#senate majority

This year's US Senate race in Alaska is now seen as competitive. That comes as good news because the incumbent is Republican Dan Sullivan. A race which was previously rated Safe Republican has shifted two notches to Leaning Republican.

Former Rep. Mary Peltola (D, AK-AL) formally launched her long-rumored challenge to Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) on Monday, putting another Senate race on the competitive board as Democrats try to chart a path to flipping the Senate in November. It is somewhat unusual for us to shift a race by two categories all at once instead of moving it just a single category, but we think it’s warranted in this instance. The reason is a combination of a solid recruit meeting what should be a good political environment.

Democrats have a good chance of flipping the House. The Senate is a steeper climb.

So even though Democrats hold 37 of the 38 seats in the 19 states that voted against Trump three times—Maine’s Collins is the only Republican holdout from those states—and they hold 10 of the 12 seats from the six states that voted at least once for either party in the last three presidential elections, that’s only good enough to get them to 47 seats, while Republicans hold 53. Hence why trying to compete for Alaska and Ohio—or Iowa, Nebraska, or Texas, three other GOP-held states we list as Likely Republican—is so crucial for Democrats to have any hope of flipping the majority this year. Likewise, Republicans have an opportunity to solidify their majority if they can hang onto these seats in trying circumstances—if Democrats can’t win an Alaska or an Ohio in 2026 with a Peltola or a Brown, when will they win them?

I'm mostly in agreement with the assessment of the state of the race in the US Senate on the map below. Though I think Iowa may be more competitive with the retirement of Republican Joni "We All Are Going To Die" Ernst. That contest depends on who wins each party's primary this year. Remember that Obama carried Iowa both times he ran and Iowa had a Democratic US senator as recently as 11 years ago. And 2 of Iowa's 4 US House seats are currently considered competitive. Iowa is definitely not Idaho.

Mike Luckovich

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 15, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 16, 2024

Three years ago today, President Joe Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, more popularly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. That law called for approximately $1.2 trillion in spending, about $550 billion newly authorized spending on top of regular expenditures. As Biden noted today, it was “the largest investment in our nation’s infrastructure in a generation.” 

In the past three years, the Biden administration launched more than 66,000 projects across the country, repairing 196,000 miles of roads and 11,400 bridges, as well as replacing 367,000 lead pipes and modernizing ports and airports. Today the administration announced an additional $1.5 billion in funding for railroads along the Northeast Corridor, which carries five times more passengers a day than all the flights between Washington, D.C., and New York City. 

In his first term, Trump had promised a bill to address the country’s long-neglected infrastructure, but his inability to get that done made “infrastructure week” a joke. Biden got a major bill passed, but while the administration nicknamed the law the “Big Deal,” Biden got very little credit for it politically. Republicans who had voted against the measure took credit for the projects it funded, and voters seemed not to factor in the jobs and improvements it brought when they went to the polls last week. 

This lack of credit has implications beyond the Biden administration. As economist Mark Zandi told Joel Rose of NPR, “We need better infrastructure. We should continue to invest. But that's going to be hard to do politically because lawmakers are seeing what's happening here and they’re not getting credit for it.”

Meanwhile, President-elect Trump has been rapidly naming people he intends to nominate for his cabinet, and it is not going well. As Brian Tyler Cohen wrote on Bluesky: “The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying ‘unqualified DEI hires’ are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test.”

Cohen was not joking; Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand, and Kristen Holmes of CNN reported today that Trump’s transition team is skipping background checks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, claiming that they are slow and intrusive.

But that lack of background checks has already mired Trump’s picks in controversy. 

Trump has said he would nominate Pete Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran and co-host on the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, to become the secretary of defense. Since that announcement, news has broken that a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations.

News broke today that a woman accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her after a Republican conference in Monterey, California, in 2017. According to Michael Kranish, Josh Dawsey, Jonathan O’Connell, Dan Lamothe, and John Hudson of the Washington Post, the woman who made the allegation said the alleged victim had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Hegseth. 

Now the transition team fears more revelations. “There’s a lot of frustration around this,” a member of the transition team told the Washington Post reporters. “He hadn’t been properly vetted.”

Causing even more headaches today for the transition team was Trump’s appointment of former Florida representative Matt Gaetz to become the United States attorney general. Immediately after Trump said he would nominate Gaetz, the representative resigned his congressional seat, forestalling the release of a House Ethics Committee report concerning allegations of drug use and that Gaetz had taken a minor across state lines for sex.

It is reported that the victim, who was a seventeen-year-old high-schooler at the time, testified before the committee. 

After spending an evening with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that publishing the report would be “terrible” and that he would “strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report because that’s not the way we do things in the House.” 

This, despite the fact that, as historian Kevin Kruse noted, “[f]or years now, the right has been accusing Democrats of running a shadowy conspiracy to protect politicians who are sex predators.” And, in fact, the House Ethics Committee did release a report on Representative William Boner (D-TN) in 1987 for allegations of corruption after he had already resigned the office to become mayor of Nashville.  

And then there is Trump’s tapping of former Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence (DNI). Gabbard’s ties to America’s adversaries, including Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, have raised serious questions about her loyalty. Making her the country’s DNI would almost certainly collapse ongoing U.S. participation in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance in which the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have shared intelligence since World War II. 

As former Illinois representative Joe Walsh wrote: “Donald Trump just picked someone to oversee our intelligence who, herself, couldn’t pass a security clearance check. She couldn’t get security clearance. She couldn’t get a job in our intelligence community. Because she’s too compromised by Russia. Yet Trump picked her to run the whole thing.”

Trump appears eager to demonstrate his control of Republicans in the Senate by ramming through appointments that will collapse the rule of law at home (Gaetz) and the international rules-based order globally (Hegseth and Gabbard). When Texas senator John Cornyn said he would like to see the Gaetz report, Trump loyalist Steve Bannon said: “You either get with the program, brother, or you're going to finish third in your primary.” A member of Trump’s transition team said that Trump wants to bend Republican senators to his will “until they snap in half.”

Despite the fact the Republicans will hold a majority in the Senate when Trump takes office, Trump’s picks are so deeply flawed and dangerous that Trump and his team knew they would not get confirmed. So they demanded that Republicans in the Senate give up their constitutional power of advising the president on high-level appointments and consenting to his picks: the “advice and consent” requirement of the Constitution. 

Trump demanded that the Senate recess in order for him to push through his choices as recess appointments. Even the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board came out against this scheme, calling it “anti-constitutional” and noting that it would “eliminate one of the basic checks on power that the Founders built into the American system of government.”

Now, in order to bring senators to heel, the Trump team is threatening to start its own super PAC to undermine the existing Senate Leadership Fund, whose leaders they insist are not loyal enough to Trump. A person close to Trump said that Senate Republican leaders “should reflect current leadership and the future, not the past.” “It doesn’t make sense,” one Republican operative told Politico’s Natalie Allison, Ally Mutnick, and Adam Wren. “Trump just had this massive win and now they are bringing in this Never Trumper.” 

But for all the spin, the political calculation for Republican senators is not as clear as the Trump team is trying to project. At 78, Trump is not exactly the face of the party’s future. Nor did he deliver a “massive win.” He won less than 50% of the popular vote with many voters apparently unaware of his policies, and while the Republicans did retake the Senate majority, they did so with very little help—financial or otherwise—from him. Republicans will have as bad a map in the 2026 midterm elections as the Democrats had in 2024, and Trump’s voters tend to be loyal to him and no one else, generally not turning out in midterms.

It is also possible that, aside from political calculations, enough Senate Republicans take seriously their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” as well as the Senate’s role in the constitutional system of checks and balances that they will judge Trump’s antics with that in mind. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

It’s fantastic Joe and Kamala will be restoring decency and calm to the world, but if they want to actually GET SHIT DONE McConnell has to be displaced by taking both GA senate seats in the special election January 5th.

I know it’s a stretch. I know that Jon Ossoff is trailing David Perdue with around the amount of Libertarian votes and that it’s incredibly unlikely, near impossible to turn Libertarians Democrat. But do not write these races off and our chance at regaining power of the senate off completely. 

Raphael Warnock is leading Kelly Loeffler by nearly nine points. Obviously, there are 18 other candidates on the ballot currently with those numbers, which could boost Loeffler’s votes by at least a million. This isn’t great, because Warnock might only gain a little over 750k at least. This isn’t hopeless, though!

Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight has done SO SO much for Georgia. For one, Biden is probably going to win the state, something that a Democrat hasn’t done in 28 or so years. Two, the state has a 21% youth turnout this year, higher than the national average, I believe. We can still raise that number even more. 

I am not an expert in any way of Georgia voting demographics, but I’m pretty sure that there are always more voters to register, especially in such disenfranchised areas. 

Basic Info

If you are a resident of Georgia and you are not registered to vote, you have until December 7th to do so. 

If you are turning 18 by January 5th, the day of the runoff, then you can register before then. 

Here is information on registering. Register to vote here.

Here are some things you can do 

(even if you live out of state)

Donate to Jon Ossoff

Phone bank for Jon Ossoff, which you can train to do here

Donate to Raphael Warnock

Volunteer for Raphael Warnock

Some phone bank events for Warnock

Write postcards to Georgia voters (more info coming soon — I’ll update on 11/9)

If anyone has anymore to add, please do! I truly believe that the senate majority is within reach. If you just volunteer to write one postcard or spend a little bit of time making calls, you might at least sway one voter. And one voter could make all the difference. There were two towns in Massachusetts where Biden won by exactly one vote.

Anyone who is registered to vote in Georgia can vote in federal, state, and local runoff elections. Check your voter status.

The date for federal, state, and local races is January 5.

The voter registration deadline is December 7. Early voting begins on December 14.

For more information about runoff elections, contact your County Registrar's Office.

Listen, Joe Manchin. If you want to be a moderate Democratic, that’s all fine. 

If you want to talk about working with Republicans and being bipartisan and stuff, that’s all good and dandy.

If you want to vote with Trump nominees who were going to pass the Senate regardless, fine.

If you don’t want to campaign against Republican Senators, fine.

If you don’t want to endorse Susan Collins’ 2020 opponent, fine.

But, as a member of the Senate DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP, you can’t be endorsing Republican Senators. I’ve always believed that having someone like Manchin is better than a Republican, and if we’re too hard on him he might jump ship to the Republican Party (almost ensuring we don’t win a majority in 2020), but this is getting ridiculous.