The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 50
Dec. 9, 2024
This week:
- Trump nominees face obstacles, none of them insurmountable
- Ernst may face a primary threat
- Kemp could help keep the Senate Republican in the second half of Trump 2.0
Outlook
Trump transition: The Trump transition team may or may not succeed in getting all of Trump’s nominations through, but it has been largely successful in managing expectations and avoiding leaks. And this is 90 percent of the battle.
Will Pete Hegseth be approved as secretary of Defense? Maybe or maybe not — but the important thing as of this writing on the morning of Dec. 9 is that no Republican senator has committed to voting against him yet, in spite of many anonymous accusations. Assuming that they continue to resist anonymity as grounds for condemnation, his chances seem to be good.
It is worth adding that even if Hegseth’s nomination doesn’t go through as planned, there are multiple alternatives who would be just as ready to clean house in the Pentagon — including retired JAG officer and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who if possible would love to take such a position to keep himself relevant.
Meanwhile, the nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director seems extremely likely to succeed.
Trump’s nominations are genuinely subversive of the “swamp” — the existing order in Washington. If confirmed by the Senate,, they will make for a very interesting next two years, before Democrats have their shot at taking back one or both houses of Congress.
Senate 2026
Have Republicans just gained a permanent Senate majority? That is the thesis of one opinion writer, and it is at least worthy of consideration, because it isn’t crazy.
In our view the answer is “No — but maybe kind of.” That is surely unsatisfying, so an explanation is required.
The argument is this: Republicans currently hold just five seats that Democrats have any realistic chance of contesting over a multi-cycle period. These include the seat that Senator-elect Dave McCormick (R) just won in Pennsylvania (next up in 2030), the Wisconsin seat of Sen. Ron Johnson (R) (next up in 2028), the seat that Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) will be defending in 2026, and North Carolina’s two Senate seats, one of which Sen. Thom Tillis (R) will be defending in 2026 (the other is up in 2028).
Democrats, on the other side, must over many cycles defend a much larger number of seats for which Republicans can reasonably hope to compete. These include both seats in Arizona, both seats in Nevada, both seats in Georgia (including one in 2026), both seats in New Hampshire, one seat in Pennsylvania, one in Wisconsin (next up in 2030), and two in Michigan. Again, this is not to say that any of these are likely to flip — just that they are the most likely to be competitive.
Do the math, and that’s five long-term weak points that Republicans will have to defend, versus 12 that Democrats have to defend on competitive ground. And that’s not including seats that could become more competitive if Virginia, New Mexico or New Jersey shift in Republicans’ direction over the next ten years.
In that context, Republicans already hold 53 Senate seats, having flipped the last few obviously mismatched Red-state seats that Democrats were holding in Ohio, Montana and West Virginia. Given that, plus the long-term advantage outlined above, Democrats will have few easy opportunities to control the upper chamber.
This theory may seem convincing, but let’s not get too crazy with it. Politics is unpredictable. People probably would not have expected Republicans to lose both Virginia Senate seats in the early 2000s, or the seat in Montana in 2006, for example — but they did. Ohio’s seats are not Republican property, either, as defeated Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) could make a comeback in the right context. And what if North Carolina trends Blue like Virginia, or Susan Collins loses in Maine due to liberal voters’ rage about Trump? From a historical perspective, it is usually a mistake to declare one of the two major parties dead in the long run.
The more predictable good news is that there will be some level of legislative stability for America going forward, and that Trump has excellent chances of getting a full four years of unimpeded nominations confirmed, in part because Democrats performed well enough in 2020 Senate races, winning the four Republican-held seats that one would have expected.
So there is a potential structural advantage for Senate Republicans in the long run, but it will require a very careful effort on their part to cultivate public opinion and hold on to critical states. None of this is any sort of basis for resting on one’s laurels, but Democrats will face a very difficult time trying to push radical changes through the legislative process for the remainder of this decade, even if a House takeover in 2026 is simply assumed.
This week, as promised, we look at competitive Senate seats that Democrats will have to defend in 2026. But first, one Republican seat that got more interesting this week thanks to the nomination battles coming up soon on Capitol Hill.
Iowa: Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R) reluctance to embrace the nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense right away may have generated a primary threat for her. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird’s (R) endorsement of Hegseth is no accident, but a clear threat.
Ernst may be forced to back down as a consequence and not only support Hegseth but also repudiate some of her more embarrassing positions from the woke era on transgenderism in the military.
On to the Democratic seats…
Colorado: This seat will probably not be a problem for Democrats, but you never know. Former Governor and Sen. John Hickenlooper (D) is the more durable of the state’s two senators, but he is not invincible, given the right political environment. Republicans would do well to put forward some kind of credible opponent in case the national mood turns against Democrats during Trump 2.0 — something that would be admittedly rare, but not impossible.
That said, Colorado is a Blue state where many things will have to change before Republicans start winning statewide elections again.
Georgia: Democrats will face a serious challenge defending Sen. Jon Ossoff (D), whose vote to cripple Israel in its war against Hezbollah terrorists might be everything his 2026 challenger needs to defeat himl.
The best case scenario for Republicans would be to nominate Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who is extremely popular with a 61 percent approval rating and recently mended fences with President Trump. With Kemp as their nominee, Republicans have better than even chances of regaining this seat.
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) is reportedly interested in the race as well.
Georgia is one of the few states where other Republicans have consistently run ahead of Trump throughout his political career, although that may only be because there were no other statewide races to test that thesis in 2024. For example, Kemp won re-election in 2022 by nearly eight points or 300,000 votes against election-denier Stacy Abrams, who was probably Democrats’ strongest statewide candidate at that time.
Michigan: Republicans came up just short here in an open-seat Senate race, even in the Red Wave of 2024. But is there any chance they can do better in 2026 against incumbent Sen. Gary Peters (D)? Maybe.
For one thing, the administration of the term-limited Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) will be coming to an end. Many of her potential successors on the Democratic side have a lot of baggage from the COVID era, from their own alcoholic behavior, and just otherwise from her administration, since Michigan voters tend to alternate party rule when given a choice.
It is also worth pointing out that Democrats during the woke era torched what good will they had with Detroit’s Arab and Muslim communities, which showed up in the presidential result this year when Trump made significant gains in Detroit’s Hamtramck neighborhood and carried Dearborn, the largest Arab American jurisdiction in America. Arabs and Muslims, it should be noted, abandoned the Democratic Party and in many cases even voted for Trump not just because of Palestine, but because of the way Michigan’s top Democrats’ insisted on shoving rainbow pride flags down their throats during a high-profile local controversy.
This was an amazing development in the election that just ended, but one worth pointing out repeatedly as Democrats continue to lose the allegiance of immigrant families from the Old World. All they had to do was back down on flying rainbow flags in a handful of unremarkable locations, and Kamala Harris would probably have carried Michigan.
Depending on how Trump 2.0 is going in 2026, a strong Republican gubernatorial candidate could help drag a good Senate candidate over the finish line, whether it is 2024 loser and former House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R) or someone else entirely.
Peters is a rather low-profile senator in any event — someone whose incumbency advantage will be less than usual. There is definitely an opportunity here.
However, it should be pointed out that the last Republican to win a Senate race in Michigan was former Sen. Spencer Abraham 30 years ago, in 1994. Michigan is as purple as it has ever been, but Republicans have been very bad at Senate races there for generations.
Minnesota: Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D), who just won re-election, is very popular in Minnesota. But that is not necessarily the case for Sen. Tina Smith (D), who came to power through an appointment and has so far survived through good Democratic years in one of America’s most politically volatile states.
Minnesota is an odd state in that it frequently breaks against the national party trend. With the governor’s seat open in 2026, there is a very real opportunity here for Republicans if they manage to find and nominate a serious candidate. Vice Presidential loser and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) could still run for a third term as governor, and that could further harm Democrats’ chances at other offices within the state as well.
New Hampshire: Assuming incumbent Sen. and former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D) runs for re-election — and she has filed the papers to do so — the burden will be on Republicans to put up a strong challenger against her. Exiting Gov. Chris Sununu (R) has already said he will not run and it is extremely unlikely that Governor-elect Kelly Ayotte (R) will do so just two years into her job.
President-elect Trump lost New Hampshire by less than three percentage points.
This state is not lost for Republicans going forward — in fact, it will be one of the Republican trifecta states for the next two years, with the GOP controlling both houses of the state legislature and the governorship.
Republicans held both of New Hampshire’s Senate seats as recently as 2006. Based on the last election and the trends, there is a very real chance they could reclaim one or both seats going forward, if they can only find good candidates.
New Mexico: Republicans put Nella Domenici (R), the heir to a New Mexico political dynasty, up against Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich this year. She lost handily, and the Republican bench in New Mexico is rather limited.
But on the other side, Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D) won with less than 52 percent of the vote when he first ran in 2020. Domenici could run again, or Republicans could find someone else.
The Land of Enchantment has been rather hostile to Republicans since 2014, the last time they elected a Republican governor, but Democrats have failed to build a structural lead with reliable voters that put the state completely off-limits, as evinced by Trump’s late-stage decision this election cycle to hold a rally in Albuquerque. George W. Bush won New Mexico in 2004 — it is still not unwinnable.
