Senate candidates Michael Whatley and Roy Cooper found a policy they both agree on, but now Cooper is asking Whatley to prove he stands behind his position.
On Monday, Whatley told The Washington Examiner that he agrees with members of Congress who believe their colleagues should sell off their individual stocks or place them in a qualified blind trust. Doing so ensures that members of Congress aren’t benefitting from their positions.
“Public servants should never be about personal profit,” Whatley, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, told The Washington Examiner. “If you’re elected to serve, your duty is to the voters and not your portfolio.”
Now Cooper is telling Whatley to put his money where his mouth is.
“If Michael Whatley truly believes public service is about serving North Carolinians and not boosting his own portfolio, he should commit to selling his individual stocks today,” Cooper, the Democratic former governor of North Carolina, said in a news release first provided to McClatchy.
Members of Congress have been debating the ethics of owning individual stocks since at least 2011. At the time, members were shocked to learn that they weren’t liable under insider trading laws, and several members were accused of trading based on insider knowledge.
Since then, laws have been created to stop insider trading among lawmakers, but advocacy groups say those policies don’t go far enough.
In December, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida, filed a discharge petition, to prohibit members from owning individual stocks. That mechanism, if she collects 218 signatures, would force House Speaker Mike Johnson to bring a bill to the floor.
So far she has 80 signatures. Only one is from North Carolina: Rep. Valerie Foushee, a Democrat from Hillsborough.
Nine members of North Carolina’s delegation own widely held investment funds and stocks, and six have widely held investment funds such as mutual funds or large pension funds, but not individual stocks.
Cooper and Whatley are considered the frontrunners to replace Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from Huntersville, who is choosing to retire after a public feud with President Donald Trump over Medicaid coverage in North Carolina. Trump has endorsed Whatley.
Both are required to submit financial disclosures to the Senate Committee on Ethics, offering peeks into how they make a living.
The exact amount that Whatley owns in stocks is hard to ascertain. He’s only required to give ranges for the stocks he owns. Most of his stock holdings are valued between $1,001 and $15,000 or between $15,001 and $50,000. At the bare minimum, he owns more than $200,000, according to his disclosure report. But if his stocks are at the top of the range, what he owns could be well over $1.5 million.
His ethics report also includes the stocks owned by his wife and children, which raises the total much higher.
His investments include pharmaceutical, oil and technology stocks, among other things.
Cooper’s financial disclosures do not show any individually owned stocks, only mutual funds. He supported a ban on lawmakers owning stocks in December, but Whatley has remained quiet on the issue until now.
“Whatley has already profited from policy decisions he championed, eroding what little trust people already have in Washington politicians,” Cooper said in the news release, which linked to an article about Whatley and his family’s stock holdings in oil companies. “I believe candidates must earn the trust of North Carolinians, which is why I didn’t own or trade any individual stocks as Governor, don’t own or trade individual stocks as a candidate, and it’s why I won’t as U.S. Senator, regardless of whether a ban is passed – Michael Whatley should commit to doing the same.”
Early voting is now underway in the March 3 primary election.
Danielle Battaglia is the D.C. correspondent for The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer, leading coverage of North Carolina’s congressional delegation and elections. She also covers the White House. Her career has spanned three North Carolina newsrooms where she has covered crime, courts and local, state and national politics. She has won two McClatchy President’s awards and numerous national and state awards for her work.
It’s 3:58 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, and Graham Platner’s campaign is sending me shirtless photos. I’m about to drive an hour to Ogunquit, Maine to attend Platner’s first town hall since the surfacing of unsavory and offensive deleted Reddit posts kicked off a week of tumultuous headlines for the oyster farmer turned politician, the Bernie Sanders–anointed Democratic front-runner in the senate race to unseat Susan Collins. And in this case, sending half-naked photos to a journalist isn’t the latest scandal—it’s fact-checking backup.
In the two days since Platner’s campaign revealed that, for years, the candidate had a chest tattoo that starkly resembled a “Totenkopf” used in SS insignia and neo-Nazi iconography, the story has lived several online lives. By the time Platner spoke to me about it Wednesday morning, he had already gotten the tattoo covered with a Celtic knot and a dog. In a video posted that day to his campaign Instagram, Platner once again claimed that he only recently learned of the tattoo’s “stark resemblance to a symbol that is used by neo-Nazis,” and that “the idea that I’ve been going around with something like that utterly horrifies me.” The controversy puts a fine point on questions of “cancellation” and accountability that the left has been grappling with for years. In the comments, a tattoo artist and 2023 Acadia National Park artist in residence named Mischa Ylva Ostberg, who uses the pronouns they/them, took credit for the cover-up, writing, “People are capable of change, reflection, and growth. I know his character because he plays a vital role in my small community everyday.”
But in other corners of the internet, the cover-up spawned more controversy. On Bluesky and X, users debated whether the new tattoo might also have neo-Nazi connotations—white supremacists having coopted various runic symbols—and pointed out that a different tattoo, partially visible in an image of Platner from a local news interview, included the numbers 1919. Online sleuths wondered if this could be code for “SS,” S being the 19th letter of the alphabet—but Platner’s full tattoo, a photo of which his campaign shared with Vanity Fair and other outlets, tells a different story. The full picture shows a mountain overlaying crossed pick-axes with the letters TFC, an abbreviation for the Appalachian Mountain Club’s professional White Mountain trail crew (“Trail Fucking Crew”). The tattoo also includes two years: 2002 (when Platner worked the trails) and 1919 (the date the Mountain Club founded its first crew). Amid the tattoo turmoil, the Advocate ran a story looking back at more posts Platner wrote between 2016 and 2021, which “include homophobic slurs, anti-LGBTQ+ jokes, and sexually explicit stories denigrating gay men.” Platner apologized for the posts, calling them the “indefensible” product of having “talked a lot of shit on the internet,” and saying that he had testified earlier this year at a local school board meeting in defense of protection policy for LGBTQ+ students.
Around 600 people turned out for Platner’s town hall in Ogunquit, population 1,577; many of them traversed rainbow crosswalks on their way into the town’s Leavitt Theater. A torrential downpour gave way to a golden sunset. As the crowd filed into the 500-seat theater and its overflow areas, country musician Griffin William Sherry sang and played guitar, including a song called “We Will Fight”—which he said he’d written for his wife on June 25, 2022, the day after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
Soon, Platner’s mother, restaurant owner and former DNC delegate Leslie Harlow, took the mic. It was her first time at one of Platner’s town halls. “Geez, Ma,” she joked, imagining her son’s response. “We’ve been doing this for a month. What?” She shared stories of Platner’s upbringing, including his parents’ dismay when he told them, following his high school graduation at the onset of the Iraq War, that he had enlisted. With visible emotion, she described how disappointed she was to see politicians fail to show up to Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps Base in North Carolina where families could visit servicepeople between deployments.
Representative Adam Schiff was mingling his way through a friendly crowd at a Democratic barbecue when the hecklers arrived—by boat. Schiff and two other Senate candidates, Representatives Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, convened on the back patio of a country club overlooking the port of Stockton, California. Schiff spoke first. “It’s such a beautiful evening,” he said, thanking the host, local Democratic Representative Josh Harder.
It was hard to know what to make of the protest vessel, except that its seven passengers were yelling things as Schiff began his remarks. And not nice things. Although their words were tough to decipher, the flag flying over the craft made clear where they were coming from: FUCK BIDEN. Notably, of the three candidates, Schiff was the only one I heard singled out by name—or, in one case, by a Donald Trump–inspired epithet (“Shifty”) and, in another, a four-letter profanity similar to the congressman’s surname (clever!).
Schiff is used to such derision and says it proves his bona fides as a worthy Trump adversary. Given the laws of political physics today, it also bodes well for his Senate campaign. The principle is simple: to be despised by the opposition can yield explicit benefits. This is especially true when you belong to the dominant party, as Schiff does in heavily Democratic California. One side’s villain is the other side’s champion. Adam Schiff embodies this rule as well as any politician in the country.
In recent years, Schiff has had a knack for eliciting loud and at times unhinged reactions from opponents, even though he himself tends to be quite hinged. The 45th president tweeted about Schiff 328 times, as tallied by Schiff’s office. Tucker Carlson called the congressman “a wild-eyed conspiracy nut.” A group of QAnon followers circulated a report in 2021 that U.S. Special Forces had arrested Schiff and that he was in a holding facility awaiting transfer to Guantánamo Bay for trial (the report proved erroneous). Before Schiff had a chance to meet his new Republican colleague Anna Paulina Luna, of Florida, she filed a resolution condemning his “Russia hoax investigation” and calling for him to potentially be fined $16 million (the resolution failed).
This onslaught has also been good for business, inspiring equal passion in Schiff’s favor. A former prosecutor, he became an icon of the left for his emphatic critiques of Trump’s behavior in office, including as the lead House manager in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country,” Schiff said as part of his closing argument, a speech that became a rallying cry of the anti-Trump resistance. (“I am in tears,” the actor Debra Messing wrote on Twitter.) Opponents gave grudging respect. “They nailed him,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told Mitt Romney, according to an account in a new Romney biography by my colleague McKay Coppins. Schiff’s own Trump-era memoir, Midnight in Washington, became a No. 1 New York Times best seller.
Representative Adam Schiff speaks to supporters at a barbecue hosted by fellow Democratic House member Josh Harder in Stockton, California. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)
You could draw parallel lines charting the levels of vilification that Schiff has encountered and his name recognition and fundraising numbers. Both the good and the grisly have boosted Schiff’s media profile, which he has adeptly cultivated. Schiff has come in at or near the top of the polls in the Senate race so far, along with Porter. A Berkeley IGS survey released last week revealed him as the best-known of the candidates vying for the late Dianne Feinstein’s job; 69 percent of likely voters said they could render an opinion of him (40 percent favorable, 29 percent unfavorable). He raised $6.4 million in the most recent reporting period, ending the quarter with $32 million cash on hand, or $20 million more than the runner-up, Porter. That’s more than any Senate candidate in the country this election cycle, and a massive advantage in a state populated by about 22 million registered voters covering some of the nation’s most expensive media markets.
“He’s become an inspiration and a voice of reason for many of us,” Becky Espinoza, of Stockton, told me at the Democratic barbecue.
Or at least the sector of “many of us” who don’t want him dead.
Schiff started getting threats a few months into Trump’s presidency. “Welcome to the club,” Nancy Pelosi, his longtime mentor, told him. He endured anti-Semitic screeds online and actual bullets sent to his office bearing the names of Schiff’s two kids. “I can’t stand the fact that millions of people hate you; they just hate you,” Schiff’s wife, Eve—yes, Adam and Eve—told her husband after the abuse started. “They just hate you.”
No one deserves to be subjected to such menace, and the threats can be particularly chilling for a member of Congress who would not normally have a protective detail. (Schiff’s office declined to discuss its security staffing and protocols.) Schiff is not shy about repeating these ugly stories, however. There’s an element of strategic humblebragging to this, as he is plainly aware that being a target of the MAGA minions can be extremely attractive to the Democratic voters he needs.
In June, congressional Republicans led a party-line vote to censure Schiff for his role in investigating Trump. As then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy attempted to preside, Democrats physically rallied around Schiff on the House floor chanting “shame” at McCarthy. On the day of his censure, Schiff was interviewed on CNN and twice on MSNBC; the next morning he appeared on ABC’s The View. “Whoever it was that introduced that censure resolution against him probably ensured Adam’s victory,” Representative Mike Thompson, another California Democrat, told me. A few colleagues addressed him that day as “Senator Schiff.”
I dropped in on Schiff periodically over the past few months as he traversed the chaos of the Capitol, weighed in on Trump’s legal travails, and campaigned across California. What did a Senate candidacy look like for a Trump-era cause célèbre who is revered and reviled with such vigor? I found it a bit odd to see Schiff out in the political wild—glad-handing, granny-hugging, and, at the barbecue in late August, nearly knocking a plate of brisket from the grip of an eager selfie-seeker. He has graduated to a full-on news-fixture status, someone perpetually framed by a screen or viewed behind a podium, as if he emerged from his mother’s womb and was dropped straight into a formal courtroom, hearing room, or greenroom setting.
I watched a number of guests in Stockton clutch Schiff’s hand and address him in plaintive tones. “After I stopped crying a little bit, I just wanted to thank him for all he did during impeachment and to just save our democracy,” said Espinoza, following her brief meeting with the candidate.
Nearby, David Hartman, of Tracy, California, put down a paper plate of chicken, pickles, and corn salad and made his way to Schiff. “I just want to shake the man’s hand and thank him,” Hartman told me, which is what he did. So did his wife, Tracy (of Tracy!), who was likewise surprised to find herself in tears.
“I’m like a human focus group,” Schiff told me, describing how strangers approach him at airports. “Sometimes I will have two people come up to me simultaneously. One will say, ‘You are Adam Schiff. I just want to shake your hand. You’re a hero.’ And the other will say, ‘You’re not my hero. Why do you lie all the time?’”
For his first eight terms in Congress, Schiff, 63, was not much recognized beyond the confines of the U.S. Capitol or the cluster of affluent Los Angeles–area neighborhoods he has represented in the House since 2001. “I think, before Trump, if you had to pick one of these big lightning rods or partisan bomb-throwers, you would not pick me,” Schiff told me.
Largely true. Schiff speaks in careful, somewhat clipped tones, with a slight remnant of a Boston accent from his childhood in suburban Framingham, Massachusetts. (His father was in the clothing business and moved the family to Arizona and eventually California.) A Stanford- and Harvard-trained attorney, Schiff gained a reputation as an ambitious but low-key legislator in the House, and a deft communicator in service of his generally liberal positions.
A Fox News reporter and other guests at the barbecue in Stockton.(Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)
After Trump’s election, however, Schiff’s district effectively became CNN, MSNBC, and the network Sunday shows, along with the scoundrel’s gallery of right-wing media that pulverized him hourly. This included a certain Twitter feed. The worst abuse Schiff received started after Trump’s maiden tweet about him dropped on July 24, 2017. This was back in an era of relative innocence, when it was still something of a novelty for a sitting president to attack a member of Congress by name—“Sleazy Adam Schiff,” in this case.
Schiff tweeted back that Trump’s “comments and actions are beneath the dignity of the office.” Schiff would later reveal that he rejected a less restrained rejoinder suggested by Mike Thompson, his California colleague: “Mr. President, when they go low, we go high. Now go fuck yourself.” Anyway, that was six years, two impeachments, four indictments, 91 felony counts, and 327 tweets by Donald Trump about Adam Schiff ago.
“Adam is one of the least polarizing personalities you will ever find,” said another Democratic House colleague, Dan Goldman, of New York. “The reason he’s become such a bogeyman for the Republican Party is simply that he’s so effective.” Goldman served as the lead majority counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, working closely with Schiff. “We originally met in the greenroom of MSNBC in June of 2018,” Goldman told me. (Of course they did.)
Schiff understands that some of the rancor directed at him is performative, and likes to point out the quiet compliments he receives from political foes. Trump used to complain on Twitter that Schiff spent too much time on television—in reality, a source of extreme envy for the then-president. Schiff tells a story about how Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, came to Capitol Hill for a deposition from members of Schiff’s Intelligence committee in 2017. “Kushner comes up to me to make conversation, and to ingratiate himself,” Schiff told me. “And he said, ‘You know, you do a great job on television.’ And I said, ‘Well, apparently your father-in-law doesn’t think so,’ and [Kushner] said, ‘Oh, yes, he does.’” (Kushner didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
One of Trump’s most fervent bootlickers, Senator Lindsey Graham, walked up to Schiff in a Capitol hallway during the first impeachment trial and told him how good of a job he was doing. Schiff, who relayed both this and the Kushner stories in his memoir, says he gets that from other Republicans, too, usually House members he’s worked with—including some who lampoon him in front of microphones. A few House Republicans apologized privately to Schiff, he told me, right after they voted to censure him.
“The apologies are always accompanied by ‘You’re not going to say anything about this, are you?’” Schiff said. When I urged Schiff to name names, to call out the hypocrites, he declined.
I asked Schiff if he would prefer the more anonymous, pre-2017 version of himself running in this Senate campaign, as opposed to the more embattled, death-threat-getting version, who nonetheless enjoys so many advantages because of all the attention. He paused. “I’d rather the country didn’t have to go through all this with Donald Trump,” he said, skirting a direct answer.
As with many members of Congress seeking a promotion or an exit, Schiff gives off a strong whiff of being done with the place. “The House has become kind of a basket case,” he told me, citing one historic grandiloquence that he was recently privy to—the episode in which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called her colleague Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor.
“And I remember thinking to myself, There used to be giants who served in this body,” Schiff said. He sighed, as he does.
I met with Schiff at the Capitol in early October, amid the usual swirl of weighty events: Feinstein had died three days earlier; news that Governor Gavin Newsom would appoint the Democratic activist Laphonza Butler as her replacement came the night before. That afternoon, Republican Representative Matt Gaetz had filed his fateful “motion to vacate” that would result in the demise of McCarthy’s speakership the next day. Schiff stood just off the House floor, colleagues passing in both directions, Republicans looking especially angry, and reporters gathering around Schiff in a small scrum.
No matter what happens next November, Schiff is not running for reelection in the House. He told me he has long believed that he’d be a better fit for the Senate anyway, where he has been coveting a seat for years. Schiff said he considered running in 2016, after the retirement of the incumbent Barbara Boxer (who was eventually succeeded by Kamala Harris).
A Democrat will almost certainly win the 2024 California race. Senate contests in the state follow a two-tiered system in which candidates from both parties compete in a March primary, and then the two top finishers face off in November, regardless of their affiliation. In addition to Schiff, Porter, and Lee, the former baseball star Steve Garvey, known also for his various divorce and paternity scandals, recently entered the race as a Republican. A smattering of long shots are also running, including the requisite former L.A. news anchor and requisite former Silicon Valley executive. Butler announced on October 19 that she would not seek the permanent job.
To varying degrees, all of the three leading Democratic candidates have national profiles. Lee, who has represented her Oakland-area district for nearly 25 years, previously chaired both the Congressional Progressive and Black Caucuses. Porter was elected to Congress in 2018 and has gained a quasi-cult following as a progressive gadfly who has a knack for conducting pointed interrogations of executives and public officials that go rapidly viral. A few of her fans were so excited to meet Porter at the Stockton barbecue that three actually spilled drinks on her—this according to the congresswoman, speaking at an event a few days later.
Schiff, Porter, and Lee all identify as progressive Democrats on most issues, though Schiff tends to be more hawkish on national security. He voted to authorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and supported the 2011 U.S. missile strikes against Libya. Lee, who opposed all three, recently criticized Schiff’s foreign-policy views as “part of the status quo thinking” in Washington. (Porter was not in office then.) Schiff expressed “unequivocal support for the security and the right of Israel to defend itself” after last month’s attacks by Hamas. Lee has been more critical of the Israeli government, and called for a cease-fire immediately after the Hamas attacks. As for Porter, she has been a rare progressive to focus her response on America’s Iran policy, which she called lacking and partly to blame for the attacks.
Although Schiff is best known for his work as a Trump antagonist—and happily dines out on that—he is also wary of letting the former president define him entirely. “This is bigger than Trump,” he reminds people whenever the conversation veers too far in Trump’s inevitable direction. Schiff dutifully pivots to more standard campaign themes, namely the “two hugely disruptive forces” he says have shaped American life: “the changes in our economy” and “the changes in how we get our information.” He reels off the number of cities in California that he’s visited, events he’s done, and endorsements he’s received as proof that he is a workmanlike candidate, not just a citizen of the greenroom.
A group of hecklers in a boat floats by near the barbecue. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)
Recently, he lamented that many of his Republican colleagues are now driven by a “perverse celebrity” that he believes the likes of Greene and Boebert have acquired through their Trump-style antics and ties to the former president. I pointed out to Schiff that he, too, has received a lot of Trump-driven recognition. Doesn’t being affiliated with Trump, whether as an ally or an adversary, have benefits for both sides?
“Well, I don’t view it that way at all,” Schiff said. “I don’t view it as having any kind of equivalence. On one hand, we’re trying to defend our democracy. And on the other hand, we have these aiders and abettors of Trump by these vile performance artists. It’s quite different.”
Schiff’s biggest supporter has been Pelosi, who endorsed him over two other members of her own caucus and delegation. This included Lee, whom Pelosi described to me as “like a political sister.” I spoke by phone recently with the former speaker, who was effusive about Schiff and scoffed at any suggestion that he benefited from his resistance to Trump and the counter-backlash that ensued. “If what’s-his-name never existed, Adam Schiff would still be the right person for California,” Pelosi said. It was one of two occasions in our interview in which she refused to utter the word “Trump.”
“I just don’t want to say his name,” she explained. “Because I worry that he’s going to corrode my phone or something.”
In one of my conversations with Schiff, I asked him this multiple-choice question: Who had raised the most money for him—Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, or Donald Trump? My goal was to get Schiff to acknowledge that, without Trump, he would be nowhere near as well known, well financed, or well positioned to potentially represent the country’s most populous state in the Senate.
“I’m not sure how to answer that,” he said. After a pause, he picked himself. “I am my own biggest fundraiser,” he declared. Okay, I said, but wasn’t Trump the single biggest motivator for anyone to donate?
“It’s the whole package,” Schiff maintained, ceding nothing. He then made sure to mention the person who’s been “most formative in helping shape my career and phenomenally helpful in my campaign—Nancy Pelosi.” He was in no rush to give what’s-his-name any credit.
“He did this for one reason and one reason only, to throw you off your game.” That’s what I told Hillary Clinton backstage at Washington University in October 2016, moments away from her second presidential debate with Donald Trump. Two days prior, the world had learned, thanks to the Access Hollywood tape, that Trump liked to assert power by assaulting women. Trump retaliated by showing up at a pre-debate appearance with women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault. “Yeah, I got that,” Clinton responded dryly to my pep talk. “The great news is that it didn’t work,” I insisted. She had been through worse and I thought she would be okay, but it was my job, as the campaign’s communications director, to make sure of it. She mustered a serene smile, folded her hands, and slowly shook her head. “Nope. Didn’t work.”
Gretchen Whitmer, too, has dealt with boorish men, like one on the floor of the Michigan Senate who leaned over her to say something “very inappropriate.” The man was older, but she was the minority leader and senior to him. “Keep in mind, I outrank this guy, he’s looming over me, and of course, I am the one who has to go through all the mental gymnastics about how I respond to his offensive comment,” she said in a lament familiar to all women. She stood, waiting to speak until she could look him in the eye, and said forcefully but with a smile, “What the fuck is wrong with you? You can’t talk to me that way.”
Whitmer didn’t have the pressure of considering how millions of TV viewers—and voters—might judge her ability to withstand the pressure of being president on this interaction. (Clinton would later speculate that people might have liked to see some fire from her in responding to Trump pacing behind her on the debate stage, but in the moment what was most critical was for her to keep her cool.) For Whitmer, that encounter in the state Senate was seminal. She would not quietly tolerate misogynistic behavior as women before her had to do. Her lewd male colleague learned a lesson other foes—including Trump—would come to know: Whitmer doesn’t go looking for trouble, but if you come for her, she will punch you in the mouth.
It is a disservice to Whitmer that she is perhaps known more for outlandish things men have done to her—showing up at her home and office wielding guns, voting to strip her of her emergency powers to manage the pandemic, plotting to kidnap and assassinate her—than for her political acumen and what she has accomplished. But as a woman leader who came into the national spotlight during the Trump era, combating the torrent of misogynistic energy the 2016 campaign unleashed in the world has been a defining feature of Whitmer’s job. I see Whitmer battling the same forces Clinton faced but am encouraged. This time the men who tried to stop the woman are paying for their actions. Republican legislative leaders in Michigan who fought Whitmer lost control of the legislature. Many of the plotters are in jail. Even Trump—who tormented both Clinton and Whitmer—continues to face consequences as his legal troubles mount.
Whitmer recently commented that the country “is long overdue for a strong female chief executive”—begging the question of whether America will elect a woman front and center while asserting that a woman would do the job better than a man. And no, Whitmer is not planning a primary challenge to Joe Biden this time around. She will be busy raising money for Biden, however, along with 2024 House and Senate candidates, through her just-launched Fight Like Hell PAC.
I am not one of the people who buys into the self-actualizing bullshit that a woman can’t win the presidency. Clinton proved it’s possible. She got more votes. Having interviewed Whitmer for Showtime’s The Circus and based on my three decades in the political trenches, I could see she had the talent, drive, and toughness to be a solid national candidate. But earlier this year, I headed to Michigan to pressure-test that notion by observing how those qualities came to be and what all of it may say about Whitmer’s—or any woman’s—chances of being elected president.
Whitmer sets her alarm for 5:02 a.m. every morning. Not 5 a.m. 5:02 a.m. I made sure to arrive early at her residence in Lansing as I had met her enough times to know that if you show up on time, you will be late. Nevertheless, the governor was already striding down the hallway—ready to start her 10 a.m. childcare roundtable event at 9:50—and calling out “Hi, Jen!” as I came through the door.
The week I spent trailing her in Michigan was a blur of activity. On Tuesday, Whitmer signed a $150 million supplemental appropriations bill that the state legislature had passed with historic speed. The next day, she signed a bill to move up Michigan’s presidential primary. Thursday was a childcare event, followed by appearances before legislators considering new economic bills and a Galentine’s Day reception at her home. She rolled out a new policy in Detroit on Friday to benefit geographically and economically disadvantaged businesses, gave a speech to a group of more than 1,000 educators, and reached a deal with the legislature on a major new tax plan.
More recently, when three students were killed at a mass shooting at Whitmer’s beloved alma mater of Michigan State, she said the time for only thoughts and prayers was over and moved forward a gun safety package the legislature approved.
Whitmer describes herself as a progressive Democrat, but observing her up close, I see her core ideology as getting shit done. At the Galentine’s Day reception, she remarked that “if you want to get something done, give it to a busy woman.” Whitmer’s office has a lot of busy women—the four-person senior team is all female—and the operation seems to be in constant motion, yet calm and empowered. Their demeanor does not change in Whitmer’s presence, and they don’t shy away from telling her tough truths. It is a clarity too often lacking in political organizations; Whitmer’s team operates with a speed and confidence I rarely see. As a former aide who remains close to Whitmer put it to me, no matter what the issue is, the process for moving forward is always the same: “Find the partners, build the coalition, get the thing done.”
First elected to the Michigan House of Representatives in 2000, at age 29, Whitmer has never lost an election. She next served for nearly a decade in the Michigan Senate, becoming the state’s first female Senate minority leader. “Anyone who understands governing and politics respects her ability,” Jeff Timmer, a Michigan-based political strategist and erstwhile Republican who once produced television ads against Whitmer when she ran for the Michigan House, told me.
After Whitmer was term-limited out of the state Senate in 2014, she thought she was done with electoral politics. As she describes it, a number of powerful men abusing the public trust compelled her to get back into politics starting in 2015, when she finished the term of the Ingham County prosecutor in Lansing who had been forced out for—wait for it—being part of a sex-trafficking ring. It was there Whitmer signed a warrant for Larry Nassar, the US women’s gymnastics team doctor later convicted of sexually abusing hundreds of female athletes. Whitmer went into the 2016 election having decided to run for governor two years later. She thought Clinton would win Michigan and the White House. After Trump won both, she felt more urgency. “I filed for office on the first possible day and spent the next two years campaigning.” She won in 2018 by nearly 10 points.
It matters that Whitmer did not have the burden of being Michigan’s first female governor. That distinction goes to Jennifer Granholm, now secretary of energy under Biden, who was elected in 2002 and won re-election in 2006. There’s a singular alienation and judgment women first through the door encounter. (For the most current example, witness the constant headwinds Kamala Harris faces as the first woman and first person of color to be vice president.)
Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer celebrate during an election night watch party at MotorCity Casino Hotel on November 09, 2022 in Detroit, Michigan.By Brandon Bell/Getty Images.
When Kyrsten Sinema campaigned for the Senate as “an independent voice for Arizona,” her volunteers didn’t take that literally. Perhaps they heard what they wanted to hear. Ana Doan, a retired teacher, thought Sinema would bring fresh energy to Washington as Arizona’s first openly LGBTQ senator. Devina Alvarado, a young Costco forklift driver, thought Sinema would defend women’s rights from Donald Trump. Michael (identified by his middle name to avoid retaliation) admired that Sinema had made it out of poverty after experiencing homelessness as a child, as he did. Each from a different corner of Arizona, they were all proud to have volunteered to get Sinema elected, proud of the doors they’d knocked and calls they’d made, proud to have had her glossy purple-and-yellow literature scattered in their home or on the floor of their car. But their pride had curdled long before Sinema announced she was leaving the Democratic Party last Friday.
So far, both the White House and Sinema’s Senate colleagues have been conciliatory, praising her legislative skill and acting as if little will change following her switch. (Sinema will still caucus with the Democrats.) Although her influence will diminish in a forthcoming 51–49 chamber, Democrats can ill afford to make Sinema a pariah. When reached for comment about the switch, Sinema’s press secretary told me in an email, “Kyrsten’s approach remains the same from when she first ran for Senate,” and directed me to a sleek video Sinema released on Friday: “I’m gonna be the same person I’ve always been,” the senator said.
But many of her most dedicated supporters don’t see things that way. I spoke with dozens of Sinema’s former volunteers from across Arizona, some of whom I managed in 2018 as a field organizer for the Arizona Democratic Party. What they’ve described to me is a feeling more raw and pained than mere disagreement over policies. Arizona Democrats are used to that; many have Republicans and independents in their family. They’re used to talking through differences. What they cannot forgive is the feeling that Sinema was not straight with them.
Doan, the teacher, had worked on a lot of campaigns in the border town of Nogales. She had just retired when Sinema announced her run, and she threw herself into the Senate race. Sinema was smart, well-spoken, a member of the LGBTQ community, and a fundraising powerhouse. In previous elections, Doan had begged the state party to do more phone banking in Spanish, and she didn’t like that phone bankers rushed older Latino voters who had questions about important issues. Things were different on Sinema’s campaign. Doan could have phone-bank lists brought to the houses of other volunteers, so they could make calls from the comfort of their own home.
She was thrilled when Sinema won, but her excitement was short-lived. Sinema, in her view, started spending too much time with the Big Business people who had funded her campaign and not enough time among the working-class folks who’d made phone calls for her. Doan told me it hurt to watch her senator block positive initiatives that other Democrats wanted to pass. “She made an idiot out of me, and I made an idiot out of all the people I spoke to,” Doan said. She said she wished Sinema had run as an independent in 2018, so people knew who she really was.
Alvarado, the forklift driver, had never volunteered on a political campaign before. She canvassed for Sinema a few days a week after finishing work and on the weekends too, always wearing her pink Planned Parenthood shirt. Alvarado couldn’t believe it when Sinema said she thought protecting the filibuster was essential to protecting women’s rights. When Sinema comes up in conversation these days, Alvarado’s fiancé teases her. “He knows I’m super salty that I volunteered for her,” she told me. “I for sure look forward to canvassing for her opponent.”
Michael considered Sinema to be a personal hero when he started volunteering on her campaign in Phoenix. A few years before, he’d been homeless, just as she had been. But Michael felt betrayed in March of 2021, when Sinema voted against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. “Hunger changes people,” he wrote to me in an email. “It made me want to make no one feel that way. I’m guessing it made her protective of what she has.”
Some of the people with the fewest illusions about Sinema were the people furthest away from her. Missa Foy, the chair of the Navajo County Democrats, didn’t even vote for Sinema in the primary. In 2018, she knocked on more than 1,000 doors for a ballot initiative in Navajo County, one of Arizona’s most rural regions. (You can’t walk down the sidewalk to the next house on your list in Navajo—you get back in your truck and drive there.) The voters Foy spoke with would offer her dinner and shelter from the cold, and listen to why they should oppose programs such as expanding school vouchers. Although Foy passed out the Democratic slate of candidates, with Sinema on top, she didn’t talk her up. Foy told me she was grateful for all the things that Democrats, including Sinema, were able to pass through the Senate, but she didn’t think Sinema’s new party preference was earth-shattering stuff. “Our mission is the same as before this news broke,” she said.
When Sinema visited Hopi sovereign land in 2018, Karen Shupla was impressed by her familiarity with water rights and other issues important to Native Americans. A tribal-elections registrar, Shupla is scrupulously neutral, but she does volunteer hundreds of hours to make sure elections run smoothly in a region that Democrats carry by more than two to one. She was unsurprised when the Hopi and other tribes supported Sinema by broad margins, and she was indifferent about Sinema becoming an independent. “It depends on how she deals with Natives from here on out,” Shupla told me. “We don’t want to be guessing which side she’s going to take on matters.”
The volunteer I spoke with over the weekend who still has the most affection for Sinema was the one who knew her personally. Martha “Marty” Bruneau met Sinema when the two of them ran for different seats in the Arizona state legislature in 2000. “I never ran again, and she never lost again,” Bruneau told me. The two of them stayed in touch. Bruneau thinks her fellow progressive Democrats have been exasperating and believes they put too much pressure on Sinema, who votes with Biden more than 90 percent of the time. She told me she doesn’t get Sinema’s reputation for being unapproachable. When I asked her if she’d support Sinema over a Democratic challenger, Bruneau praised Sinema’s record and said she’d have to look at both candidates. This was, in dozens of interviews, the closest that any of Sinema’s former volunteers came to saying they would vote for her again.
Some believe that Sinema is becoming an independent because she can’t win against a primary challenger. Campaigning as an independent worked in Alaska for Lisa Murkowski in 2010, and in 2006 for Joe Lieberman in Connecticut—but they were running in deep-red and deep-blue states, where their party was dominant enough to form a coalition with voters from other parties. Arizona is purple, with roughly equal portions of Republicans, independents, and Democrats. Sinema positioned herself as a lone politician capable of uniting her state, but if she is reelected, it will likely be by forcing an expensive and vicious election.
As David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic last week, Sinema’s move is flashy but comes from a place of weakness. She seems vulnerable to a challenge from not only the left but also the center. Arizona just elected a full slate of establishment Democrats in a year far less favorable than 2018, when Sinema won her seat. It’s unclear if the campaign arm of the Senate Democrats will even support her next time around. What’s more, 2024 is a presidential-election year in an era when split-ticket voting is rare. Although Sinema is an incumbent, her sour relationship with the Arizona Democratic Party means she will not benefit from party infrastructure, for fundraising or mobilization. They don’t know what to expect from her, and she feels no obligation to explain publicly what she believes, or why she believes it. That’s her prerogative. But it’s also the prerogative of people who lent Sinema their time and reputation to now turn against her. In bitter irony, the volunteers who cut their teeth working to get her elected may be among those working the hardest to defeat her.
In the early 2000s, the Japanese racehorse Haru Urara became something of an international celebrity. This was not because of her prowess on the track. Just the opposite: Haru Urara had never won a race. She was famous not for winning but for losing. And the longer her losing streak stretched, the more famous she grew. She finished her career with a perversely pristine record: zero wins, 113 losses.
American politics doesn’t have anyone quite like Haru Urara. But it does have Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams. The two Democrats are among the country’s best known political figures, better known than almost any sitting governor or U.S. senator. And they have become so well known not by winning big elections but by losing them.
Both Abrams and O’Rourke have won some elections, but their name recognition far surpasses their electoral accomplishments. After serving 10 years in the Georgia House of Representatives, Abrams rose to prominence in 2018, when she ran unsuccessfully for the governorship. O’Rourke served three terms as a Texas congressman before running unsuccessfully for the Senate, then the presidency. And they are both running again this year, Abrams for governor of Georgia, O’Rourke for governor of Texas. They are perhaps the two greatest exponents of a peculiar phenomenon in American politics: that of the superstar loser.
The country’s electoral history is littered with superstar losers of one sort or another. Sarah Palin parlayed a vice-presidential nomination into a political-commentary gig, a book deal, and a series of short-lived reality-TV ventures. The landslide defeats that Barry Goldwater and George McGovern suffered made them into ideological icons. I’m talking about something a little more specific: candidates who become national stars in the course of losing a state-level race. There have been far fewer of these. There was William Jennings Bryan, who lost a race for the Senate in 1894, then ran unsuccessfully for the presidency three times. And there was the greatest of all the superstar losers, the one-term representative from Illinois whose unsuccessful Senate campaign nonetheless propelled him to the presidency two years later: Abraham Lincoln.
But never before has such small-scale loserdom so often been sufficient to achieve such large-scale stardom. Apart from Abrams and O’Rourke, there have also been other examples in recent years. Jaime Harrison made an unsuccessful bid for the DNC chairmanship, then an unsuccessful bid to unseat Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, and then a second bid, this time successful, for the DNC chairmanship. MJ Hegar, a Texas Democrat, lost a close House race in 2018, then a not-so-close Texas Senate race in 2020. Amy McGrath likewise used a close loss for a House seat, hers in Kentucky, to launch a Senate campaign against Mitch McConnell that ended in a 20-point loss. This, it seems, is the golden age of the superstar loser.
Superstar loserdom has not been historically tracked, so it’s hard to say with certainty whether it’s really on the rise. But the general sense among the experts I spoke with was that it is. “I do think it is something that we’ve seen more of,” John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College, told me. Why, exactly, is a complicated question, the answer to which involves various conspiring forces, some technological, some political, some demographic.
Let’s start with Lincoln. His 1858 Senate race against Stephen Douglas produced some of the most celebrated rhetoric in American political history, but without the advent of shorthand, stenographers could not have taken down the hours-long Lincoln-Douglas debates word-for-word. Without the country’s new railroad and telegraph networks, those transcripts could not have been transmitted all across the country.
“Earlier in the century, Lincoln couldn’t possibly have become a national figure,” Pitney told me. “He might have made the same brilliant arguments, but nobody outside of Illinois would have ever heard them.” In that sense, his superstar loserdom—and his eventual ascent to the presidency—must be credited as much to the technological advances of the preceding decades as to the power of his speeches.
The same might be said of today’s superstar losers. Online fundraising platforms such as ActBlue and WinRed give even state-level candidates the ability to draw support from—and build a following among—donors all across the country, a phenomenon that David Karpf, a political scientist at George Washington University, told me has nationalized local and state races.
Candidates also have other tools to thrust themselves into the spotlight in a way they never have before—cable TV, podcasts, social media. Both Abrams and O’Rourke are skilled at using social media, and he in particular is a master of the viral moment (see his interruption of a press conference that Governor Greg Abbott held after the Uvalde shooting or his recent outburst at a heckler). Even when the campaign ends, no one can stop you from posting. Unlike a generation ago, “there are lots of avenues in the media today for former candidates to keep having their views known and to continue to be a spokesperson,” Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver, told me. (Neither the Abrams campaign nor the O’Rourke campaign agreed to an interview for this story.)
It would be wrong, though, to chalk up the staying power of superstar losers entirely to their social-media dexterity or telegenic appeal. In the end, “politics is a lot of What have you done for me lately?” Julia Azari, a political scientist at Marquette University, told me. And both Abrams and O’Rourke are also top-notch party builders. O’Rourke may not have secured a Senate seat in 2018, Azari said, but he has been credited with helping Democrats pick up seats in the Texas statehouse. Abrams, meanwhile, has founded an organization to protect voting rights and raised millions of dollars to organize and register voters. Largely as a result, she has been hailed as the driving force behind Democrats’ 2020 success in Georgia. “Anyone can tweet,” Azari said. “But the two of them behind the scenes, I think, have actually walked the walk and helped other people win, helped other people develop their campaign apparatus.”
Even though Abrams and O’Rourke have been helpful to their party, the golden age of superstar loserdom is closely tied to our current era of what Azari has called “weak parties and strong partisanship.” For one thing, vilification of the opposition allows challengers to especially despised candidates to quickly become household names. Even in extreme-long-shot races, donors have shown a willingness to pour vast amounts of money into these boondoggles. McGrath burned $90 million on the way to her 20-point loss. Harrison raised $130 million in his Senate race and fared only slightly better. In his contest against Ted Cruz, O’Rourke raised $80 million, including $38 million in a single quarter, the most of any Senate candidate in history—all to no avail.
Whether because they outperform expectations or because of what they’re up against, these candidates and their supporters are then able to frame the losses as moral victories. Sometimes, as for Abrams supporters, that means framing a defeat as the outcome of an unjust system. Other times, as for O’Rourke supporters, that means framing an unexpectedly good performance in an unfavorable state as a sign of things to come. This, perhaps, is one reason superstar loserdom has so far skewed Democratic, political scientists told me: Democrats desperately want to take advantage of some red states that have been trending purple. Or perhaps the disparity is a product of our post-Trumpian moment. Or perhaps something else entirely.
For now, polls suggest that things are not looking great for either O’Rourke or Abrams. Superstar-loser status, it seems, does not convert easily into electoral wins. Still, this is likely far from the end of superstar loserdom. Both Abrams and O’Rourke emerged during the 2018 midterms cycle, when Democratic voters energized by opposition to Donald Trump turned out in large numbers to break Republicans’ stranglehold on Congress. This year, Republican voters energized by opposition to Joe Biden will probably turn out in large numbers to break Democrats’ majority in Congress. This election could produce Republicans’ answer to Abrams and O’Rourke. But John James, the Michigan conservative who has made two failed bids for the Senate and was the one contemporary Republican superstar loser political scientists mentioned to me, seems poised to win his congressional race this year.
A meaningful defeat may be the most Abrams and O’Rourke can hope for: not so much superstar losers as losers with legacies. But losers have a special utility. Winners have to deal with the unglamorous minutiae of actual governance. They have to figure out how to translate campaign promises into concrete policies. They make mistakes, and people get disillusioned, and approval ratings decline. Losers are spared these indignities. Politically speaking, they don’t survive long enough to let anyone down. Unsullied by compromise, losers can be made into lodestars. Look at Goldwater or McGovern. Everyone, it turns out, can get behind a lost cause.
Most Americans consistently say in polls that they believe that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have mismanaged crime, the border, and, above all, the economy and inflation. But roughly as many Americans say that they view the modern Republican Party as a threat to their rights, their values, or to democracy itself.
Based on Biden’s first two years in office, surveys show that most Americans are reluctant to continue following the policy path he has laid out. But polls also show no enthusiasm for returning to the programs, priorities, and daily chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an NBC national survey released last weekend, half of registered voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and congressional Democrats want to do, but more than that said the same about congressional Republicans and Trump. About half of all voters said they had little, or no, confidence in either party to improve the economy, according to another recent national survey from CNBC.
It remains likely that two negatives will still yield a positive result for Republicans. Most voters with little faith in both sides may ultimately decide simply to give a chance to the party that’s not in charge now, Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct the CNBC survey, told me. That would provide a late boost to the GOP, particularly in House races, where the individual candidates are less well known. But even if that dynamic develops, Campbell said, the Democrats’ ability to hold so much of their coalition over concerns about the broader Republican agenda has reduced the odds that the GOP can generate the kind of decisive midterm gains enjoyed by Democrats in 2018 and 2006, or Republicans in 2010 and 1994.
If Republicans make only modest gains this fall, it will be a clear warning that the party, as currently defined by Trump’s imprint, faces a hard ceiling on its potential support. But even a small Republican gain would send Democrats an equal warning that concerns about the GOP’s values and commitment to democracy may not be sufficient to deny them the White House in 2024. “If I was advising the Biden administration, I would say this is the No. 1 priority: Fix the fundamentals,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of a new book on the 2020 presidential election, The Bitter End, told me. “The biggest priority is inflation, and everything else is secondary.”
By precedent, Democrats should be facing a rout next month. That’s partly because the first midterm election for a new president is almost always tough on his party, but also because most voters express deep pessimism about the country’s current conditions. Despite robust job growth, the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, and tumbling stock markets has generated intense economic dissatisfaction. National surveys, like last week’s CNBC poll, routinely find that on key economic measures, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats by double-digit margins. A September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that nearly three-fifths of voters say Biden’s policies have weakened the economy, compared with only about one-third who say they have strengthened it.
Given those attitudes, academic models predict that Democrats should lose about 40 to 45 House seats next month, Sides recently noted.
Likewise, Democrats are swimming upstream against the growing tendency of voters to align their selections for the Senate with their assessment of the incumbent president. In 2018, Republicans lost every Senate race in a state where Trump’s approval rating in exit polls stood at 48 percent or less; in 2010, Democrats lost 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where then-President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 47 percent or less. This year, Biden’s approval rating does not exceed 45 percent in any of the states hosting the most hotly contested Senate races, and more often stands at only about 40 percent, or even less.
These precedents could ultimately produce Republican gains closer to these historic benchmarks. In polling, the party out of the White House traditionally has gained strength in the final weeks before midterm voting, as most undecided and less-attuned voters break their way.
Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, told me that dynamic could be compounded this year because independent and less partisan voters remain focused on inflation (rather than the issues of abortion and democracy animating Democrats) and express preponderantly negative views about the economy and Biden’s performance. Campbell agreed that for those reasons, independent voters could move against Democrats, especially in House races. The number of blue-leaning House districts where Democrats are nonetheless spending heavily on defense in the final weeks testifies to that likelihood. Several House-race forecasters have recently upped their projections of likely Republican gains closer to the midterm average since World War II for the party out of the White House, about 26 seats.
But even with all of these formidable headwinds, Democrats have remained highly competitive in polling on national sentiment for the House, and in the key Senate battlegrounds (including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). And although Democrats face unexpectedly difficult challenges in governor’s races in New York and Oregon, they remain ahead or well within reach in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To be sure, Democrats are not decisive favorites in any of these races (except for governor of Pennsylvania), but despite the gloomy national climate, neither have any of these contests moved out of their reach.
That’s largely because the party has minimized defections and increased engagement from the key groups in its coalition—including young people, college-educated voters, women, and people of color—by focusing more attention on issues where those voters perceive the Trump-era GOP as a threat. Weak or extreme Republican candidates have eased that work in several of these Senate and governor races.
But another factor allowing Democrats to remain competitive is that, for all the doubts Americans are expressing about their performance, there is no evidence of rising confidence in Republicans.
For instance, the latest national NBC survey, conducted by the bipartisan team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, found that 48 percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who promised to continue Biden’s policies. That sounds ominous for Democrats, but voters were slightly more negative about a candidate who promised to pursue Trump’s policies (50 percent less likely). Only about one-third of independents said they preferred a candidate who would continue the policies of either Biden or Trump. All of that tracks with the survey’s other finding that although half of voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and the Democrats are trying to do, even more said they mostly disagreed with the agenda of congressional Republicans (53 percent) and Trump (56 percent).
Other polls have also found this double-barreled skepticism. The latest CNBC poll (also conducted by the Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies team) found the two parties facing almost identically bleak verdicts on their ability to improve the economy: Only a little more than one-fifth of voters expressed much confidence in each party, while more than three-fourths expressed little or none.
When a Yahoo/YouGov America poll recently asked whether each party was focusing on the right issues, only about 30 percent of voters in each case said yes, and about half said no. Only about one-fourth of women said Republicans have the right priorities; only about one-fourth of men said Democrats have the right priorities. The capstone on all of these attitudes is the consistent finding that most Americans (an identical 57 percent in the Yahoo/You Gov survey) don’t want either Biden or Trump to run again in 2024.
In baseball, they say a tie goes to the runner. The political analogue might be that equally negative assessments of the two parties are likely to break in favor of the side out of power. Campbell points out that while a striking 81 percent of independents say they have little or no confidence in Republicans to improve the economy, that number rises to 90 percent about Democrats. In the NBC survey, voters who said they mostly disagreed with both Biden’s and Trump’s policy agenda preferred Republicans to control Congress by a margin of three to one, according to detailed results provided by McInturff.
Democrats seem acutely, though perhaps belatedly, aware of these challenges. They now warn that Republicans, if given control of one or both congressional chambers, would threaten Medicare and Social Security, most pointedly by demanding cuts in return for raising the federal debt ceiling next year. But it’s not clear that those arguments can break through the lived reality of higher prices for gas and groceries squeezing so many families. “Inflation, rising gas prices, interest rates—those are things people feel every day,” Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster for Trump in 2020, told me recently. “There is no TV commercial that is going to change what they feel when they go to the grocery store or the gas station.”
The challenge those daily realities pose to Democrats is not unique: As the political analyst John Halpin recently noted, “inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments” across the Western world (as demonstrated by England’s recent chaos and the election of right-wing governments in Sweden and Italy). No democratically elected government may enjoy much security until more people in its country feel secure about their own finances. For Democrats, the risk of an unexpectedly bad outcome next month seems greater than the possibility of an unexpectedly good one.
Republican gains this fall would only extend a core dynamic of modern American politics: the inability of either party to establish a durable advantage over the other. If Democrats lose one or both congressional chambers, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president who went into a midterm election with unified control of government has lost it. The prospect of very tight races next month in almost all of the same states that decided the 2020 presidential election underscores the likelihood that the 2024 race for the White House will again divide the country closely and bitterly.
Yet the undertow threatening Democrats now previews the difficulty they will face in two years if economic conditions don’t improve. In presidential races, political scientists say voters start to harden their verdicts on the economy about a year before Election Day. That means Biden is running out of time to tame inflation, especially if, as most economists expect, doing so will require at least a modest recession. Even amid widespread anxiety about both inflation and recession, Democrats remain competitive this fall by highlighting doubts about Republicans, particularly among the voters in their own coalition. But that cannot be an experiment any Democrat would look forward to repeating in 2024.
The map of competitive Senate elections is shrinking—and not just for November.
Though Republicans began the year expecting sweeping Senate gains, the party’s top-grade opportunities to capture seats now held by Democrats have dwindled to just two—Nevada and Georgia—and both are, at best, toss-ups for the GOP. And while Democrats, somewhat astoundingly, have emerged from the primaries with at least as many plausible flipping chances as Republicans, Pennsylvania is the only GOP-held seat clearly favored to go blue, and even that isn’t guaranteed. It remains entirely possible that November’s results will leave the Senate divided again at 50–50, something that has not happened in consecutive elections since the Seventeenth Amendment established the direct election of senators more than a century ago.
This standoff partly reflects the volatile dynamics of the 2022 election, in which Republican advantages on the economy have been largely neutralized by public unease over gun violence, the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, the resurgent visibility of former President Donald Trump, and the GOP’s nomination of weak, Trump-aligned candidates. Yet the possibility of a virtual draw—after a campaign season in which the two sides have already poured more than $850 million into just the 10 most expensive Senate races—reflects larger changes in the electoral competition.
One of the most powerful trends in modern politics has been for each party to consolidate control of the Senate seats in the states it usually captures in the presidential election. That’s lowered the ceiling on the number of Senate seats each party can win. And that lowered ceiling, in turn, has diminished each side’s ability to maintain control of the Senate majority for any extended period.
The Senate is therefore frozen in the sense that neither side, in normal times, can seriously contest more than a handful of the seats held by the other party. Paradoxically, it’s unstable in the sense that the shrunken playing field leaves each side clinging to tiny majorities that are vulnerable to small shifts in voter attitudes in the very few states that remain consistently competitive.
Throughout the 20th century, it was common for one side to build a comfortable majority in which it held at least 55 percent of the Senate’s seats. Republicans hit that level of dominance in 10 of the 15 Congresses from 1901 through 1930. Then, from 1932 to 1980, Democrats regularly reached the 55 percent threshold. (The big exception to this pattern came in the 1950s, when the ideological lines between the parties blurred and neither won more than a two-seat Senate majority through four consecutive Congresses.) Even from 1980 to 2000, one side or the other reached 55 seats seven times. Since 2000, though, the parties have controlled at least 55 seats only three times: Republicans immediately after George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 and Democrats immediately after Barack Obama’s presidential victories in 2008 and 2012.
Smaller margins have reduced both parties’ ability to defend their majorities for any extended period. Since 1980, neither party has controlled the Senate for more than eight consecutive years. That’s unprecedented: The U.S. has never gone four decades without a Senate majority that survived for more than eight years.
Both the thin margins and frequent turnover are rooted in a third trend: the growing alignment between states’ votes for president and Senate.
Especially through the second half of the 20th century, states routinely supported presidential candidates from one party and Senate candidates from the other. After the landslide reelections of Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984, for instance, Democrats still controlled about half of the Senate seats in the states that voted for them both times.
But as American politics has grown more partisan and parliamentary, those split-ticket senators have virtually gone extinct, which has reduced the number of states each side can realistically contest.
After the 2020 election, the GOP held 94 percent of the Senate seats in the 25 states that voted for Trump both times while Democrats held 98 percent of the seats in the 20 states that twice voted against him. Democrats have squeezed out their current 50–50 Senate majority by winning eight of the 10 Senate seats in the remaining five swing states that switched from Trump to Joe Biden.
Last spring, Republicans anticipated a midterm red wave that would break this stalemate, followed by a push toward a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority in 2024.
Both parties identified Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Raphael Warnock in Georgia, Mark Kelly in Arizona, and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire as the most vulnerable Democratic senators. Beyond that, Republicans hoped to seriously challenge Michael Bennet in Colorado and Patty Murray in Washington. The 2022 electoral environment remains unsettled, and it’s possible that continuing discontent over the economy could improve GOP prospects before election day. But for now, with Colorado, Washington, Arizona, and New Hampshire all moving toward the Democrats, it appears that the list of fully plausible GOP Senate targets has fallen to just two: Nevada and Georgia.
All polls in Georgia show a tight race between Warnock and the Republican nominee, Herschel Walker, the former University of Georgia football star. And with Republican Governor Brian Kemp holding a steady lead over Democrat Stacey Abrams, it remains possible that a Georgia crimson tide (pun intended) might carry Walker to victory. But Walker may be the most obviously unqualified Senate nominee in recent memory, and he’s facing a seemingly endless procession of personal scandals. Walker’s vulnerabilities might allow Warnock to survive even a strong Republican current; indeed all but one of the five most recent public polls have shown Warnock in the lead.
That leaves Nevada as the best chance for Republicans to capture a seat Democrats hold now. A state with legions of low-wage workers, Nevada has heavily felt the effects of coronavirus shutdowns and inflation. The state also lacks the large pool of college graduates and white-collar professionals heavily motivated by abortion and other social issues lifting Democrats elsewhere. But even with all that boosting them, Republicans can hardly be confident about Nevada: For longer than the past decade, Nevada Democrats, operating the political machine assembled by the late former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have shown a knack for turning out just enough of their voters to win very close races.
Democrats, unexpectedly, have kept a larger roster of GOP Senate seats in play. The Senate race most likely to change hands between the parties remains Pennsylvania, where Republican Pat Toomey is retiring. Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, although some polls show his margin narrowing, remains favored over Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee. Oz is laboring under strong unfavorable ratings and will likely face an undertow from the governor’s race, where Doug Mastriano, among the most extreme GOP nominees anywhere this year, could face a crushing defeat.
Polls also show Democrats Mandela Barnes and Tim Ryan locked in margin-of-error races in Wisconsin and Ohio. Barnes and Ryan have given themselves a realistic chance to win against GOP opponents who are also laboring under high unfavorable ratings, Senator Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and J. D. Vance in Ohio. But those are both states where Democrats often struggle to find the last few percentage points of support they need, and this will especially be the case while Biden’s approval rating is depressed among the white non-college voters so plentiful in each.
In North Carolina, Democrat Cheri Beasley is likewise step for step in polls with Republican Ted Budd—though, since 2008, that state has functioned as a kind of heartbreak hill for Democrats, who have suffered a succession of narrow defeats there. Florida has become an even tougher state for Democrats, but polls have consistently shown Democratic Representative Val Demings remaining closer to Republican Senator Marco Rubio than most analysts initially expected.
This playing field still leaves Republicans a path to a majority, but one much narrower than they anticipated. If the GOP loses Pennsylvania, which remains likely, its most plausible path to retake the Senate is to win both Nevada and Georgia, while simultaneously holding off the Democrats in both Wisconsin and Ohio, not to mention North Carolina and Florida. Republican upsets in Arizona or New Hampshire, or Oz surging past Fetterman during the final weeks in Pennsylvania, would ease that pressure. But today, none of those outcomes look probable.
Yet even if Democrats hold the Senate, it will likely be with a very narrow majority, and perhaps with nothing more than another 50–50 tie that Vice President Kamala Harris will step in to break. Democrats would still remain at substantial risk of surrendering their majority in 2024, largely because they will be defending all three of the seats they hold in the states that twice voted for Trump—Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Jon Tester in Montana, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. That won’t be easy in a presidential-election year.
Early in Biden’s presidency, some Democratic strategists, such as the data analyst David Shor, ominously warned that the party could face an extended period of Republican dominance in the Senate, largely because of the GOP’s hardening advantage in heavily white interior states. The GOP probably does hold an edge in the long-term battle for Senate control because it is regularly winning slightly more states than Democrats in presidential contests. But the fizzling of the GOP’s Senate opportunities this year shows how difficult it may be for either side to secure a sizable, much less durable, majority.
Political scientists and strategists alike usually find far more meaning in elections that deliver resounding change than those that reconfirm the status quo. Yet it will send a powerful message if neither party in November can break through the forces that have left the Senate so precariously balanced. It will show that the two sides remain locked in a grinding trench warfare where neither can overwhelm the other’s defenses and the handful of states in the no-man’s-land between them hold decisive power to tilt the national direction. That’s a recipe for more years of bitter but inconclusive conflict between two political coalitions that are now almost identical in size—but utterly antithetical in their vision for America’s future.
