Traditionally, Labor Day Weekend was seen as the start of the Fall campaign (at least by the media).  If that was ever true, it no longer is.  With cable and websites like Facebook and Youtube, there are a lot of relatively inexpensive way to get advertisements out during July and August.  If a campaign waits unti September to begin its ad campaign, the other side has already defined the race.

But, by this point in the cycle, we are down to the last handful of primaries, and the national committees and big PACS are already looking to decide where they are going to be spending the big bucks in late September and early October.  (As the change in the mechanism for advertising has obliterated Labor Day as the start of the fall campaign, the change in voting habits (with a significant percentage casting early votes or mail-in ballots) has also altered when the big final push begins.  While, in a close race, last minute news and ads can make a difference, it is just as important to get as many votes locked in as early as possible so that the last-minute spending can be focused on a tiny number of votes.

But that is the inside baseball stuff of campaigns.  The purpose of this post is to set the stage for the next eight weeks.  For the past two years, Democrats have had the frustration of a very narrow margin in the House of Representatives and a dead-even Senate.  Because Nancy Pelosi may be one of the all-time great Speakers, Democrats have been mostly able to pass things in the House.  The Senate, however, has been very, very difficult.  The filibuster rules has limited the Democrats to passing anything significant via the reconciliation process.  Even the reconciliation process requires keeping the entire Democratic caucus together which has proven difficult as a single member can insist on changes to any proposal.  And the  lack of a majority has also prevented any changes to the filibuster rule (again due to the ability a single Democrat to veto any proposed change).

The Senate looks the most promising for Democrats in this cycle.  The Democrats started with four potentially vulnerable seats — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire.  The Republicans, however, have done an excellent job of nominating candidates who shouldn’t even be running for dog catcher.  At this point, Arizona looks to relatively safe.  While New Hampshire’s primary is next week, the Republican field is very lacking, and New Hampshire looks relatively safe.  In Nevada, the Republicans actually have a credible candidate.  Democrats should be able to hold Nevada, but it will be close and will depend on turnout.  Lastly, there is Georgia.  Herschel Walker should not win, Georgia.  But polls have been all over the place.  The one polling company that has polled this race more than once is showing Senator Raphael Warnock in the lead, but that lead has shrunk somewhat over the year (even as national numbers have been moving in favor of the Democrats).

At the start of the cycle, there were several states that looked like potential Democratic pickups — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.  Florida looked like something of a reach, but races in Florida are always close and Marco Rubio has proved to be an underwhelming Senator.  In both Pennsylvania and Ohio, Trump’s ego has done severe damage to the chances of the Republican party to hold those seats.  Dr. Quack seems to be like a dead charlatan walking in Pennsylvania.  J.D. Vance seems to have disappeared at a key part of the campaign, but Ohio is red enough that he might just survive.  Ron Johnson may be one step ahead of criminal charges for his role in the attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election, but Wisconsin is enough of a toss-up in normal years that hie might just have a third narrow win.  The two reaches currently are North Carolina and Florida. In many ways, the two states are very similar, and both have proven to be consistent disappointments for Democrats.  Both states are very close but with only a tiny sliver of swing voters.  And so, cycle after cycle, the states look close enough for Democrats to win, but we seem to fall just short every time.  Not blown out, but also not getting the 2-3% swing that we needed at the start of the cycle.

To get much done in the Senate, Democrats probably need to pick up a net of three seats. As things stand today, my best hunch is that anything between a net loss of one and a net gain of three are equally likely.  If Democrats have fifty-three seats in the Senate, they probably could push through some reforms of the filibuster or at least have the votes to recognize additional exceptions to the filibuster rule.

But none of that matters if Democrats lose the House.  If House Democrats are unable to pass bills, Democrats are unlikely to take hard votes on changes to Senate rules.  And the House was always going to be difficult.

The reality is that mid-term elections are always hard for the President’s party.  Even if a president has decent success, there is a segment of the population that blames the President for every problem.  By global standards, the U.S. has actually weathered the last two years rather well.  For a variety of reasons — China’s strict reaction to COVID, droughts driven by climate change impeding the food supply, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine impacting global oil and food supplies — the entire globe has had a period of high inflation for the past eighteen months.  Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. has actually been on the low end of inflation.  But people do not pay much attention to global economics and merely see high prices at the gas pump and grocery store.  Additionally, the difficulty of translating an agenda into legislation (a party can agree on the broad policy goals but not agree on the details of how to achieve those goals) typically leaves some members of the party discouraged at the limited accomplishments driving down turnout from the base.  Meanwhile, the other party tends to see what has passed as outrageous and turnout in droves to stop the President’s party from doing more.  So the default assumption is that the President’s party will lose seats, and the Democrats have almost no seats to spare.

Complicating matters is that this cycle is a redistricting year.  While things probably went as well as Democrats could expect, it has not gone great.  In too many of the states with large Democratic majorities, voters wanting to do the right thing have enacted redistricting commissions.  Meanwhile, in Republican states, legislatures still have the power to draw the lines.  The redistricting commissions, for the most part, did their best to draw fair lines.  But legislatures did their best to stack the deck.  The only good news for Democrats in this cycle was that Republicans were more interested in stemming the bleeding by shoring up Republican seats that seemed to be slipping away rather than taking seats away from the Democrats.  Ultimately, however, the Democrats’ problem is geographic.  Democrats tend to be packed into a handful of counties.   And a “natural map” will try to minimize splitting counties and also minimize multi-county districts.  Things are actually, a little better than the 2012 map.  After the last redistricting cycle, the median seats was R +3.  In plain English, that means that a 52-48 Democratic win in the national popular vote for the House would mean that Republicans would have the majority of seats.  The median seat is now only R+1.  Most of this change is through shifts in the composition of the voters within the districts as some lean Republican districts in 2012 were lean Democratic districts by 2021 rather than the product of changes to the map.

The other thing that has benefitted the Democrats hope of keeping the House has been the takeover of the Republican-party by extremists.  This takeover, unfortunately, also extended to the federal bench.  While most Republicans believe in the Constitution and Democracy, the current leadership of the Republican Party is divided between wannabe authoritarians like Donald Trump and Ron Desantis and gutless cowards like Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsay Graham who are unwilling to take any stand that would risk their chances of gaining or maintaining power.  Meanwhile the takeover of the federal courts by the Anti-Federalist Society has resulted in several decisions which make clear that the federal courts are no longer interested in protecting the constitutional rights of anybody but the wealthy and Republican-affiliated interest groups.  Since the end of the Supreme Court term, this abandonment of the Constitution has resulted in some surprising results around the country which has demonstrated that, even in areas thought to be conservative, there is a solid pro-choice, pro-civil rights, and pro-LGBT rights majority.  If Democrats can persuade this majority that the only way to protect these rights from judicial activists is by keeping the Democratic majority in the House, there is a chance that Democrats could win in November.

Ultimately, the bottom line is that future of progressive legislation depends on the Democrats keeping (and expanding their majority in) the House and expanding their majority in the Senate.  With 230 House seats and 53 Senate seats, civil rights and voting rights legislation that have been blocked by the filibuster will get a vote on the merits.  Reproductive rights will be protected by federal law.  And, just maybe, D.C. and Puerto Rico will finally get statehood.  If Republicans get either House, continued investigation and efforts to block a future repeat of the treasonous behavior of December 2020 and January 2021 will not proceed.  Instead, we will get a return to hearings on Benghazi and the Clinton e-mails and Hunter Biden’s computer.  The next eight weeks will determine which vision will dominate on Capitol Hill for the next two years.