‘October surprise’: Democrats will have down-ballot reasons to cheer

Get ready for this election’s “October Surprise.” In a Senate election cycle that favors the GOP, the Democrats are so far out-performing predictions and holding strong.

They are in position to win in races in Arizona, Ohio, Maryland, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while trailing in a tight race in Montana.

Republicans, meanwhile, are stunned to be raising money to defend what they thought were safe seats in Florida and Texas. Both are surprisingly close contests.

Last week, the reliable Cook Political Report wrote that Democrats are “defying political gravity” in Senate races, Until last week, they had 51 Senate seats as lean, likely or currently held by Democrats. They have now shifted Montana to a likely Republican pickup. 

Last week, the RealClear Politics average of polls had Democrats leading senate races in six of seven key races.

The October surprises extend to House races.

Last week, the Cook Political Report had 24 seats in the House rated as a toss-up.

That is good news for Democrats because there are 19 House seats now held by Republicans in which most voters backed President Biden in 2020. Those congressional districts are fertile ground for Democrats to win.

And that leads to a potentially bigger surprise: History tells us that most Americans cast straight party-line votes. Voters standing by Democrats in House and Senate races in swing states that will decide the outcome of the race for the White House are open to voting with the Democrat at the top of the ticket.

That means the Democrats’ presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, is in line to get a boost from the success of the party’s down-ballot candidates. That rising likelihood also extends to another swing state, North Carolina. The governor’s race there features an extreme GOP candidate.

A strong victory for the Democrat in the North Carolina gubernatorial race again has the potential to increase the number of voters open to voting for other moderate Democrats, including Harris at the top of the ticket.

The prospect of a strong showing for Democrats in congressional races also creates the potential for Harris to realistically say how she can achieve real change and move beyond the currently polarized, do-nothing politics in Washington.

In last week’s debate, Harris was challenged when she promised to sign a law to protect abortion rights. 

Former President Trump, her GOP rival, said an abortion rights bill has no chance to get to Harris’s desk because there are not enough votes in Congress to pass it. He also said there is no need to ask him if he will sign a right-wing bill ending all abortion rights because he does not see enough votes to pass that bill.

Similarly, Trump criticized Democrats now in the White House, the Biden-Harris administration, for trying to offer student loan relief based on executive action because that bill could not get through the current, polarized Congress.

Trump tried to hammer the Biden-Harris administration for not going around Congress to close the border to people coming across illegally.

Harris responded that Congress had a bipartisan border security bill ready to pass to deal with illegal immigration, but it died when Trump ordered GOP senators to kill it.

Demonizing immigrants and attacking Democrats in Congress and the White House as responsible for illegal immigration remains Trump’s primary avenue for political claims that Democrats fail to solve problems. 

There is frustration with Congress among voters favoring Democrats, too. They want Congress to pass bills to protect voting rights, reform laws that allow police brutality and establish ethics rules for the Supreme Court. All those legislative efforts have been blocked, even though Democrats hold a thin majority in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Republicans under the Trump administration changed Senate rules on Supreme Court nominations to allow for the confirmation of three justices, who voted to end constitutional protection of federal abortion rights by upending nearly 50 years of established law under Roe v. Wade.

After last week’s presidential debate, polls showed Harris had dominated Trump.

She won a victory in the eyes of about two-thirds of voters contacted in flash polls done by Newsweek and CNN.

But two undecided voters from Pennsylvania, a couple in their 70s, told The New York Times that while they were impressed with Harris’s tax and economic plans, they wanted to know whether “she can get them through Congress.”

That fit with the nearly one-third of voters who told a New York Times-Siena poll they want to know more about Harris and the “biggest question on their minds, the poll found, was what her plans and policies would be.”

Any plan proposed by Harris to move the country forward will first have to deal with the paralyzing division on Capitol Hill and beyond the bitter partisan divide that now defines presidential politics.

The prospect of Democrats pulling off a surprise by holding their majority in the Senate while gaining a majority in the House opens the door to a surprise in the presidential vote.

And there is the chance for even more important surprises for the nation’s progress.

An “October Surprise” of Democratic strength in congressional races will also create fertile political ground on Capitol Hill for Harris to see honest, bipartisan debate of her plans and the potential for them to pass both houses and become law.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.