There are two Americas: the one that votes in presidential years, and the one that votes in nonpresidential years. The former represents the broad American electorate, and hence skews Democratic, while the latter represents merely a rump electorate, hence Republican.
It was such a rump electorate that swept Republicans into the U.S. Senate majority last fall, a majority they must defend with next year’s presidential-year electorate. It’s bad enough that Republicans must defend 24 of the 34 seats being contested; to make matters worse, those are seats Republicans won during the rump-electorate wave election of 2010.
Things don’t look so good for them.
{mosads}Of those 24 Republican incumbents, seven represent states won by President Obama in 2012: Illinois, Iowa, Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. While nothing suggests the Iowa Senate contest is currently competitive, the other six are already serious battlegrounds. The fact that those are all presidential battlegrounds will only amplify matters.
Some of those Republican incumbents aren’t doing their party any favors. For example, in Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio is quitting the chamber to focus on his presidential bid, and Republicans have failed to recruit their top- and second-tier candidates to replace him. They are now scraping the bottom of their barrel trying to come up with any warm body to face the Democrats’ top recruit, Rep. Patrick Murphy.
In Illinois, GOP Sen. Mark Kirk continues to dig his own grave. Last week, he called his fellow bachelor Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) his “bro with no ho.” Before that, he explained to a newspaper editorial board how he drove faster through black neighborhoods.
In Ohio, freshman Republican Sen. Rob Portman has kept himself free of personal gaffes, and yet he’s being dragged down by his party. Recent polling has the race anywhere between a tie and an implausible 9-point Democratic advantage.
And in Wisconsin, former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold is back for a rematch against the guy who ousted him in that 2010 GOP wave, Ron Johnson. Johnson has spent the last several years telling constituents that finally have health insurance that they are moochers, claiming “The Lego Movie” is part of a vast anti-business conspiracy, explaining how he trusts Iranian mullahs more than Obama and blasting those crazy college kids for taking too long to graduate because they’re living the “Animal House” lifestyle. (It couldn’t have anything to do with skyrocketing education costs!) Perhaps that’s why respected Marquette University polling had Feingold leading Johnson 54 percent to 38 percent.
But that’s not the extent of the GOP’s 2016 troubles. In Arizona, Sen. John McCain remains among the nation’s most unpopular senators. Indiana has a competitive open seat. North Carolina, perhaps the nation’s most politically divided state, will feature another barn-burning Senate contest.
In summary, Democrats already have at least nine genuine pickup opportunities in a year when the electorate will heavily favor them. And you can guarantee the Tea Party will pull some additional red seats into play before all’s said and done. For their part, Republicans have an outside chance at Nevada’s open seat and nothing else.
Considering they only need to pick up five seats for a clean 51-seat majority, Democrats are on track to make Mitch McConnell’s Senate leadership a two-year anomaly, at least until 2018, when the electorate and map will look more like 2010 and 2014.
So perhaps the bigger question is, which party will break out of this boom-bust cycle first?
Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.