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Despite the hardening realization that the House of Representatives has moved out of reach for Republicans this fall, you’d still have to say the red team is favored to hold on to the Senate… Probably.
Of the 11 seats that look at least somewhat competitive, Republicans hold seven (Alaska, Maine, Ohio, Nebraska, Iowa, Texas and North Carolina) and Democrats hold four (Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Georgia). And while it’s not the most likely outcome that Democrats end up with at least eight of the 11, the path is certainly there.
And if Republicans do lose the Senate, or even if the upper chamber ends up 50-50 with Vice President Vance as the tiebreaker, that’s a lot of misery for the GOP. Outright Democratic control means every budget fight, every confirmation becomes a scorched-earth battle with a lame-duck president who has nothing left to lose. And if it's a one-vote majority, that means every GOP senator has a veto over every measure. A world in which Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) or Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) can kill any bill is one in which Republicans have partial responsibility for Congress but little functional control.
So Republicans want to not just keep the majority, but preserve some of their current three-vote cushion. They’ve raised lots of money and have minimized some of the recruiting problems that plagued the party in the past — if not entirely. And, fortunately for the GOP, Democrats are imitating some of their mistakes from Senate shortfalls of the 2010s by getting too weird.
But none of that solves the core problem that Republicans face: voter apathy. Polls show a deep chasm in enthusiasm between Republican and Democratic voters. Whether that speaks more to disillusionment among Republicans or just the Trump-era problem of relying on low-propensity voters in nonpresidential years, who knows? But we don’t need polls to tell us that the gap is real. Each special election victory by Democrats shows us that the blue team is fired up and ready to go, while Republicans struggle to get out the vote.
Motivating one’s core voters is always essential in midterms, but even more so when independents are lined up with the other side. The so-called double haters, those voters with negative views of both parties, preferred Democratic control of Congress by a whopping 31 points in one recent poll. If the final result is anything like that, Republicans are going to have to drag every one of their voters to the poll to prevent an absolute bloodbath in November.
But how to motivate them?
The current effort is to remind GOPers about the good things they already got, particularly immigration enforcement and a tax cut. But immigration has become a fraught topic and voters are pretty clearly not feeling grateful about tax rates. It makes it a harder sell when prices are up and economic optimism is down.
What might work, though, would be a Supreme Court fight.
In three of the past four national elections, Republicans have very much put the Supreme Court on the ballot. Indeed, President Trump’s 2016 victory owes as much to the court as anything else. That was when Senate Republicans blockaded Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, making the November election a referendum on court control.
In 2020, keen to avoid giving Democrats a similar advantage, Republicans pushed through the conformation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September of the election year.
But the model that Senate Republicans are thinking about right now is 2018, when the wild and combative confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh may have helped save the Senate for the GOP in a difficult election year. Democrats’ effort to derail Kavanaugh over the accusations of an alleged high school sexual assault helped unite and energize conservatives and allowed Trump, yet again, to make good on his campaign promise of nominating conservatives to the high court.
It’s certainly on President Trump’s mind amid the Washington speculation about a possible retirement by Justice Samuel Alito. But the president, as always, is looking for more, telling Fox News, "In theory, it's two — you just read the statistics — it could be two,” in a nod to Justice Clarence Thomas’s 77 years. That’s a little rich coming from a man who is two years older than Thomas, but it certainly speaks to his ambitions to remake the court.
Alito’s team sounds adamant that he is going to serve out the current term of the court, which runs to the beginning of October, but are hazy about what comes thereafter. Serving out this term, though, would not preclude him from announcing his retirement before then. Oral arguments are typically finished by July, which could tee up a confirmation fight right about the time midterms start heating up around Labor Day.
This poses several interesting questions. There’s no chance Senate Republicans will want to hand Democrats the chance to run on a vacancy or to have the chance to block a Trump nominee by leaving the seat open. That means Trump would need a nominee who could do as Barrett and Kavanaugh did and get basically universal GOP support for a speedy confirmation. But that would mean Trump would have to accept the same kind of justice — eminently qualified, widely respected, etc. — that has handed him a number of reversals at the court on everything from overturning the 2020 election to tariff power.
The president has repeatedly mentioned Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in a joking-not-joking kind of way. Cruz told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that he would refuse, as he had thrice before when Trump approached him about vacancies. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has floated the idea of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), but it is not clear that Lee, who went through a sort of radical MAGA makeover, would be able to get 51 votes with the kind of ease Republicans need.
More likely, Trump will need to choose from a list of Senate-confirmed appellate judges like right-wing favorites James Ho and Andrew Oldham or conservative stalwarts like Neomi Rao and Amul Thapar. But whomever Trump would pick, it would need to be someone who can unite Republicans rather than divide them or the anticipated benefit of an election-year confirmation could turn into a fiasco that compounds the party’s existing problems.
