Republicans’ big Senate mess
The Senate is supposed to be the staid chamber of Congress. But just as nobody got that message to the Republicans in Alabama who rallied around Roy Moore, no one has filled in the Republicans in West Virginia who have taken a shine to Don Blankenship.
Blankenship is running in a primary there for the chance to go head to head in November with Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democratic incumbent, whose seat Republicans were once confident they could snatch. President Donald Trump won the state by 42 points.
But Blankenship, a former coal magnate, has serious blemishes. Make that pocks. Actually, gaping, oozing sores: He served a year in federal prison for conspiring to violate safety rules, after 29 of his miners died in a 2010 explosion. He’s campaigning while on probation.
Oh, and his company settled a lawsuit that accused it of contaminating West Virginians’ drinking water even as he installed a pristine private supply of water for his own home. He’s a knight in toxic armor — and certainly not the Manchin-slaying hero that party bigwigs had in mind.
“If he’s the nominee, that race is off the table,” a prominent Republican strategist told me, adding that groups affiliated with the party are poised to spend whatever it takes to stop Blankenship. The candidate, in turn, is comparing that outside interference to Russia’s attempted corruption of the presidential election.
West Virginia may be the wackiest theater in the battle between Republicans and Democrats for control of the Senate, but across the country, the fight is getting messier, Republicans are confronting unanticipated obstacles and the outcome is growing harder to predict.
Republicans have a mere 51-49 advantage in the chamber, and they’re still favored to hold onto that majority, a state of play that confounds casual observers, who wonder how a predicted blue wave wouldn’t wash away such a tiny gap.
Easy: Of the 35 senators who are up for re-election, 26 are Democrats and only nine are Republicans. Ten of those Democrats are defending their seats in states that Trump won in 2016, and in five of those states — West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Indiana and Missouri — the president’s victory margin was enormous and he maintains an approval rating significantly higher than his national number. Meanwhile, only one Republican, Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, is defending his seat in a state that Hillary Clinton won.
But recent developments in West Virginia and elsewhere underscore how unsettled and unpredictable the situation is. Sen. Bob Corker, R-tenn., who is retiring at the end of this year, went out of his way last week to praise the Democrat running for his seat, Phil Bredesen, the former governor and Nashville mayor.
“He was a very good mayor, a very good governor, a very good businessperson,” Corker said at an event in Washington, adding that he wouldn’t campaign for Bredesen’s likely Republican opponent, Rep. Marsha Blackburn; that Republican donors in Tennessee were hosting fundraisers for Bredesen; and that Bredesen probably had a 6-point lead in the race. A Tennessee poll from late last month put him 10 points ahead of Blackburn, but political analysts say it’s too early to read much into such surveys. Tennessee remains a red state.
Even so, Trump tweeted an endorsement of Blackburn the day after Corker fawned over Bredesen. The Washington Post reported that the president also called her to buck her up and that Sen. Mitch Mcconnell, the Republican majority leader, took Corker aside on the Senate floor to register his displeasure.
Displeasure is too mild a word for Republican leaders’ feelings about what’s happening in Missouri. The scandals enveloping the state’s Republican governor, Eric Greitens, have utterly overshadowed the Senate campaign of the state’s Republican attorney general, Josh Hawley, an up-and-comer who was supposed to topple Sen. Claire Mccaskill, the Democratic incumbent.
It would take an entire column to explain the Greitens saga, which involves bondage and accusations of blackmail. It’s what you’d get if you mashed up “House of Cards” and “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Hawley has implored him to resign. The state’s Republican lawmakers are contemplating impeachment. And Mccaskill looks less worried about her re-election by the day.
Some candidates can’t catch breaks. Mccaskill has some magical mitt for collecting them. Although Missouri leans heavily Republican, she defended her Senate seat six years ago against self-appointed sexologist Todd Akin, he of the crackpot distinction between legitimate and illegitimate rape. This time around, her gift is her state’s Republican meltdown.
“She is definitely the luckiest woman in politics,” Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told me. Duffy now gives Democrats a 40 to 45 percent chance of a Senate majority.
Mccaskill is plenty enterprising, too, and has raised much, much more money than Hawley, whose favor with party leaders is fading fast. “He’s this young guy and he’s allergic to hard work,” groused the Republican strategist I mentioned before.
The fundraising success of many Democratic Senate candidates speaks to heightened passions among Trump-apoplectic Democrats, but it also reflects deepening pessimism among Trump-anxious Republicans, who fear that the nonstop presidential melodrama will drag down the party’s Senate and House candidates.
Another prominent Republican strategist noted that donations to national groups that will help the party’s Senate candidates have accelerated and told me that big donors will increasingly flock to the Senate races because they rightly estimate that Republicans’ chances there will be much better than in the House.
“I’m not lying awake at night fearful that we’re going to lose the Senate,” he said, “but I think it’s way more complicated than people think it is.”
Republicans got a sole piece of great news a few weeks ago, when Rick Scott, the Republican governor of Florida, announced his candidacy against Sen. Bill Nelson, the state’s Democratic incumbent. Scott can bankroll much of his own campaign, potentially freeing outside groups to spend on Senate races elsewhere.
In Texas, for example. A poll published recently put Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican incumbent, only 3 points ahead of Rep. Beto O’rourke, his Democratic challenger. That was within the margin of error.
If I had to place a bet, I’d bet on Cruz, because Texas is Texas and he’ll benefit from the fact that the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, is also running for re-election and has a crackerjack voter-turnout operation.
But O’rourke’s advance is at the very least a metaphor: Nothing can be taken for granted. “It’s a very weird year,” Duffy said. In a very weird country, at least these days.