News and notes for the week of 1/16
What caught my eye this week and what you need to know about it.
If you read one article this week, make it Seung Min Kim on the relationship between President Biden and Mitch McConnell. There are really good insights from people who know McConnell and even a quote from the Senate Minority Leader himself that hadn’t made national news before.
The piece gets at the complexity of McConnell as a figure in our political era. He’s unquestionably a very conservative politician — despite his roots in the moderate-to-liberal wing of the GOP before coming to the Senate. My favorite McConnell story, as told by historian Geoffrey Kabaservice, is how, in 1970, he urged fellow moderates in the Ripon Society not to abandon the GOP because the Nixon Administration had been “completely reactionary” in its first two years. Instead, they should stay in the party and not give up the fight. Flash forward, 50+ years, and Nixon looks like a liberal compared to what McConnell advocates today. The Kentucky senator is also a far cry from earlier Republican Senate leaders who were statesmen (Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Hugh Scott, Everett Dirksen even), who put the national well being ahead of politics (Baker cost himself a chance at the presidency to back the Panama Canal Treaties and Scott was one of the Republicans who told Richard Nixon that if he didn’t resign, he’d be impeached and removed from office).
McConnell is complicit in the bareknuckled politics of our era and in the abuse of the filibuster that has distorted how the Senate functions. His hypocrisy in handling the nominations of Merrick Garland and Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court did irreparable damage to the Court. He’s a master political tactician whose hardball tactics have worked to great effect for the GOP. But that’s often come at a cost in terms of fueling the acrimony and disfunction that are such a major part of our politics in 2023.
Despite that, McConnell is also more willing to prioritize what once would have been considered bare minimum essential government functions — keeping the government open, raising the debt ceiling — over the brinkmanship embraced by a lot of his Republican colleagues. He’s also long been a guy focused on his legacy and he’s 80 years old. It seems entirely possible that he’s decided he won't run again in 2026 at age 84. In which case, he might be more willing to cut deals and ignore what House Republicans and his right flank want over the next two years. It’s certainly no given — if he’s planning to retire, he assuredly wants one more stint as Senate Majority Leader. But if he’s thinking about how history will evaluate his career, he may be less willing to countenance a default or a lengthy government shutdown. The man who said he wanted to make Barack Obama a one term president, might be less interested in ensuring Republicans beat Biden than in keeping American government functional and making sure he doesn’t go down as one of the men responsible for the total breakdown of our system.
If there is another article you should read this week, it’s this Abe Streep piece on Montana. If you’re a Democrat, this quote should be absolutely alarming: ‘“There was no red wave,’ the state party’s executive director, Sheila Hogan, told me. ‘They do have the supermajority, but we really feel we’re able to work with moderates, and I think we’ll be OK.”’
Why should it be alarming? Because as Democratic operative Bill Lombardi told Streep, it’s “‘institutionalizing losing.”’ And that matters because while Montana is a small state, unlikely to decide the presidency or the House — although with a margin as narrow as we have now, Montana’s new, competitive first district, where former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke won by just over 3 percent, could play a difference. But Montana matters a lot in the Senate.
Democrats have a 51 seat majority with one of Montana’s Senate seats.
And it’s a red state where Democrats have shown the capacity to win statewide races even in the last decade — and in red states, it’s been a rough decade for Democrats with two midterm wipeouts, this last midterm that didn’t go all that well in red states, and then two dominant performances by Donald Trump. But from 2005-2021 Democrats controlled the governor’s mansion in Montana and Jon Tester has won 3 Senate races over an incumbent senator, a statewide elected House member and another statewide elected official. The state also has an illustrious history of powerhouse Democratic senators — former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, former Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, Lee Metcalf, Burton Wheeler, etc (Fun fact: since the 17th Amendment ushered in the direct election of senators in 1913, Montana has only had 3 Republican senators: Zales Ecton for 1 term, Conrad Burns for 3, and now, Steve Daines for 2). Montana also has a deep populist streak and a deep libertarian streak, both of which make it less ruby red than fellow Mountain West states like Idaho and Wyoming.
Beyond this history, though, it’s a simple math problem for Democrats. There are exactly 2 Republican senators from states Joe Biden won in 2020 — Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, who just eked out reelection thanks to a Democratic nominating failure, and Maine’s Susan Collins, who is up for reelection in 2026. For Democrats to be a majority, they have to be able to win seats in at least a few red states, unless they win 100% of the seats in blue and purple states — a tall task. Just to hold the Senate in 2024, they need 2 out of 3 Democratic incumbents in states Trump won twice — Tester, Joe Manchin and Sherrod Brown — to run and win reelection. And Tester seems like a better bet than Manchin, since West Virginia voted for Donald Trump by 39 points in 2020.
But even if Democrats lose the Senate in 2024, they can’t simply write off every red state and expect to win the chamber back anytime soon. And if you asked me to rank red states, in terms of Democrats having a plausible shot of being competitive in Senate races, my ranking would probably look something like: North Carolina [tier break] Florida/Texas/Montana [huge tier break] maybe Indiana/Missouri. After Sen. Mike Lee’s rather lackluster performance in Utah in 2022, it seems possible that Beehive State might push its way somewhere on the list in the next decade. But by that third tier, Democrats probably need a massively flawed Republican nominee, an incredible Democratic candidate and a good election cycle for their party to even have a chance. As we saw in Ohio in 2022, a bad candidate can beat a good candidate in our politics if they come from the right party. We’re just that polarized.
So instead of claiming that it’s going to be okay that Republicans have a supermajority in the Montana legislature, the Democratic Party should be embarking on a major registration and grassroots campaign in the state to grow their support — to ensure Tester wins election and give whoever challenges Sen. Steve Daines in 2026 a better shot of winning.
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