RICHLAND CENTER, Wis. — It was Pride weekend in Wisconsin, a natural time for the state’s groundbreaking, openly gay senator to rally her Democratic base, but on Sunday, Tammy Baldwin was away from the parades and rallies in Madison and Milwaukee — in a dairy farm in Republican Richland County.
“I’ll show up in red counties and they’ll say, ‘I don’t remember the last time we saw a sitting U.S. senator here, especially a Democrat,’” Baldwin said an hour later. in his unassuming job handing out plastic cutlery at an annual dairy breakfast, and five months before Wisconsin voters decide whether to give him a third term. “I think that’s starting to happen.”
Wisconsin is one of seven states that will determine the presidency in November, but it will also help determine which party controls the Senate. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are competing in the state, which Trump narrowly won in 2016 and Biden took back in 2020.
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Baldwin, by contrast, is well ahead of the president and his presumptive Republican opponent, wealthy banker Eric Hovde. Polls released early last month by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College found that Baldwin maintains a 49% to 40% lead over Hovde. In late May, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report estimated the spread even wider, 12 percentage points.
This low-voting Democratic force is not isolated to Wisconsin. Democratic Senate candidates also lead in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. A Marist poll released Tuesday said Trump led Biden in Ohio by 7 percentage points, but Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, leads his opponent, Bernie Moreno, by 5 percentage points, a 12-point swing.
In a warning memo shared with donors, Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative group focused on helping Republicans regain control of the Senate, said that in states with hot Senate races, voters have a deeply negative view of Biden, but positive opinions about his Democratic senators.
“It’s still early in the race, but we’re seeing some of the same warning signs we saw in 2022,” said Bill Riggs, a spokesman for the group. “So far, voters are not connecting Democratic Senate candidates to the top of the ticket, and despite deep disapproval, Biden has not become the holdout you would expect.”
There is no reason why the Democratic Senate candidates are doing much better than Biden. The political terrain for congressional candidates may be more favorable than for the president. Most Democratic candidates have the power of incumbency, name recognition and fundraising. And unlike Biden, most have opponents who are not well known and therefore vulnerable to negative attacks.
As we ate pancakes and cheese curds, Scott Crook, a retired operating engineer from Richland County, echoed the negative publicity against Hovde when he called him a rich guy from California—Democrats criticized him for his $7 million home in Laguna Beach, California.
“His money isn’t fooling anyone here,” he said.
Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for Biden’s campaign, said Democratic Senate candidates are running on the president’s agenda. It has benefited them and will ultimately benefit Biden.
“In 2022, Democrats had the best midterm performance by a presidential party in decades because the Biden-Harris agenda is incredibly popular,” she said, citing abortion rights and drug price controls. “Record President Biden won at the polls in 2022 and will win again in 2024.”
Senate Republican campaign aides also dismissed any concerns. Reagan McCarthy, Moreno’s spokesman, noted that while Moreno is trying to emerge from a brutal primary season, Brown has the support of just over 40 percent of voters — “a death knell for any incumbent.”
Elizabeth Gregory, spokeswoman for Dave McCormick, the Republican challenging Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, pointed to the Times poll, which shows Casey at 46 percent to McCormick’s 41 percent. “Incumbent senators with Bob Casey’s poll numbers right now almost always lose,” she said, “and so will he.”
But for many reasons, it’s easier for the Democratic Senate candidates than it is for Biden. On the political front, they are much less burdened by controversies that place the president between the left flank of his party and the broad center of the electorate. Voters generally do not expect Senate candidates to define U.S. foreign policy in Israel, nor do they hold a porous U.S.-Mexico border against them.
“They don’t blame her for all the things they blame President Biden for,” said Pam Flick, a retired educator and Democrat from Richland Center, Wisconsin.
As Biden balances priorities, including controversial issues like extracting billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine, Democratic candidates may focus more on issues like lowering child care costs — which Baldwin has spoken about on Monday in Milwaukee.
“No question,” Baldwin said of whether the president should focus more on kitchen table issues. “You saw him deal with things like undue fees; this movement alone is extremely popular. What he hasn’t done yet is connect the dots – he’s the one repressing.”
As Biden worked this spring to shore up weakening support among young progressives, canceling student debt against the inclinations of more moderate voters and framing the election as a fight to save democracy, Democratic Senate candidates were bolstering their images in the center. -left and center-left. sure voters will need in swing states.
Brown went on air to emphasize his bipartisan work to bring semiconductor manufacturing to Ohio, never mentioning Biden by name, even though the president was instrumental in passing the legislation, known as the CHIPS and Science Act. An ad airing in Nevada shows the Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat, promoting herself as “one of the most bipartisan senators” who has worked with both parties to help veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq. Once again, Biden is not mentioned in one of his main legislative achievements, the PACT Act.
A recent Casey ad in Pennsylvania did one better, featuring influential workers declaring, “Our own government has turned its back on us, using Chinese steel to build our infrastructure,” adding, “Bob Casey said no way.” Viewers could be forgiven for concluding that “our government” was Biden’s, despite the president forcing the “buy American” clause for steel into his infrastructure bill.
But campaign advisers from both parties warn not to read too much into the political moves, communications skills or strategic maneuvering of Senate Democrats. Its biggest advantages are much more obvious: Democratic senators running for reelection in Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have the power of incumbency on their side, working against Republican opponents who are much less well-known.
And that may be more important.
“We’re so busy that we don’t pay attention to politics,” said Sherry Nelson, 70, co-owner of Huff-Nel-Sons Farm, who hosted the dairy breakfast on Sunday with her husband, Larry Nelson, 69. years. But, she added of Baldwin, “I think she’s doing a good job.”
As for the presidential race, both Nelsons were extremely disappointed with their choices.
“It’s a coin toss,” Larry Nelson said of his vote in November. “That’s about it.”
Biden and Trump are running as incumbents versus incumbents, with no advantage in name recognition and both burdened with ingrained negative images.
As Baldwin campaign strategist Andrew Mamo said, he is trying to shape the opinions of the 50 percent of Wisconsin voters who don’t know the Republican in this race and therefore could be swayed by negative publicity. The Biden campaign actually has to change some people’s opinions about Trump, and that is one of the most difficult tasks in politics. Voters don’t tend to like admitting they were wrong.
Exceptions confirm the rule. In Michigan, where Rep. Elissa Slotkin is running for retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s seat, her lead over her expected Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, is within the margin of error in most polls, with at least least a quarter of Michigan voters undecided. None of the candidates are incumbents. Both hail from the Lansing area, and much of Michigan is unfamiliar with them.
In the Arizona Senate race to replace Kyrsten Sinema after her retirement, Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, maintains a consistent lead over his Republican opponent, former news anchor Kari Lake. But that may be because the best-known candidate is Lake, and she is not liked, not since she refused to accept defeat in her failed 2022 gubernatorial bid.
Mike Berg, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that with Republican candidates still running, the most important number in the polls is the Democrats’ vote share, which in most cases is below 50%.
“Our candidates still have significant room to grow,” he said, adding: “These Democrats will win or lose with Biden, regardless of their last-minute attempts to create distance from him after supporting every one of his disastrous policies.”
He may have a point. In the last two presidential elections, only a single candidate, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, won a race in a state that went to the opposite party’s presidential candidate.
“The fact is there is less ticket sharing today than at any other time in American history,” Berg said.
Republicans already have an advantage in their bid to retake the House. The Republican Party all but won the seat from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a deeply red state. To maintain control of the Senate, Democrats will have to win every election in swing states, plus the two elections in Republican-leaning Montana and Ohio, unless Democratic challengers somehow defy the odds against Republican incumbents in Texas. , in Florida or Missouri.
But if Republicans want to run up the score, they shouldn’t be complacent, warned Brian Walsh, a Republican strategist who previously worked at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
“Certainly no one is panicking,” he said, “but for Republicans who think Biden’s unpopularity will just translate to these other Democrats, look to 2022,” when the president was equally unpopular and Democrats actually won a seat in the Senate. .
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