As it looks more and more likely that the Republicans will seize control of the Senate on Tuesday (if not in January after runoff elections in Georgia and Louisiana), many Democrats are losing hope that any of their political priorities will be accomplished in the next two years. Given a deeply unpopular president, a base that is much less likely to turn out in the midterms than in presidential elections, and a battleground consisting for the most part of conservative, southern states that went for Mitt Romney in 2012, this shouldn’t be a surprise. But even acknowledging the Democrats’ bleak prospects in the short term, long-term trends should give them reason to retain some holiday cheer as November 4 approaches.
First of all, a Republican Senate takeover is far from definite. Assuming, as most observers do, that Republicans pick off Democratic seats in West Virginia, Montana, and South Dakota, they’d still have to win three out of the six races in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, and North Carolina, all of which are toss-ups. In addition, Republicans would have to hold onto seats in Georgia, Kentucky, and Kansas, where Democrats see a chance of making gains in the Senate. And thanks to get-out-the-vote efforts funded by their newfound success with large donors, Democrats have a legitimate chance of winning in these swing states.
Furthermore, in this year’s gubernatorial races, where it’s harder for Republicans to nationalize the election and tie their opponents to an unpopular president, they look even weaker. Many Republican incumbents who were elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010 face uphill battles against strong Democratic opponents in states that are slightly more liberal as a whole than those in contention for the Senate. Twenty-two out of the 36 gubernatorial races this year are in states that Obama won in 2012. And even in those states that Obama lost, like Georgia, Kansas, and Alaska, Democratic or independent candidates are ahead of or tied with unpopular Republican incumbents in the polls.
Indeed, the fact that red states like Georgia and Kentucky are in play at all is indicative of the Republicans’ potential weaknesses on a larger scale going forward. As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. put it in a recent column, “Given Obama’s low approval ratings, Republicans could have been running away with this thing. They’re not, because they look more extreme and out of touch than they did four years ago.”
National demographic trends are pushing the country in the opposite direction that gerrymandering and Tea Party primary challengers have pushed Republicans. While these Republicans have short-term incentives to reject immigration reform and action on climate change to motivate their base in swing states that are whiter and more conservative than the country as a whole, this will come back to bite them in 2016 and beyond.
Even in this election cycle, Democrats have been successful at putting climate change, if not immigration reform, back at the forefront of the national debate. According to a recent New York Times article, among this year’s Senate races, “energy and the environment are the third-most mentioned issue in political advertisements, behind health care and jobs.” A large part of this is the work of billionaire activist Tom Steyer, who is spending $100 million on this election cycle to elect candidates that acknowledge that climate change is a real threat that requires a swift response. This has forced Republicans like Rick Scott, who is fighting for reelection as governor of Florida, where the disastrous effects of climate change can already be seen, to retreat from positions of all-out climate change denial to simply saying, “I’m not a scientist.”
Despite pleas from moderate Republicans like Jon Huntsman and Henry Paulson, however, only three percent of Republicans in Congress are willing to accept that global warming is real, and that humans are causing it, according to Politifact. This is partially a factor of gerrymandering: House Republicans in deep red districts are more vulnerable to a primary challenger from their right than a Democratic opponent in the general election. Only 25 percent of Tea Party Republicans, who have an outsize influence in these districts, accept that the earth is getting warmer, compared to 67 percent of Americans (not to mention 97 percent of climate scientists).
Gerrymandering also explains why, despite getting 1.1 million fewer votes than Democratic congressional candidates, Republicans maintained control of the House of Representatives in 2012. These congressional Republicans can afford to ignore national public opinion on issues like climate change and immigration reform because their voters are so far to the right of the mainstream on these issues. In fact, according to The New York Times’ Upshot blog, in 2014, “Republicans would probably hold the House — and still have a real chance to retake the Senate — if they lost every single Hispanic voter in the country.”
Given the demographic challenges that Republicans face, it would seem that the Democrats’ best strategy in the short term would be to embrace the president’s progressive stance on issues like the environment and immigration reform. Instead, Democrats across the board seem to be running as fast as they can away from President Obama (this was epitomized in Sen. Mark Udall’s (D-Colo.) insistence of the White House that “the last person they want to see coming is me”). While this hostility towards the president is understandable, given his low approval ratings, the young, diverse coalition that twice gave him more than 51 percent of the national popular vote is only going to get bigger as a percentage of the total population. This is where Democrats have a true advantage, one that dwarfs any short-term advantage that Republicans have going into the midterms.
Finally, even if the Republicans do capture the Senate this year, this too could hurt them in the long run. Having been rewarded in 2010 and 2014 for their obstructionism, Republicans will not have any incentive to work with President Obama for the remaining two years of his term. This continued gridlock and dysfunction will likely come back to bite them in 2016, when a Democrat like Hillary Clinton can run “on a narrative of Republican obstruction to passing legislation on issues like income inequality, raising the minimum wage, and equal pay for women,” according to TIME political correspondent Zeke Miller. Furthermore, there will be 24 Republican Senators up for reelection that year, compared to only nine Democrats. Republicans may well win the battle this year, but they could be losing the war.