with a Democratic Senate and House, and when both chambers fell into Republican hands in the next off- year election, the agenda that Clinton had campaigned on – an energy tax, nationalized health care – was as dead as the dodo.
American Consequences 31
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