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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Twente, Twente Explained. Twente Explained. Way back in January 2020, when the world was worried about those wildfires in Australia, or whether we were going to go to war with Iran, or how President Trump's impeachment would shake out, it was prevailing wisdom that Democrats had little to no chance of taking the Senate in 2020. But one pandemic and a crippled economy later, it's not such a sure thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, I mean, I think, if you had asked somebody maybe last summer, they would have said that Republicans were much more likely to retain control of the Senate. But there are a number of things that have changed since then. And right now, the race for the Senate is looking very competitive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ella Nilsson has been writing about this very subject for Vox. And it's wicked important because if Biden wins the presidency and has the House and the Senate in tow, he could really shake things up in the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So on today's show, we're going to talk about how Democrats could flip the Senate. And on tomorrow's show, we're going to talk about what Biden would do with majorities in the House and the Senate. And we're going to start with the Senate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So right now, there are 23 Republican Senate seats and 12 Democratic Senate seats. But in those numbers, you can kind of segment those into seats that are safe and then seats that are more competitive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the key numbers that we really need to know is right now there are 10 Republican Senate seats that Cook Political Report rates as either toss up or lean Republican compared to just two Democratic seats with the same ratings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And only one of those Democratic seats, Alabama, is seen as, you know, truly flippable for Republicans. OK, well, we'll talk about Alabama in a bit, but let's first focus on these seats that Republicans could very potentially lose.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where are they? There are four four states known as the core four. The core four? The core four. That sounds fun. I've never heard that before. When you talk to political operatives, you pick up on weird, rhymey lingo. It sounds like it should be like a math rock band from Seattle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Colorado, Arizona, Maine, and North Carolina. Colorado, Corrigan, Arizona, Martha McSally's name. Susan Collins, North Carolina, Tom Tillis. Colorado, Corrigan, Arizona, Martha McSally's name. Susan Collins, North Carolina, Tom Tillis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, let's go through and dig a little deeper, starting with Maine. That's Susan Collins' seat, and she catches a lot of heat, right?
--:-- Ella Nilsson: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Susan Collins has been in office for a really long time. Our distinguished colleague, the senior senator from Maine, cast her 7000th roll call vote. She's high ranking on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is a pretty powerful committee that decides what money gets appropriated.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And Collins has always been seen as somebody who can work with Democrats and somebody who traditionally bucked her party when she didn't necessarily think that she wanted to go along with what Republican leadership was saying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Unyielding adherence to an extreme position is easy. It is compromise, good faith, and the hard work of bringing people together that requires determination, intellect, and courage.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But I think that that image has kind of changed in the Trump era. And that's because she voted for Kavanaugh?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I see a lot of hate because she voted for Kavanaugh.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: Yeah, I mean, that is certainly like the thing that has kind of inspired, you know, the most anti-Susan Collins sentiment in Maine and around the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Senator Susan Collins, talk about a 180. She won her last reelection with almost 70 percent of the vote. Now she is ranked as the country's most disliked senator in a new poll.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But there are other things, too. I mean, she she voted for the GOP tax bill back in 2017. She voted to acquit President Trump during his impeachment trial in the Senate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One area where she had actually bucked Republicans early on in Trump's presidency was voting against the Affordable Care Act repeal legislation that would have done away with the ACA. That was sort of Susan Collins' last big stand against her party.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: Since then, a lot of folks have been looking to see if she's going to vote against the interests of Republican leadership in the Senate and the interests of President Donald Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in the case of some of these swing states and, you know, Maine especially, there are also a lot of people who hate Trump in the state.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And Maine is kind of segmented into kind of the more conservative northern part of the state which Susan Collins is from And then the more liberal southern part of the state where Portland Maine is located
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So she walking this fine line where she hasn actually come out and said whether she going to support Trump or even vote for him in the 2020 election.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But she also isn't really, you know, speaking out against him a lot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I feel like people may have heard or caught a whiff of the fact that Maine is kind of up for grabs and Susan Collins' next term is in question.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But what's up in North Carolina? I feel like people probably haven't heard as much about the race there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a similar dynamic, although definitely more of a competitive kind of swingier state. North Carolina, it's always sort of traditionally been Republican.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Senator Tom Tillis, a Republican, is up for reelection there. I knew that you all and North Carolinians want elected officials that are going to go to Washington and get something done, fulfill their promises.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you all know that we're going to continue the tradition that we've done here in North Carolina. We're going to go there and expect more out of our leaders and we're going to fulfill our promises and we're going to make this country great again.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But North Carolina is pretty purple. There are more Democrats moving in there, like a lot of other places in the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are suburbs outside cities like Charlotte, other big cities in North Carolina that are just getting more diverse and, you know, trending a little bit more blue.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: The Democrat running there is Cal Cunningham. You know, he's been a state politician in North Carolina for a while. And he's pretty moderate, but he's basically running on a message of Medicaid expansion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Here in North Carolina, we really need to use one of the tools in the Affordable Care Act toolbox and expand Medicaid to some 600,000 of our people that don't have access to care today, in part because of a law that Tom Tillis himself said he was proud to have passed as Speaker of the State House.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: Tillis actually used to lead the North Carolina state legislature before he became a senator.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he actually had a pretty pivotal role in rejecting Medicaid expansion when he was a state politician.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And he also was part of a bill that kind of constrained North Carolina's unemployment benefits system and made it so fewer people could get benefits, which obviously is a pretty big issue now amid the coronavirus crisis and so many people trying to get unemployment benefits.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And moving all the way across the country to Arizona, this race might have some names that people are familiar with, right?
--:-- Ella Nilsson: Yeah. So the two candidates that are running in Arizona. So on the Republican side, we have Senator Martha McSally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Look, I don't play games with usual politics. I don't campaign one way and then vote another. I don't pretend that avoiding the problem is the same as solving a problem. I don't introduce legislation and pat myself on the back as if I've actually solved the issue. I maintain mission focus.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: She ran in 2018 and lost to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. And then she was appointed by the state's Republican governor when former longtime Senator John McCain died to fill McCain's spot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then the Democrat who's running against McSally is astronaut Mark Kelly, who is the husband of former U.S. Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who a lot of people know she was the victim of a gun attack many years ago, survived and has now become a very vocal advocate for gun control laws.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And is, I mean, is Kelly all but a shoo-in to win? He's got a pretty remarkable story being an astronaut who's also married to Gabby Giffords, yeah?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, Kelly, I think, is a good fit for the state. He has a lot of name recognition. His story is definitely inspiring.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: You know, seeing that sunrise from space for the very first time, it is incredible. You know, it becomes pretty obvious pretty early when you get into space that we're all kind of in this together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he's proved himself to be very good at fundraising. He has pulled in a ton of money throughout the race.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: He's up on television everywhere. I think most polls throughout the summer have shown him, you know, double digits ahead of McSally, which is a pretty big deal considering that Arizona, you know, up until a few years ago was kind of seen as a safe Republican state, but is again, you know, one of those states that's diversifying pretty rapidly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how does Arizona compare to Colorado, a state we, I think, more uniformly think
--:-- Ella Nilsson: Yeah, I mean, I would say that Arizona is considered to be more conservative than Colorado for sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so in Colorado, there's the incumbent Cory Gardner. Mr. President, you've done so much good for Colorado. As a result of your work, the Bureau of Land Management is now headquartered in the great state of Colorado.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: who is a freshman Republican. It's his first reelection since he won in 2014.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he's going up against former Democratic governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: The Senate doesn't attract me at this point, just doesn't attract me. Oh, he wanted to be president, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, he briefly ran for president like a few other candidates, Senate candidates this year.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: So Hickenlooper is, you know, seen as a fairly moderate guy, pretty affable and well-liked, certainly, in Colorado, given his tenure as governor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that the biggest question here for Cory Gardner is whether there are enough Republicans and moderate Republicans left to win re-election, essentially.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: I mean, Gardner won in 2014, which was a year where Republicans swept a bunch of races. It was a really good midterm year for Republicans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But even then, that was a tight race. He's known as being, you know, a pretty savvy politician. But since 2014, I think that Colorado has moved even further left.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And you know it just a really tough electoral year for him given the dynamics with Trump Trump is not well in Colorado
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK so those are the four states where Republicans really might stand to lose something But you mentioned there was Alabama where Democrats could lose something, too, right?
--:-- Ella Nilsson: What's up in Alabama? That's Doug Jones' territory?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, that is right now Doug Jones' territory.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: We have shown not just around the state of Alabama, But we have shown the country the way that we can be unified. Like the fact that we're even talking about, you know, a Democratic incumbent from Alabama in 2020 is like kind of crazy, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Quite. This is a very southern state. It's a very Trump friendly state.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And yeah, Doug Jones won a special election in 2017 against Roy Moore, who was an incredibly flawed candidate who was accused of pedophilia in the middle of the race.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's interesting when you talk to folks on Jones's campaign who were involved in the 2017 race, they are very adamant in saying that they felt like the race was really close even before the revelations about Moore came out.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But this time, you know, Jones doesn't have Roy Moore to run against. He's running against Republican Tommy Tuberville, who is a former football coach at Auburn University in Alabama.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Doug Jones is Alabama. You don't work for your state in Alabama. You don't work for the United States of America. You spend the first three years trying to impeach the best president we've ever had, and he voted to impeach him.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: So football, Alabama might be tough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I recently interviewed Doug Jones and, you know, he and his campaign know that they are the underdogs here, even though he's the incumbent.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And Jones is going to really run on his record of being a bipartisan senator, even though he has taken some Democratic Party line votes on things like voting against Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he hasn't really tried to make himself a conservative Southern Democrat.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But he thinks that Tuberville is certainly maybe not as vulnerable as Moore is, but he also feels that Tuberville and Alabama Republicans maybe aren't taking his campaign seriously enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Republicans and Democrats alike think that he is one of the most endangered senators in 2020.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But his campaign is pretty scrappy. And I am interested to see, you know, if they can pull off something that everybody said they couldn't pull off in 2017 and now is saying they can't pull off in 2020.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: More with Ella in a minute.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash today explained.
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--:-- Ella Nilsson: 2020, 2020, 2020. Okay, Ella, from talking to you about the four races where Republican seats are most up for grabs, it sounds like there's a lot of different state-by-state variables at play.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But how much does the bigger race, President Trump, play into those races?
--:-- Ella Nilsson: It's a really big deal. I mean, I think that the presidential election is really going to have an effect on Senate races.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I've talked to a lot of pollsters and political operatives in both parties, and a lot of people have said to me that voters are just less likely these days to split their tickets.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: So, you know, voting for a presidential candidate of one party and then voting for a Senate candidate of a different party, more people just kind of vote straight down the ballot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And yeah, you're definitely seeing the effects of Trump in what is making some of these Senate races more competitive.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: You know, even in states like Montana that Trump won by 20 points in 2016, his approval rating has gone down since then.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there are things that have happened since, like, you know, Trump's postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, cutting down Postal Service processing and, you know, slowing down the delivery of mail, which has impacted folks in rural Montana from getting things like their prescriptions and their mail and obviously their mail-in ballots.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: So it not even just coronavirus in the economy There are now like enough Trump tangential scandals that Democrats can point to in a bunch of different states to make the argument not only against him as the president but also to make the argument against the Republican senators that have defended him thus far
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So how much does that change the Democrat strategy in states like Montana or Maine or North Carolina or Colorado or Arizona?
--:-- Ella Nilsson: I mean, they flipped the house in 2018. Is the strategy similar or is it, you know, very Corona economy based now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that they're definitely keeping a lot of elements of their 2018 strategy. And that was to talk about health care all the time.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: Barack Obama today driving home the Democrats closing message. Health care is on the ballot. You vote, you might save a life. A hoarse Joe Biden Sunday.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They oppose mandating insurance companies cover preexisting conditions. It's Nancy Pelosi's final marching orders in a letter to House Democrats today, writing health care is the key factor in voters decisions.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But of course, we are now in a pandemic that has killed over 200,000 Americans and left millions unemployed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And for many people, you know, who have lost their jobs have also lost their insurance that came with that job.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: So I think that the healthcare argument is as salient as ever, if not more so.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, you see a lot of Democrats making arguments in states that haven't expanded Medicaid that they should expand the social safety net for people who need the help.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And I think that, you know, coronavirus and healthcare and the economy kind of all fit pretty well together in this package of issues that Democrats are really choosing to focus on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, on that note, we did this episode recently on ventilation in which we talked about how the fact that maybe one sixth of Americans may not return to their office buildings might mean that we might see this dramatic reshuffling and acceleration of shifting demographics throughout the country of people leaving cities and moving to more rural, Southern states.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: How much is the shifting demography of this country going to be a big factor here in this 2020 race?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, it's huge. I mean, I was talking to a Republican pollster today and I asked him about Georgia and the fact that, you know, the incumbent Republican Senator David Perdue is in a pretty tight race that really wasn't on anybody's radar half a year ago.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And he basically said, you know, it's kind of crazy that we're sitting here talking about a competitive race in Georgia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he just said that that tells you about the impact of demographic change on American politics.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And, you know, that means that we're talking about a lot of Black voters that are certainly not just in cities like Atlanta, Georgia, but also in the suburbs or Latino voters or Asian American voters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When we talk about the suburbs, I feel like usually the image that comes to mind is white people in the suburbs.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: I feel like that's certainly the people that Trump is really trying to appeal to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But American suburbs don't look like they used to back in 1960s.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: They look a lot more reflective of the country as a whole.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And yeah, this is the reason that we're talking about Georgia and Arizona and even maybe Texas, although I would argue Texas is more of a reach.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: as competitive battleground Senate seats in 2020.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think we're all familiar with what it looks like to have a Democratic president and at least partially controlled Republican Congress that's butting heads with said president.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But what could this potentially look like if, say, Joe Biden wins the presidency and has the House and has the Senate?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Democrats would have a pretty unique opportunity to pass things that they have been wanting to get done for years.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: Shoring up the Affordable Care Act and potentially passing a public option.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that the consensus in Washington, D.C. is that there probably needs to be more COVID relief getting passed.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: And as we've seen the last few months, talks between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill haven't really gone anywhere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if Democrats had total control of the White House and the Senate, you know, it wouldn't be a total breeze.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: You still have, you know, the minorities to deal with.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you obviously have different factions in your party and people of different ideological stripes that you have to please.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But, yeah, I mean, I think that Biden is wanting to put forward a pretty bold agenda for his presidency.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It keeps getting described as, you know, a New Deal agenda.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: There are really historic problems that the country is facing that the Democrats want to tackle in big ways, including health care and climate change and the COVID pandemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it certainly wouldn't be, you know, a breeze.
--:-- Ella Nilsson: But compared to the total loggerheads that we've seen between Republicans and Democrats over the past decade, even, it would be a lot different.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ellen Nilsson covers politics for Vox. I'm Sean Rameswaram for him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained. And on tomorrow's show, I'll speak with our colleague Dylan Matthews about what exactly Joe Biden would do with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
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