Republican efforts to maintain control of the Senate appear to be on life support just over 100 days out from the November election.
Indeed, the momentum is all on the Democrats’ side. With the assistance of a media that continues to frame issues in a way favorable to Democrats and unfavorable toward Republicans, Democrats appear poised to not only win contested seats, but some GOP strategists are claiming that seats they believed safe just a few months ago are at risk.
“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.”
The coronavirus, the recession, the riots — right now voters are alarmed, angry, and scared. This is not a good atmosphere to run for office if you’re a Republican. And the way the media is framing those issues makes it easy to blame the president and his party.
News networks are on the air 24 hours and a day and yet, they can never seem to find the time to give much context that would help voters understand what’s happening. They leave that to activists screaming into the camera about injustice or partisan public health officials making dire predictions (that never seem to come true).
Republicans don’t have much of a chance.
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.
Those cultural shifts have been encouraged and driven by a media that has determined it’s time to “fix” America and repair the damage of 300 years in a few months. Of course, if Biden gets elected, collective amnesia will descend on the media and it will be more far more helpful for the protesters to go home, sit down, and shut up.
It’s not over yet, of course. Events may yet break in the GOP’s favor and flip a lot of those races that have become progressively more out of reach. But Democrats have outraised, out hustled, and outrun Republicans at almost every turn.
Time is growing short and the window is closing.
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