Today, Explained - Can the Democrats take the Senate?

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

Vox’s Ella Nilsen says the implausible is now looking possible. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Twenty, twenty explain. Twenty twenty explain. Way back in January 2020, when the world was worried about those wildfires in Australia, or whether we were going to go to war with Iran, or how President Trump's impeachment would shake out, it was prevailing wisdom that Democrats had little to no chance of taking the Senate in 2020. But one pandemic and a crippled economy later, it's not such a sure thing. No, I mean, I think, you know, if you had asked somebody maybe last summer,

they would have said that Republicans were much more likely to retain control of the Senate. But there are a number of things that have changed since then. And right now, the race for the Senate is looking very competitive. Ellen Nielsen has been writing about this very subject for Vox. And it's wicked important because if Biden wins the presidency and has the House and the Senate in tow, he could really shake things up in the United States. So on today's show, we're going to talk about how Democrats could flip the Senate. And on

tomorrow's show, we're going to talk about what Biden would do with majorities in the House and the Senate. And we're going to start with the Senate. So right now there are 23 Republican Senate seats and 12 Democratic Senate seats. But in those numbers, you can kind of segment those into seats that are safe and then seats that are more competitive. So the key numbers that we really need to know is right now there are 10 Republican Senate seats that Cook Political Report rates as either toss-up or lean Republican, compared to just two Democratic seats with the same ratings. And only one of those Democratic seats, Alabama, is seen as, you know, truly flippable for Republicans.

Okay, well, we'll talk about Alabama in a bit, but let's first focus on these seats that Republicans could very potentially lose. Where are they? There are four states known as the core four. The core four? The core four. That sounds fun. I've never heard that before. When you talk to political operatives, you pick up on weird, rhymey lingo.

It sounds like it should be like a math rock band from Seattle. Colorado, Arizona, Maine, and North Carolina. Tom Tillis. Colorado. Corrigano. Arizona. Martha McSally. Maine. Susan Collins. North Carolina. Tom Tillis. Colorado. Well, let's go through and dig a little deeper, starting with Maine.

That's Susan Collins' seat, and she catches a lot of heat, right? Yeah, so Susan Collins has been in office for a really long time. Our distinguished colleague, the senior senator from Maine, cast her 7,000th roll call vote. She's high ranking on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is a pretty powerful committee that decides what money gets appropriated. been seen as somebody who can work with Democrats and somebody who traditionally bucked her party when she didn't necessarily think that she wanted to go along with what Republican leadership was saying. Unyielding adherence to an extreme position is easy. It is compromise, good faith and the hard work of bringing people together that requires determination, intellect and courage. But I think that that image has kind of changed in the Trump era. And that's because she voted for Kavanaugh. I see a lot of hate because she voted for Kavanaugh.

Yeah. I mean, that is certainly like the thing that has kind of inspired, you know, the most anti-Susan Collins sentiment in Maine and around the country. Senator Susan Collins, talk about a 180. She won her last reelection with almost 70 percent of the vote. Now she is ranked as the country's most disliked senator in a new poll. But there are other things, too. I mean, she she voted for the GOP tax bill back in 2017. She voted to acquit President Trump during his impeachment trial in the Senate. One area where she had actually bucked Republicans early on in Trump's presidency

was voting against the Affordable Care Act repeal legislation that would have, you know, done away with the ACA. That was sort of Susan Collins' like last big stand against her party. Since then, a lot of folks have been looking to see if she's going to vote against the interests of Republican leadership in the Senate and the interests of President Donald Trump. But in the case of some of these swing states and Maine

especially, there are also a lot of people who hate Trump in the state. And Maine is kind of segmented into kind of the more conservative northern part of the state, which Susan Collins is from, and then the more liberal southern part of the state where Portland, Maine is located. So she's walking this fine line where she hasn't actually come out and said whether she's going to support Trump or even vote for him in the 2020 election. But she also isn't really, you know, speaking out against him a lot. I feel like people may have heard or caught a whiff of the fact that Maine is kind of up for grabs and Susan Collins' next term is in question. But what's up in North Carolina? I feel like

people probably haven't heard as much about the race there. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a similar dynamic, although definitely more of a competitive kind of swingier state. North Carolina, it's always sort of traditionally been Republican. Senator Tom Tillis, a Republican, is up for reelection there. I knew that you all and North Carolinians want elected officials that are going to go to Washington and get something done, fulfill their promises. And you all know that we're going to continue the tradition that we've done here in North Carolina. We're going to go there and expect more out of our leaders and we're going to fulfill our promises and we're going to make this country great again. But North Carolina is pretty purple. There are more Democrats moving in there, you know, like a lot of other places in the country.

There are suburbs outside, you know, cities like Charlotte, other big cities in North Carolina that are just getting more diverse and, you know, trending a little bit more blue. The Democrat running there is Cal Cunningham. You know, he's been a state politician in North Carolina for a while. And he's pretty moderate, but he's basically running on a message of Medicaid expansion. Here in North Carolina, we really need to use one of the tools in the Affordable Care Act toolbox and expand Medicaid to some 600,000 of our people that don't have access to care today, in part because of a law that Tom Tillis himself said he was proud to have passed as Speaker of the State House. Tillis actually used to lead the North Carolina state legislature before he became a senator. And he actually had a pretty pivotal role in rejecting Medicaid expansion when he was a state politician.

And he also was part of a bill that kind of constrained North Carolina's unemployment benefits system and made it so fewer people could get benefits, which obviously is a pretty big issue now amid the coronavirus crisis and so many people trying to get unemployment benefits. And moving all the way across the country to Arizona, this race might have some names that people are familiar with, right? Yeah. So the two candidates that are running in Arizona, so on the Republican side, we have Senator Martha McSally. Look, I don't play games with usual politics. I don't campaign one way and then vote another. I don't pretend that avoiding the problem is the same as solving a problem.

I don't introduce legislation and pat myself on the back as if I've actually solved the issue. I maintain mission focus. She ran in 2018 and lost to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. And then she was appointed by the state's Republican governor when former longtime Senator John McCain died to fill McCain's spot. And then the Democrat who's running against McSally is astronaut Mark Kelly, who is the husband of former U.S. Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who a lot of people know she was the victim of a gun attack many years ago, survived and has now become a very vocal advocate for gun control laws.

And is Kelly all but a shoo-in to win? He's got a pretty remarkable story being an astronaut who's also married to Gabby Giffords, yeah? Yeah, I mean, Kelly, I think, is a good fit for the state. He has a lot of name recognition. His story is definitely inspiring. You know, seeing that sunrise from space for the very first time, it is incredible. You know, it becomes pretty obvious pretty early when you get into space that we're all kind of in this together. And he's proved himself to be very good at fundraising. He has pulled in a ton of money throughout the race.

He's up on television everywhere. I think most polls throughout the summer have shown him, you know, double digits ahead of McSally, which is a pretty big deal considering that Arizona, you know, up until a few years ago was kind of seen as a safe Republican state, but is again, you know, one of those states that's diversifying pretty rapidly. And how does Arizona compare to Colorado, a state we, I think, more uniformly think of as purple. Yeah, I mean, I would say that Arizona is considered to be more conservative than Colorado, for sure. And so in Colorado, there's the incumbent Cory Gardner.

Mr. President, you've done so much good for Colorado. As a result of your work, the Bureau of Land Management is now headquartered in the great state of Colorado. Who is a freshman Republican. It's his first reelection since he won in 2014. And he's going up against former Democratic governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper. The Senate doesn't attract me at this point, just doesn't attract me. Oh, he wanted to be president, right? Yeah, he briefly ran for president like a few other candidates, Senate candidates this year. So Hickenlooper is, you know, seen as a fairly moderate guy, pretty affable and well-liked,

certainly in Colorado, given his tenure as governor. And I think that the biggest question here for Cory Gardner is whether there are enough Republicans and moderate Republicans left to win re-election, essentially. I mean, Gardner won in 2014, which was a year where Republicans swept a bunch of races. It was a really good midterm year for Republicans. But even then, that was a tight race. He's known as being a pretty savvy politician. But since 2014, I think that Colorado has moved even further left. And it's just a really tough electoral year for him, given the dynamics with Trump. Trump is not well-liked in Colorado.

And so it's just fundamentally a really tough race for Gardner. OK, so those are the four states where Republicans really might stand to lose something. But you mentioned there was Alabama where Democrats could lose something, too, right? What's up in Alabama? That's Doug Jones' territory? Yes, that is right now Doug Jones' territory. We have shown not just around the state of Alabama, but we have shown the country the way that we're even talking about, you know, a Democratic incumbent from Alabama in 2020 is like kind of crazy, right? Quite. This is a very Southern state. It's a very Trump-friendly state. And yeah, Doug Jones won a special election in 2017 against Roy Moore, who was, you know, an incredibly flawed candidate who was accused of pedophilia in the middle of the race. It's interesting when you talk to folks on Jones's campaign who were involved in the 2017 race,

they are very adamant in saying that they felt like the race was really close even before the revelations about Moore came out. But this time, you know, Jones doesn't have Roy Moore to run against. He's running against Republican Tommy Tuberville, who is a former football coach at Auburn University in Alabama. And Doug Jones is Alabama. You don't work for your state in Alabama. You don't work for the United States of America. You spend the first three years trying to impeach the best president we've ever had, and he voted to impeach him. So football, Alabama, might be tough. So I recently interviewed Doug Jones, and, you know, he and his campaign know that they are the underdogs here, even though he's the incumbent. And Jones is going to really run

on his record of being a bipartisan senator, even though he has taken some Democratic party line votes on things like voting against Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. And he hasn't really tried to make himself a conservative Southern Democrat. But he thinks that Tuberville is certainly maybe not as vulnerable as Moore is, but he also, you know, feels that Tuberville and Alabama Republicans maybe aren't taking his campaign seriously enough. Republicans and Democrats alike think that he is one of the most endangered senators in 2020. But his campaign is pretty scrappy. And I am interested to see, you know, if they can pull off something that everybody said they couldn't pull off in 2017 and now is saying

they can't pull off in 2020. More with Ella in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. Thank you. R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty. Okay, Ella, from talking to you about the four races where Republican seats are most up for grabs, it sounds like there's a lot of different state-by-state variables at play. But how much does the bigger race, President Trump, play into those races? It's a really big deal.

I mean, I think that the presidential election is really going to have an effect on Senate races. I mean, I've talked to a lot of pollsters and political operatives in both parties, and a lot of people have said to me that voters are just less likely these days to split their tickets. So, you know, voting for a presidential candidate of one party and then voting for a Senate candidate of a different party, more people just kind of vote straight down the ballot. And yeah, you're definitely seeing the effects of Trump in what is making some of these Senate races more competitive. You know, even in states like Montana that Trump won by 20 points in 2016, his approval rating has gone down since then. And there are things that have happened since like, you know, Trump's postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, cutting down postal service processing and, you know, slowing down the delivery of mail, which has impacted folks in rural Montana from getting things like their prescriptions and their mail.

And obviously their mail-in ballots. So it's not even just coronavirus and the economy. There are now like enough Trump tangential scandals that Democrats can point to in a bunch of different states to make the argument not only against him as the president, but also to make the argument against the Republican senators that have defended him thus far. So how much does that change the Democrats' strategy in states like Montana or Maine or North Carolina or Colorado or Arizona? I mean, they flipped the house in 2018. Is the strategy similar or is it, you know, very corona economy based now? I think that they're definitely keeping a lot of elements of their 2018 strategy. And that was to talk about health care all the time. Barack Obama today driving home the Democrats closing message. Health care is on the ballot. You vote, you might save a life.

A hoarse Joe Biden Sunday. They oppose mandating insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions. It's Nancy Pelosi's final marching orders in a letter to House Democrats today, writing health care is the key factor in voters' decisions. But of course, we are now in a pandemic that has killed over 200,000 Americans and left millions unemployed. And for many people, you know, who have lost their jobs, have also lost their insurance that came with that job. So I think that the healthcare argument is as salient as ever, if not more so.

You know, you see a lot of Democrats making arguments in states that haven't expanded Medicaid that they should expand the social safety net for people who need the help. And I think that, you know, coronavirus and healthcare and the economy kind of all fit pretty well together in this package of issues that Democrats are really choosing to focus on. And, you know, on that note, we did this episode recently on ventilation in which we talked about how the fact that maybe one sixth of Americans may not return to their office buildings might mean that we might see this dramatic reshuffling and acceleration of shifting demographics throughout the country of

people leaving cities and moving to more rural southern states. How much is the shifting demography of this country going to be a big factor here in this 2020 race? I mean, it's huge. I mean, I was talking to a Republican pollster today, and I asked him about Georgia and the fact that, you know, the incumbent Republican Senator David Perdue is in a pretty tight race that really wasn't on anybody's radar half a year ago. And he basically said, you know, it's kind of crazy that we're sitting here talking about a competitive race in Georgia. And he just said that that tells you about the impact of demographic change on American politics. And, you know, that means that we're talking about

a lot of Black voters that are certainly not just in cities like Atlanta, Georgia, but also in the suburbs or Latino voters or Asian American voters. When we talk about the suburbs, I feel like usually the image that comes to mind is white people in the suburbs. But I feel like that's certainly the people that Trump is really trying to appeal to. But American suburbs don't look like they used to back in 1960s.

They look a lot more reflective of the country as a whole. And yeah, this is the reason that we're talking about Georgia and Arizona and even maybe Texas, although I would argue Texas is more of a reach, as competitive battleground Senate seats in 2020. And I think we're all familiar with what it looks like to have a Democratic president and at least partially controlled Republican Congress that's butting heads with said president. But what could this potentially look like if, say, Joe Biden wins the presidency and has the House and has the Senate?

Democrats would have a pretty unique opportunity to pass things that they have been wanting to get done for years. Shoring up the Affordable Care Act and potentially passing a public option, I think that the consensus in Washington, D.C. is that there probably needs to be more COVID relief getting passed. And as we've seen the last few months, talks between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill haven't really gone anywhere. And if Democrats had total control of the White House and the Senate, you know, it wouldn't be a total breeze. You still have, you know, the minorities to deal with.

And you obviously have different factions in your party and people of different ideological stripes that you have to please. But, yeah, I mean, I think that Biden is wanting to put forward a pretty bold agenda for his presidency. It keeps getting described as, you know, a pretty bold agenda for his presidency. It keeps getting described as, you know, a New Deal agenda. There are really historic problems that the country is facing that the Democrats want to tackle in big ways, including health care and climate change and the COVID pandemic. And it certainly wouldn't be, you know, a breeze. But compared to the total loggerheads that we've seen between Republicans and Democrats over the past decade, even, it would be a lot different.

Ellen Nilsson covers politics for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. And on tomorrow's show, I'll speak with our colleague Dylan Matthews about what exactly Joe Biden would do with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Until then, here's the core four. Colorado, Arizona, Maine and North Carolina Colorado, Arizona, Maine and North Carolina Colorado, Cory Gordon, Arizona, Martha McSally's name Susan Collins, North Carolina, Tom Tillis Colorado, Cory Gordon, Arizona, Martha McSally's name Susan Collins, North Carolina, Tom Tillis, Colorado, Cory Gardner, Arizona, Martha McSally, Maine, Susan Collins, North Carolina, Tom Tillis, Colorado, Arizona, Maine, and North Carolina.