If I said to you, “Quick, name three states with competitive Senate races,” I’m guessing you’d probably say Texas, Michigan, and Maine. Those are the three that get the most consistent media attention. Then, under those three, there are a number of races in red states where we know the Democrat either is generally ahead or has a great shot at winning—that’s North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, and Nebraska (where the challenger is an independent, not a Democrat). Finally, there are a couple blue states where Democrats need to defend seats, and where the Democrat is usually ahead in polls, but they’re still very close and far from done deals: Minnesota and New Hampshire.
Then, there are three other states where something very interesting may be taking shape. They’re all deep red states. One was recently a purple state but has lately become a very MAGA shade of red. The second hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century. The third started the Civil War. And improbably enough, in all three states, the Democrat is tied or maybe even a smidge ahead. And if these results hold for seven weeks, I’ll be watching these three especially closely on November 3.
Let’s start with, believe it or not, South Carolina. A poll came out in early September showing Democrat Annie Andrews narrowly leading Darline Graham, who was named to the seat when brother Lindsey died in July. Graham, as you’ll recall, then narrowly won the GOP primary after being forced into a run-off. The reason it wasn’t a clean succession is that she made a fool of herself at a debate by saying national security “is not my thing.” Andrews is a pediatrician who’s been campaigning aggressively on affordability and health care. She came out for a two-year moratorium on data centers.
She is 45 and comes across as affable, smart, and very normal. She cut an ad with her father, a Republican, who said he’s crossing party lines on this one (“Annie’s not some crazy socialist!” Dad avers). Graham is counter-punching on, of course, guns and trans athletes. The two will debate on October 11, a Sunday night. If Andrews does a good job of deflecting those parries and keeps the focus on economics, health care, and the fact that someone shouldn’t get to inherit a Senate seat, she has a shot.
In Kansas, Methodist minister Adam Hamilton is hoping to become the first Democratic senator since George McGill, elected in 1930 (right after the Great Depression hit, in other words) to serve out the term of a Republican who died in office and then elected in his own right to one term in 1932. Hamilton had a two-point lead over GOP incumbent Roger Marshall in a poll that hit last week. That poll came out a few days after The New York Times broke a devastating story detailing how Marshall, an obstetrician, sued more than 700 patients for unpaid bills as small as $101. It’s also been revealed during this campaign that Marshall and his wife, while claiming Kansas as their home, have been spending a suspicious amount of time in Sarasota, Florida.
Hamilton, 61, leads the nation’s largest Methodist church. He built it from “a few people meeting in a funeral chapel in 1990,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, to a 25,000-strong congregation. He’s written some 30 books on Christian theology, which is impressive but also gives Marshall’s oppo team a lot of material to comb through. Marshall, predictably, says Hamilton is “too woke” for Kansas. The Christian right calls him a heretic for a 2022 sermon in which he said it’s possible for non-Christians to get into heaven. Ted Cruz laid into him. Hamilton responded: “If he’s going to call me a heretic, he’s not the first. He won’t be the last.”
And finally, it’s Florida that interests me most of all. No one saw Angie Nixon’s Democratic primary win over Alexander Vindman coming. That includes me; after I wrote a column earlier this year assuming Vindman as the party’s nominee, a reader wrote in with a stern warning: Pay attention to Angie Nixon, she’s out there hustling. I was wrong, and the reader was right. Nixon destroyed Vindman, by 12 points.
Nixon is facing another appointed GOP incumbent, Ashley Moody, who was handed the seat when Marco Rubio became secretary of state. There have been three polls this month. Moody led by seven in one, but the other two showed the race a tie.
Nixon fascinates me. She joined the Democratic Socialists of America, she says, in June. In other words: In the middle of a campaign in which she was seeking a prominent statewide office in a souped-up-MAGA state run by a souped-up-MAGA governor, she joins a controversial socialist organization! Which didn’t even endorse her! This is definitely not someone who is just doing whatever her media consultants and pollsters tell her to do. In fact, on the topic of media consultants, it appears that she may not have any: During the primary, on her way to that landslide victory, she did not run a single television ad.
Just 42, Nixon is a state representative from Jacksonville. Raised by a single mother, she graduated from the University of Florida, went into politics immediately, and has opened a bookstore and coffee shop that’s a hub of local organizing and after-school efforts. She does speak her mind. On MS NOW recently, she called Moody “a liar, a cheater, a thief, a scammer who stole $10 million from sick, low-income kids to put into a political slush for Ron DeSantis.” She is referring to this sickening Florida Medicaid scandal, and she is pounding away at it.
Andrews, Hamilton, and Nixon are all still longshots, in a certain way. And I trust you know all the reasons why the experts sniff at them and say they can’t win.
But I want to tell you the reasons why they can win. They’re all smart, they’re all playing offense, they’re all unafraid. None of them seems over-consultant-ified. They’re running to some extent on the obvious things—affordability, gas prices, Iran. But they’re all throwing the kinds of punches and saying the kinds of thing consultants usually wouldn’t have candidates in red states say.
And the other reason they can win? Precisely because the experts say they can’t. Experts base their expectations on past patterns. This is a rational enough thing to do, and most of the time, it results in reasonably accurate predictions.
But sometimes, conditions change. The past patterns are no longer as relevant. I remember 1994 very well. I thought maybe the GOP had an outside shot at taking the House, but past patterns for the prior 40 years suggested that the Democrats just couldn’t lose the House. Then, at Mario Cuomo’s “victory” (actually, loss) party at the New York Hilton, I saw Chuck Schumer hanging up a payphone (?!) with an ashen look on his face. What about the House, I asked? It’s bad, he said. Like very bad. Could be 50 seats. It was 54.
Donald Trump is the author of disaster after disaster. And now he’s banning media organizations from the White House. I doubt your average voter cares enough about that to base her vote on that kerfuffle. All the same, it’s yet another “mad king”-y thing to throw on the pile, and groupable in that sense with his attacks on the Kennedy Center and all the rest of his monu-mania. (His new excuse for the planned “triumphal arch” is that it will be a “military base” with “drones and snipers.”) And that he’s doing all these things while gas is climbing toward $5 a gallon, and he’s telling people that it’s “an inexpensive price to pay” to prevent Iran from having the nuclear weapons it wasn’t anywhere near having until he huffily and foolishly tore up the JCPOA, is something our average voter cares about a lot.
Is this one of those sea-change years? Perhaps not. As I noted above, loads of Senate races are still close enough that it’s conceivable that Republicans could hold their current margin or even expand it, or at the very least retain their majority.
But it’s important to remember that sometimes, conditions are so extreme that past patterns don’t matter. That’s why these three races in particular are worth paying attention to. Because if these three Democrats somehow win, we’ll know an earthquake happened.
