Bluenami Tsunami, Con't

Cook Political Report's Jessica Taylor now has the Democrats favored to take back the Senate with the needed net four pickups predicted in November.

With just over 100 days until Election Day, the political climate appears dire for Republicans across the board. President Trump is the decided underdog against former Vice President Joe Biden in our Electoral College ratings and Democrats could end up expanding their House majority.

That leaves the Senate as Republicans' firewall—the final barrier to unified control for Democrats in 2021. While GOP incumbents are trying to run races independent of the president, if Trump’s polling numbers remain this dismal come November, that’s an unenviable and likely unsuccessful strategy, according to several top party strategists. As of now, Democrats are a slight favorite to win the Senate majority.

“Something remarkable would have to happen for Republicans to still have control of the Senate after November,” remarked one GOP pollster. “It’s grim. There’s just so many places where Democrats either have the upper hand or are competitive in states that six months ago we wouldn’t have considered at risk.”
“If you’re an incumbent in a bad environment sitting at 44 percent, you should be pretty damn scared,” another alarmed Republican strategist said. “The expanding map has made it really hard, and there’s just a lot of Democratic momentum right now."

We wrote four months ago that the worsening pandemic, along with Biden emerging as the Democratic nominee instead of Bernie Sanders, was the “perfect storm” Republicans feared. Now, with the death toll nearing 150,000, the environment has gotten even worse for the GOP, prodded along by Trump’s missteps. Racial injustice protests after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery in early June further galvanized the nation, leading to rapid cultural shifts against Confederate monuments and even the long pushed for change of the Mississippi state flag, which still bore the Confederate battle flag emblem.

Taken together, that’s not just a perfect storm for Democrats, but perhaps a perfect tsunami. “The bottom fell out for us at the end of May and June,” with worsening numbers continuing into July now, one national GOP strategist looking at polls across the map bemoaned.

Ultimately, every day that Trump stubbornly refuses to change course is another day that it becomes increasingly likely he may not only tank his own re-election bid but could be on a kamikaze mission to take the Republican-held Senate down with him. At this point, a net gain of five to seven seats for Democrats looks far more probable than the one to three seat gain that would leave them shy of a majority.  

July Ratings Changes:

Arizona: Martha McSally (R) — Toss Up → Lean D
Iowa: Joni Ernst (R) — Lean R → Toss Up
Georgia: David Perdue (R) — Lean R → Toss Up
Minnesota: Tina Smith (D) — Likely D → Solid D
New Mexico: OPEN (Udall) — Likely D → Solid D

With McSally's loss now countering Doug Jones's uphill climb to keep his seat, Cook now has Republicans defending a whopping nine seats in November to Dems' two (the other being Gary Peters in Michigan, who is Lean D still). Six of those Republican seats are toss-ups now: Perdue in GA, Ernst in IA, Collins in ME, Daines in MT, Tillis in NC, and Gardner in CO, plus McSally now favored to lose in AZ.

It's entirely possible that Dems end up with a net gain of six seats and maybe, maybe eight or nine.

We'll see how this holds up.