Why the GOP may lose everything
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock says that when he first announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, he “didn’t know what Montana and the country was going to look like in the short period thereafter.” With the COVID-19 crisis, all his time has been taken up by being a governor, not a candidate. So far, that has only helped him in his campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines.
In Maine, House Speaker Sara Gideon, a Democrat seeking to end the long career of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, says the pandemic has “laid bare the inequities that already existed” and underscored the need for a “vision of what it means to work together and for each other instead of trying to sow divisiveness.” This brings home Gideon’s case against Collins’ willingness to ally with President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., two of the most divisive figures in American politics.
Colorado’s former Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with a good chance of ousting incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, expresses a sense of gravity about this campaign that he never felt in his races for mayor of Denver or governor.
“I will never forgive myself if I lose it,” Hickenlooper told me, “and I will do everything in my power, I will work as hard as humanly possible, to make sure that I win this, just because I feel in my bones that our democracy has been so weakened by this relentless partisanship, the constant division.”
And Democrat Cal Cunningham, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan facing incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, says that many North Carolinians today feel “an urgency that did not exist prior to March of this year” about “health coverage ... about jobs, the economy.”
Issues that were once “percolating for many” are now “personal for everyone.”
If Bullock, Gideon, Hickenlooper and Cunningham all win, Democrats will likely take over the U.S. Senate and ending McConnell’s days as majority leader.
And they are not the only challengers with a decent shot at Republican seats. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has been running ahead of Republican Sen. Martha McSally, and Republicans face vulnerabilities in Iowa, Georgia, possibly Kansas, and perhaps even in South Carolina. McConnell, though favored, faces a spirited opponent in Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot. Only one Democratic incumbent, Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, is an underdog.
Having disastrously bungled the pandemic, Trump is not only falling well behind former Vice President Joe Biden in the polls; he could also be creating a tidal wave that would give Democrats unified control of the federal government’s elected branches.
Hickenlooper and Gideon are running in states Trump lost in 2016, but the president’s increasing vulnerability in Arizona and North Carolina could open the way for Kelly and Cunningham.
A poll last week by Montana State University showed that Trump, who won Montana by 20 points in 2016, led Biden by just under 6%. The same survey found Bullock with a 70% approval rating for his handling of the pandemic and a seven-point lead over Daines.
My conversations with four of the top Senate challengers suggested that the virus crisis has reinforced core arguments that helped the Democrats win the House in 2018, particularly around access to health care, while also increasing the saliency of inequality — in both economic and health outcomes — as a mainstream concern.
At the same time, Trump’s brutal belligerence has turned Democratic candidates into missionaries of concord. This allows them to be implicitly critical of the president and reach out to his one-time supporters at the same time.
Thus Cunningham speaks of being “a champion for everybody” and criticizes a Republican Senate where “partisan considerations are overriding institutional considerations.” Gideon notes that she reorganized the seating of the Maine House of Representatives to mix Republicans and Democrats. “When they sit next to each other,” she said, “they see each other as human beings.”
For Hickenlooper, a time of “suffering in every direction” raises the most basic questions about life — and politics.
“You’re never going to be able to control what life throws your way, but you can control whether it makes you better, or stronger, how you respond to it,” Hickenlooper said. “I think this is true of the country. We’re going to have to use this experience to be a stronger, more unified country.”
If the GOP does lose everything, it will be because the Trumpian circus-plus-horrorshow is entirely off key for an electorate that has so much to be serious about.