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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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I haven't actually looked at the Senate races this year, but let's take a look!
20 Democrats, 11 Republican
And one of those Democrat seats is WV. While Democrats like to complain about Joe Manchin, he is probably the only Democrat who could win any statewide office in WV. His decision to not run makes keeping his seat nearly impossible for Democrats. And the 11 Republican seats are all quite safe. Rick Scott in FL and Ted Cruz in TX are the only ones Democrats have any shot at all at.
The best Democrats can hope for is to keep the rest of their seats, which will leave the Senate at 50/50 (leaving control up to whoever the VP is).
Synema in AZ is the one I have no clue how it's going to go. Nobody likes her.
Remember she's technically an independent now, and the Democrats are running someone against her.
Last time I read anything about that race, I believe the Dem was leading polling in a potential 3 way race there.
I would have to imagine that if Synema did not run, that would overall help the Dem candidate.
Fingers crossed.
Yeah. I've voted for him every general election, and usually against him in the primary but people really need to understand this - your choices are Manchin or a Republican, not Manchin or a different Democrat.
WV was a safe blue state until 2000. But it was a blue state because of the unions. And Gore was the one who really started pushing hard against the largest union industries in the state, which is why the state flipped so hard and so suddenly.
This is a huge thing that a lot of people, especially young people (millennials included here), tend to miss.
I may not have narrowed it down to Gore specifically, but at some point between, say...1985 and 2000...the Democratic party really seemed to just take unions and blue collar workers for granted...people who'd been a historic pillar of the party.
I'm not sure why this happened, but I suspect deep pockets of donors in big business had a part in it. Regardless, that decision may have had its desired effect in the short term, but in the long term, it basically put the Rust Belt in play. PA, OH, IN, MI, WI, and MN could/should be solid bets to break blue in every national race, but now you have these states full of registered Democrats who have voted Republican in at least half of the last six elections.
I always thought that WV was more about coal, but the union angle makes a ton of sense as well, and through that lens, it makes perfect sense to include them as maybe "Rust Belt adjacent".
They backed away from unions and started putting more emphasis on identity over that period, but for WV it was Gore attacking the coal industry that triggered the switch over. WV was only Democrat because of the unions and the largest union industry was the coal miners. It doesn't matter if you pay lip service to supporting unions if you're also expressing a dedication to shutting down the biggest union industry in the region.
The two are fundamentally linked. What do you think the biggest union in WV was? There was never a solid Democrat support of coal, but so long as they were pro-union and didn't actively attack coal they were going to keep WV. Instead they went increasingly