Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks outside an early-voting site in New York last week.
Other than the American people, who are likely to see Mitch McConnell’s Senate continue to thwart their every need, the biggest losers of 2020 are shaping up to be two New Yorkers—Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer. President Trump, of course, could still conceivably have the courts keep him in power, should they choose to override the nation’s voters. Senate Democratic Leader Schumer has no such backstop. The judiciary isn’t going to intervene to reverse the verdicts of the voters who appear to have chosen to keep the Senate in Republican hands.
As I write, the Democrats have picked up two Senate seats, with the victories of Mark Kelly in Arizona and John Hickenlooper in Colorado. They have lost, as everyone expected, the Alabama Senate seat, which Democrat Doug Jones held only because his Republican opponent in 2017 had pursued middle-school-age girls (and for all I know, “pursued” is a euphemism). In Michigan, Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is narrowly leading his Republican opponent, and the remaining late vote from Detroit and other blue areas should save him, though there’s no guarantee. In Georgia, Democrat Jon Ossoff’s hope to force Republican Sen. David Perdue into a January 5 runoff (Georgia goes to top-two runoffs if no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote in November statewide elections) depends on his winning enough votes in Atlanta’s suburbs to push Perdue’s percentage down by half a percentage point. The other Georgia seat, a special election, already saw no candidate get a majority. Rev. Raphael Warnock (D) and appointed incumbent Kelly Loeffler (R) will face off in January.
If Peters holds on and Perdue slumps beneath 50 percent, the Democrats will control 48 Senate seats and the Republicans 50, with both of Georgia’s currently Republican seats yet to be decided. Democrats would have to take both the Georgia seats to get to 50—their magic number for Senate control if Joe Biden also wins, since then-Vice President Kamala Harris would become the Senate’s tie-breaking vote.
Winning both Georgia seats, however, is a distinct long shot, particularly if Biden is elected. Republicans would then mobilize their Peach State voters by saying only their vote stood between the nation and a socialist takeover. It would require a steep uphill climb for Democrats to prevail over that. In fact, runoff rules like Georgia’s are a relic of Jim Crow, a way to make it harder for non-Dixiecrat candidates to prevail. They are designed to stop candidates like Ossoff and Warnock from winning.
It’s the big picture that reveals Schumer’s failure. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on his anointed Senate candidates in hopes of picking up the four seats required for a majority, the Democrats will likely end up picking up between three and none. And make no mistake: Schumer anointed virtually all of the party’s Senate hopefuls.
As Bob Moser detailed in our pages in March, for many years now, Schumer has routinely selected a preferred Democratic candidate from a field of aspirants, funneling so much money to that candidate that opponents tend to drop out. Schumer’s choices are invariably centrists on the Democratic spectrum: Kansas’s Barbara Bollier, who lost by 12 points on Tuesday to Republican Roger Marshall, was until recently a Republican. M.J. Hegar, who fell by ten points to John Cornyn in Texas, voted in the Republican presidential primary as recently as 2016.
A couple of Schumer’s picks panned out: Arizona’s Kelly and Colorado’s Hickenlooper. Their victories, however, seem more a function of Biden carrying their state on the presidential line than of any stroke of political brilliance on Schumer’s part. Indeed, Biden outperformed Hickenlooper by 5.5 percentage points. Left to their own devices, Colorado Democrats would likely have elected progressive Andrew Romanoff in their party’s primary to face off against vulnerable Republican incumbent Cory Gardner—had Schumer not recruited Hickenlooper into the race and instructed his machine to throw money at him. Instead of incoming Sen. Romanoff, however, Senate Democrats will now welcome Hickenlooper, whose anti-progressive policy positions strongly hint he’ll become a goyishe Joe Lieberman.
In fairness, Americans aren’t really splitting their tickets these days. In this era of hyper-partisanship, states that vote one way for president typically vote the same way for senator, which is why Kelly and Hickenlooper won, Peters is just hanging on, Ossoff is just falling short, and Kansas’s Bollier, South Carolina’s Jaime Harrison, North Carolina’s Cal Cunningham, Montana’s Steve Bullock, Iowa’s Theresa Greenfield, Texas’s Hegar, and Kentucky’s Amy McGrath either lost or got clobbered. One notable point is that only three of these 11 candidates—Bullock, Bollier, and McGrath—managed to do more than two points better than Biden in their states. Their performance compared to the money spent on their campaigns reveals a negligible return on investment. McGrath spent $90 million of mostly late donations from the liberal base to lose to McConnell by over 20 points; Harrison took in over $100 million and lost by 13.5.
By handpicking candidates and driving their primary opponents from the field, Schumer ensures that Democratic nominees aren’t really field-tested before they go up against Republican opponents.
The sole exception to this no-split-ticket rule occurred in Maine, which, like its fellow northern corner state Alaska, is a political oddball. There, the veteran Republican senator and confounding sometime moderate Susan Collins was re-elected over Democrat Sara Gideon, though Biden carried the state by a double-digit margin. Gideon is running over 17 points behind Biden at last count.
Can Schumer plead not guilty on account of straight-ticket voting? To an extent. On the other hand, by handpicking candidates and driving their primary opponents from the field, he ensures that Democratic nominees aren’t really field-tested before they go up against Republican opponents. Schumer’s candidates all fit a milquetoast, don’t-make-waves stereotype that’s good for bossing them around inside the Senate Democratic caucus, but maybe not so much for inspiring people to vote. If you can discern any policy that this group actually ran on, let me know.
Like most of us, Schumer can say that he was misled by erroneous state polls, but it’s been clear for some time that a number of his picks didn’t have a prayer. In the primaries, he erred by narrowing the Democrats’ choices; in the generals, he erred by not sufficiently narrowing the party’s largesse.
Will the election’s outcome, Schumer’s second straight failed effort to take back the chamber, lead his Senate colleagues to seek to replace him as leader? As yet, no one has stepped forward to do that, and most of them may conclude it was unlikely that any of their candidates could have run far enough ahead of Biden in their states anyway. Senate Democrats may want to rethink their candidate selection process, however, letting voters rather than their own leader have more of a say in picking their nominee.
Whether Schumer stays or goes as leader, he may well face a serious primary opponent himself when he’s on the New York ballot in 2022. Word on the street is that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might challenge him, and his performance in this week’s election will do nothing to endear him to Empire State Democrats.
