Stop Pretending that Democrats Will Lose the Senate Because of “The Map” — It is NOT a Normal Election
Note: I am editing this for clarity and fixing of grammatical errors, along with adding more links. Also please keep in mind that I am not saying that this election will be easy for Democrats to win, but rather that we must not treat it as normal and should fight for every senate seat. We must make clear that every Republican is part of the extremist GOP and so would contribute to the downfall of the American experiment.
Over and over I hear that it will be very hard, maybe impossible, for the Democrats to “hold onto” the Senate, let alone expand their majority, in 2024 — why? Because of “the map” — the number of seats which have Senators up for re-election from each party, and whether the state is “red”, “blue”, or “purple”. That all sounds very reasonable until you consider that this is not a normal election — at all.
People will say that we are more divided than ever, but remember that media loves a “horserace”. I’m old enough to remember landslide elections like Reagan’s — people switch over and vote for the “other” party all the time — they often split their ticket, voting POTUS one way and downballot the other one. In this, people have been saying the same — and it’s been building, the last presidential (which still has always had much greater turnout than “off-year” elections like 2018 and 2022, but Democrats did well in those) was before January 6th, before the hearings about them and the convictions, and the loudest people in the room may be crazier than ever but they are a shrinking groups of crazies.
Nicki Haley’s voters — people in supposedly “deep red” states who attended the Republican primary or caucus, sometimes in the middle of a snowstorm — are saying that they won’t vote for Trump “no matter what.” If they won’t vote for Trump, do you think that people who voted for Obama twice but then voted for Trump twice before January 6th and everything we have learned since will vote for him or the Senator in their state who is sticking with him and the party’s national abortion ban and increasingly obvious Christian Nationalism?! Not if they know that is what they are voting for: this election is about making sure that they know.
The Senate GOP — representing states, not just tiny gerrymandered districts — has tended to be a little less crazy, so I was honestly quite surprised that they would block a bill to protect IVF of all things — after everyone paying attention could see the absurdity. (A bit like the Senators who voted to overturn the election after they almost got killed by confederate flag waving white nationalists.) Gotta say though, thank you Senate GOP, because now we have evidence which can be used in ads that this is not a normal Republican Party right now. It is a cult — for the followers and the party itself — and the Senate Republicans are deeper in it than they were in 2022.
At its core, the Republican party is now a cult of Trump — a conman apparently coming down with dementia, who has made clear he wants to be president to stay out of prison and is content to implement a Handmaid’s Tale agenda for religious extremists who see him as a second coming.*
This sounds insane — but that is simply because it is insane. And it is what the GOP is right now. I have voted Republican. I have been libertarian. I am not being partisan, I am talking about how this is different. This is not normal.
Project 2025 — put out by the Heritage Foundation, where I worked for 5 years running their Individual Income Tax Model — is a statement of how to implement an authoritarian strongman Christian Nationalist takeover. If you think I am exaggerating: read it, or (as it is quite long) watch a video where someone breaks it down and then visit the website to confirm that what they say is accurate. It is a plan to make the US into Putin’s Russia or similar. It was written by extremists who despise the equality of a diverse democracy — would-be oligarchs and religious fundamentalists.
Trump has said or shown (in various statements, tweets, meetings/actions; I won’t link to these, they have been covered & I will let readers fact-check them on their own — let me know in the comments if I have any of it wrong) all of the following:
- he will be a dictator “on day one”,
- he will violate/dissolve/terminate the constitution,
- he has stolen, hoarded & shared classified info: he took home and refused to return national security docs, he shared classified info with folks without security clearance, he shared classified info of allied democratic countries & and probably there is more we don’t yet know,
- he fawns over dictators,
- he asked dictators for help in getting elected and remaining in power
- his lawyers have argued and he has stated that he cannot be prosecuted for crimes if they were committed while he was president (and making use of presidential powers at the time) because he has absolute immunity, even to murder political opponents (like his idol Putin does),
- he invites self-proclaimed Nazis to his dinner table & calls them good people,
- he invited white supremacist militias to help him remain in power and has promised to pardon them and continues to praise them as heroes and as hostages
- he has promised to take retribution out on any who oppose him in any way, demanding complete loyalty and fealty
- he wants to disband NATO and said Russia should invade our democratic allies if they fail to spend on national security their agreed-upon percentage of GDP (which would be illegal btw — we signed the treaty); even though NATO came to our aid after 9/11),
Trump and his supporters do propaganda for Putin — like pretending groceries are cheap in Russia, by ignoring what wages are like in Russia — which Putin appreciates greatly. They also spread their disinformation on their media (Fox ‘News’ knew they were doing it & continued, see their internal memo about it for details; they did the same for Trump’s election lies). Trump’s propaganda was also spread through Congress itself, again knowingly, as in their impeachment inquiry, based on Russian disinformation & zero actual evidence.
It cannot be any clearer. Trump wants to be a dictator (but just for a day right? Famously, dictators always step down after they achieve the status right?) Also, his rationale (drilling more and building a wall) is laughable: Biden is drilling more we were before, while offsetting it surprisingly well; and his ephemeral wall will not be constructed faster if he had dictatorial powers. Trump would be a dictator, allying with another dictator — one who murders his political opponents, just as Trump has argued he could do, and has essentially promised to do — when he speaks of retribution.
Trump has said he would “broker a peace deal”, which would mean handing Ukraine over to Putin; and he is practically salivating at the idea of having that kind of power himself — for those paying attention and taking him seriously (at the time he was widely regarded as joking) he has praised such power from the start, talking about the deference that Kim and Putin are given.
And, for policy, now Trump is directing the party to do whatever they can to destroy America, from wishing for recession to killing their own hardcore border bill when it was finally ready & would be signed by Biden despite how hard it would crack down on immigration. As with the economy, if what the GOP says about it is true that it’s a crisis then he would prefer that crisis continue for 6 more months simply so he can blame Biden for it — when something could be done — because he only cares about himself. Thankfully migrants are not criminals, so it is less of a crisis than they are claiming.
And now they are killing a bill that would protect IVF. I am not even sure what they are saying to justify that — but the people will see that it is awful to destroy the lives of families who have paid in for this treatment for decades in hopes of having a child and now suddenly may lose that chance.
They would also like to take away the Affordable Care Act and Medicare — so again, take away healthcare that people have paid into for decades. Their policies are extremely unpopular, which is why the rightwing media talks instead about drag queens and $25 Gay Pride t-shirts instead. They have been rewriting history, from recent history — such as “January 6th was just some tourists visiting the Capitol” all the way to “slavery wasn’t so bad for the slaves”.
Meanwhile Biden and the Democrats (with a few Republicans supporting some of them) pass very popular policies, bills that are popular in every state — and some that Trump promised but failed to deliver on, like infrastructure — and so many Republicans are trying to take credit for the results, even when they voted against the bills — and the economy is so good that Trump has tried to claim credit for it.**
It is not a normal election. Although it can be argued that only — legitimate, obviously — conviction and prison can put an end to the Trump movement’s hold on the GOP, it seems possible that another way to end it is with a sound electoral defeat. The air might be let out of the inflated sense of Trumpism if there was a loss so decisive as to force a reordering of the party: if Democrats can win not just the presidency — ideally with a Reaganesque electoral college number — and the House, but also win the Senate decisively as well.
We must recognise and embrace that this is not at all a normal election. There are no red state or blue state contests — Democrats can win every seat that has an election because the GOP is a crazy party right now. We can have a consensus of the vast majority of Americans, including majorities in most every state, that we reject the extremism of Trump and of the party that is still backing him. We must not believe that any senate seat is “safe Republican” in 2024 — they are all possible for Democrats to take, and indeed we must fight to win every one of them, using every legitimate tool.
In truth, he should not be on the ballot: he attempted an insurrection to remain in power in front of all our eyes — which every reasonable American (not to mention every citizen of anywhere around the world) knows, despite attempts to rewrite history; and the details of a longer running scheme were shown to us during the impeachment and January 6th committee hearings, and subsequently a number of organizers have been convicted for their role in this attempted (self-)coup or insurrection; this was a treasonous attempt to become a dictator, which nearly succeeded. Insurrectionists are banned from running for office again: the 14th Amendment made that clear.
Had a few good people not refused to play their part, we would be living under a Trump dictatorship — and yet he is being allowed to run again, and now he has loyalists only around him, including those who wrote Project 2025, which is a plan for ensuring that Trump or the next Trump-Republican to gain power will easily be able to use the levers of the American government as personal weapons, and remain in power as long as they so desire. This is not a normal election — this has never happened before, at least not out in the open, where everyone could see it.
I know I can be an optimist, and to many I sound like an alarmist, but I am not being either in this assessment. We are not a divided nation — not in the sense of 50/50 or anything like it. There is at least a 70/30 split preferring democracy under the modern Democratic Party over Trumpist authoritarianism. Just look at exit polls fro m GOP primaries & nationwide polls that ask about voting for Trump if convicted or ask if he should not be allowed to run if he really incited an insurrection.
This 70% includes the likes of Liz Cheney, who was among the most conservative members of the Senate — but she prefers democracy, even democracy under the modern Democratic Party, to Trumpian autocracy. Voters are more like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger than like Elise Stefanik or other Republican elected officials who let Trump’s wind blow them over to a set of talking points — and policies which might as well put Burkas on women — that offend at least 70% of voters but thrill the base.
This election is like no other. But the whole idea of “safe Senate seats” is based on an old idea about a 2 party system with 2 normal parties and the idea that party loyalties will mean voters will stick to the party they are registered as right now. But the idea that millions of people — even small (Rhode Island = 1 million) and rural (Wyoming — half a million) states have a lot of people in them — will vote for a party that would take away not only the right for an abortion (they want a Federal ban now, despite all the talk of ‘sending it back to the states’), but contraception and IVF —seems wrong. The policies are about controlling women through hardcore religious theocracy: the Handmaid’s Tale. Most Americans do not want this.
The GOP right now is party that would take away rights of all LGBT folk; now that most people now understand their gay friends and family and have no issues with it — they think it’s immoral to treat them differently, not that being themselves is immoral — and they want their loved ones to be able to marry like anyone else. This country is not supposed to be a theocracy. And gay marriage and abortion rights are considered good and normal and important. A party that has a cult leader, a wannabe strongman dictator at its head, and they want to impose a theocracy — this is not normal, and would not be popular at all. Assuming people know what’s going on.
Election season is just ramping up: they will know. If we make sure they know.
- * Note 1: It would be amusing if not so scary how many extremist white evangelicals see Trump as a “second coming” instead of the personification of their own “false prophet” — the one described in the bible — charismatic (to them) but sinful and in many ways an “anti-Christ”, in the sense of being the opposite of what Jesus stood for, in every way.
- ** Note 2: Trump has argued the stock market is doing well because “people know I’m gonna win” — and otherwise lies about the state of the economy. So, the argument goes that 6 months before the election the stock market is surging — and unemployment and inflation low, wages higher than inflation and rising, millions of new good jobs & strong unions — with the great new NLRB enforcement etc, even non-union companies have given salary rises so they don’t lose their workers — and it’s all because people “know Trump will win”….? The former president who crashed the economy by mishandling the pandemic, lowered taxes basically only for the wealthiest, and added massively to the debt? Yeah, makes sense to … absolutely nobody.
