Will Dems ever have a Senate Majority again?
With Joe Manchin gone, it's become a lot less likely in the 2020s
Thanks for reading America Explained - writing posts like this takes a lot of time and effort, and signing up for a paid subscription helps make that work possible. It also ensures that you’ll never miss a post and will have access to the full archive. Click below to subscribe for about the cost of a cup of coffee a month.
Yesterday Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, announced that he will be retiring rather than seeking a new term in 2024. Manchin has long occupied one of the most paradoxical positions in the Democratic Party. On the one hand, he is the only Democrat who could plausibly win in the deep red state of West Virginia, and without him the Democrats wouldn’t currently have a Senate majority. Yet even as he made the passage of some major Democratic legislation possible, he emerged as a hated figure on the party’s left by blocking more progressive accomplishments.
Although I’ve had my own moments of anger at Manchin, I’ve always thought it was better to have a Democratic senator from West Virginia than not to have one. And the overwhelming likelihood is that we will not see Manchin’s like again. Trump won West Virginia by nearly 40% in 2020, and only Manchin’s personal history in the state - he was its Secretary of State, and then its Governor - allowed him to buck the usual forces of partisanship. When Manchin started his career in West Virginia politics in 1982, there were 17 Democratic senators in the American South. Today, there are five.1 Of those five, one is Manchin, and two apiece come from Virginia and Georgia - states demographically very unlike the rest of the South.
With Manchin passing from the scene, we can expect to see West Virginia acting very much like any other state with its political and demographic composition - which is to say we can expect it to elect two Republican senators by large margins. It’s exactly the sort of state that Democrats have ceased to be competitive in - mostly rural, lower income, and overwhelmingly white. Democrats can win in Virginia because the sprawling suburbs of Washington, DC have spilled over into the north of the state, and they can win in Georgia because of the bustling, multi-racial metropolis of Atlanta. But they almost certainly cannot win in West Virginia, or places like it.
This creates a huge ongoing problem for the Democratic Party. The American political system structurally favors smaller, less densely-populated places such as West Virginia by gifting them the same representation in the Senate - two seats - as the nation-state-sized states of New York or California. As a result, the forty million people in California can be outvoted by the roughly 1.5m of North Dakota and South Dakota combined. In a world in which Democrats aren’t competing for rural states, this gives them a huge built-in disadvantage.
The situation becomes more alarming if you take a look at the specific states in which there will be Senate elections in the remainder of the decade. In 2024, Republicans have three pick-up opportunities in states that Trump carried by large margins - Ohio, West Virginia and Montana - plus possibilities in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The Democratic senators in these states were all elected in 2018, a blue wave which is unlikely to be repeated. Democrats, by contrast, only have opportunities in Florida and Texas - very tough targets. In 2026 and 2028 the maps are more balanced, but without any obvious way for Democrats to make big gains.
To put it bluntly: By taking away their opportunity to win a seat in West Virginia, Manchin’s retirement only adds to this problem - and makes it very difficult to see how Democrats can maintain a Senate majority for the rest of the 2020s.
This matters for a lot of reasons. Firstly, the Supreme Court. Some liberal voices are already calling on Sonia Sotomayor (age 69) and even Elena Kagan (age 63) to retire so that a Democratic Senate can pick younger replacements while it still has the chance. This might sound absurd, but given the hardball that Republicans have started playing with Supreme Court appointments, plus the reality that Democrats might not have a Senate majority for another decade or more, it’s not outlandish - particularly in the case of Sotomayor.
The second problem is that even if Biden wins in 2024, the chances he’s going to have a Democratic Senate are slim. That means no major legislation and constant fights over routine things like the budget and the debt ceiling. Conversely, if Trump wins in 2024, he’s very likely to have a GOP Senate - and one which will be considerably more Trumpy and less interested in constraining his behavior than the Senate was during his first term.
Of course, a decade is a long time in politics, and this grim prediction could turn out to be off-base for a number of reasons. But if it is, then it’s more likely to be due to the GOP messing things up than the Democrats suddenly figuring out how to broaden their appeal. Republicans have cut deeply into Democratic support among rural whites through cultural and racial messages that Democrats can hardly imitate, both because they don’t want to and because their base consists of people of color and liberal whites. Republicans, though, have frequently messed up winnable Senate races in recent years through either nominating crazy candidates (think Roy Moore in Alabama) or through the antics of Donald Trump (think Georgia in 2020/21). Perversely, then, the insanity of the Republican Party continuing to repel American voters is Democrats’ best shot at keeping control of the Senate in the coming years.
But that continued insanity also vastly raises the stakes of failing. If Republicans lock down the Senate, they’ll be one step closer to being able to implement their extreme vision for America - one in which abortion is illegal and Donald Trump can jail whoever he pleases. Democrats, meanwhile, are losing one of their most crucial means of fighting back and keeping the GOP in check. When you look at it this way, whatever you thought of him, Joe Manchin was a bulwark of the republic. With him gone, even tougher times lie ahead.
I used the U.S. Census Bureau definition of the South, except I excluded Maryland and Delaware, which are pretty clearly part of the North - fight me in the comments