Technically, the 2020 Senate map favors Democrats.  It just doesn’t favor them enough.

While it’s still very early and candidates are still unknown in many states, an initial look seems appropriate.  If Democrats manage to retake the White House, they’ll need a Democratic Senate to do much of anything.  If Democrats don’t beat Trump, a Democratic Senate could at least limit the damage.

Democrats need a net gain of 4 seats to take definitive control of the Senate (or a net gain of 3 seats if Democrats win at the top of the ticket).

In 2020, Republicans will defend 22 seats and Democrats will defend 12 seats.  By my count, however, only 14 seats are at all competitive – 9 Republican and 5 Democratic.  Since 12 of the 14 seats are in swing states, there will be massive synergy between the Presidential and Senate races.  A strong Democratic ticket could certainly help Democratic Senate candidates; a mediocre ticket will be a disaster all around.

Here’s my current Senate breakdown, more or less in order of a possible Democratic win:

The details aren’t at all good:

• The seat most likely to flip is currently held by a Democrat.  It would take a minor miracle for Doug Jones to retain his Alabama Senate seat.  Democrats’ best bet is for Roy Moore to again be the Republican nominee and it’s doubtful Republicans will repeat that mistake.
• Democrat Tom Udall isn’t running for re-election in New Mexico which puts that state more in-play than it needed to be.
• Democrats failed to recruit 6 (SIX!) of the best potential candidates to unseat Republican Senators.  Beto O’Rourke passed in Texas, Stacey Abrams passed in Georgia, Tom Vilsack passed in Iowa, John Hickenlooper passed in Colorado, Susan Rice passed in Maine, and Kathleen Sebelius passed in Kansas.
• Democrats have yet to field solid candidates in two of the most flippable races (Colorado and Maine).

Unfortunately, I could go on.

There is a bit of not-bad news:

• Mark Kelly, former astronaut and husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is running in Arizona.
• Amy McGrath, possibly the best qualified candidate to lose in 2018, looks likely to run in Kentucky.
• MJ Hegar, another well-qualified candidate that lost in 2018, is running in Texas.

To take control of the Senate, my initial analysis says that Democrats need to:

• Successfully defend 4 of the 5 in-play seats that they currently occupy.
• Flip all 3 toss up seats.
• Flip 1 or 2 seats that currently favor the GOP (depending on who wins the White House).

That’d be an uphill climb with a great set of candidates.  Without superstars, it’ll be more like free soloing at night.  At this point, Democrats will be lucky to not lose even more Senate seats in 2020.

That’s just embarrassing.

In a previous post, I suggested that each of the 2020 candidates for president be required to state and defend the Electoral College math that they intend to use to win the general election.  It’s far too easy for a candidate to win the nomination with no prayer of winning the election.

Lo and behold, one candidate’s campaign manager made such a statement yesterday.  Unfortunately, it was Trump’s campaign manager.

Brad Parscale, who served as Trump’s digital media guru in 2016, shared that the Trump campaign will target all of the states that Trump took in 2016 and then additionally target Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and New Mexico – with a stretch goal of adding Minnesota.  Those are five of the seven states I previously identified as only “Likely D”.  The five extra states combine for an extra 34 Electoral votes.

Sure enough, Trump does have a chance of winning in every state he’s targeting and no chance of winning in any of the 14 “Safe D” states.  Of course, Parscale hasn’t yet revealed a strategy for how they’ll win in these five new states.  He also skips over the hard task of repeat wins in the six 2020 “Toss Up” states and the slightly easier task of again winning the five “Likely R” states.  But that’s just political spin.  Parscale expects to lose some “Toss Up” states and he needs some cushion.  The math just isn’t that hard and it appears that Parscale knows it.

It sure would be nice if I could say the same thing about a Democratic campaign.

Depending on how you count, it looks like there’s going to be between 18 and 25 Democratic candidates for President in 2020.  We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

Commenting on the large field, a Republican-leaning friend sent me a link to this article:  Why are 2020 Democrats so weird?

Funny.  But true enough.

When the first candidate announcements came out, it did strike me that some of them were a bit strange.  I chalked that up to the odd ducks just needing the early press.  Unfortunately, as the list of candidates grew, things didn’t dramatically improve.  The field isn’t without considerable substance but it’s not an abundance of riches, either.  Where is the academic intellectual giant or the brilliant military mind or the popular business executive or the impressively theatrical orator?  So, okay.  Maybe the field is a little weird.

Of course, given the Republican opponent, weirdness is a matter of scale.  No Democrat will ever out-weird Donald Trump.

More importantly, though:  Does it really matter?  This won’t come a huge shock to anyone who reads my blog, but it’s worth repeating…

I simply don’t care if the Democratic candidate is weird or boringly ordinary.  I don’t care if the candidate is young or old, male or female, tall or short, gay or straight, black or brown or white or green.  While I have some strong policy preferences, absolutely nothing is a litmus test for my support and my vote.  I don’t care if the candidate is as dull as a spoon or, to paraphrase Lina Lamont, “a shimmering, glowing star in the political firmament.”

My sole concern is that whoever wins the Democratic nomination must be able to successfully execute a campaign strategy to win 270 Electoral votes in the general election.

In my perfect world, each candidate would need to declare a state-by-state strategy for winning the Electoral College.  Many would have a tough time defending their ability to win all of the states on their lists.  A candidate without control of the math necessary to win the general election is just a waste of oxygen.  And a lot of oxygen is going to be wasted.

Many candidates in the Democratic herd will be able to rack up huge polling numbers in states where anyone not named Trump could win in the general election.  Some candidates will be favored to win the Democratic primary in states where no Democrat could possibly win in the general election.  These states don’t matter.  They. Don’t. Matter.

Even people that know better sometimes miss the point.  FiveThirtyEight keeps track of what they call the “Endorsement Primary” which puts point values on the endorsements that candidates receive from “prominent members” of the Democratic party.  While it might be a clever way of determining who has the best intra-party buzz, it includes no weighting for endorsements in swing-states.  While Cory Booker currently “leads” this FiveThirtyEight construct, he has zero endorsements from anyone in a swing state.  Conversely, while FiveThirtyEight puts Amy Klobuchar in third place, every one of her endorsements comes from a swing state.  As the campaigns progress, and more endorsements are forthcoming, I might have to create my own version of this that includes only swing-state endorsements weighted by the associated Electoral vote count.

For Democrats to win, they’re going to have to recognize that swing-state performance in the general election is the only thing worth considering.  At the moment, unfortunately, it doesn’t even seem to be part of the conversation.  That must change.  The outcome is too important.  Our nation cannot survive another four years of Donald Trump.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be 92 at the end of Trump’s second term.  The oldest Supreme Court Justice to-date was the 90-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes.  Just sayin’.

I’ve already weighed in on the Democratic Electoral Strategies that I believe have the best shot at winning and I don’t yet have any reason to change those opinions.  The point is that a Democratic win is still well within reach given the correct candidate.

So what candidate(s) can successfully execute one of the winning strategies?  I don’t know yet.  In the coming months, some candidates will run better campaigns than others; some candidates will break out of the pack via some random event; some candidates will do better than others in the debates; some candidates will seriously self-destruct; some candidates will allow the media to build them up and then destroy them.  And, most unfortunately, some potentially good candidates will be successfully marginalized by other, weaker candidates.

In the end, though, it’s a numbers game that screams for meaningful data analytics.  Such analytics require discrete polling data in each of the 18 swing-states.  And, again, it’s a bit too early.

While nationwide polls are abundant, they are actually less than useful.  Not only is overall popularity meaningless given the rules of the Electoral College, some of these polls are being used to push political narratives that simply don’t reflect reality.  My biggest worry is still that progressive activists in very Democratic states will nominate someone who has been forced so far to the left that they will be unable to win in enough swing-states.

The swing-state polls that do exist may not be particularly useful, either.  Without a specific Democratic candidate, current polls are forced to pit a generic Democrat against Trump.  In such polls, the generic candidate benefits from being “Not Trump” without having to deal with any candidate-specific baggage.  Thus, these polls will artificially favor the generic Democrat.  There will also be an issue of accuracy even once the field shrinks enough to allow match-up polls.  Sampling voters in a single state is considerably harder than conducting a national poll.  Given those difficulties, there might not be enough publicly-available state polls to mathematically eliminate the outliers.

I’ll keep looking, though, and will share whatever I gather.  In the meantime, I sincerely hope that someone in the DNC’s new DDEx with access to a lot more data is being paid to do this level of analysis.

But, then, I also sincerely hope that I win the lottery.  Weird, huh?

As the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate field solidifies, the nation begins to focus on… Iowa?

Since 1972, Iowa has been the first state in the nation to weigh in on the selection of Presidential candidates for both the Democratic and Republican parties.  While someone obviously needs to go first, Iowa is a remarkably lousy choice.

Rather than holding a primary election, several states use presidential preference caucuses.  Iowa is unfortunately one of them.  While the state’s caucus rules and processes for 2020 are still being tweaked, here’s the basic timeline and structure:

Starting even before the 2018 mid-term elections, potential 2020 Democratic candidates for President flocked to Iowa.  At first, the candidates mostly visited party leaders and influencers, with the candidates paying their respects, requesting campaign assistance, and seeking endorsements from the Iowa Powers-That-Be.  Consider the opening scene of The Godfather and you’re got the idea.

Now, the 2020 candidates are beginning to court Iowa voters – voters who have grown so self-important that they demand early and continuous personal attention from everyone.  The potential nominees, trailed by teams of eager reporters, will proceed to canvas the state where they will suck up to very small groups of Iowa voters in barns, cafes, drug stores, VFW halls, bowling alleys, and any other quaint venue they can find.  They will extol the virtues of old-school, hand-shaking, baby-kissing political campaigns as they trek from living rooms to town square gazebos.  They will take the obligatory photo from at least one of the Pizza Ranch locations across the state.  They will most definitely attend the Iowa State Fair this August where they will be impressed by the butter cow, judge the tallest corn stalk, and try to correctly eat something on a stick that doesn’t belong on a stick.

During the 2016 primary season, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders combined for a total of 50 separate trips to Iowa and spent a total of 96 days in the state.  The platoon of 2020 Democratic candidates will put those numbers to shame.  The intense retail politics that Iowans expect will consume an inordinate amount of resources and time from all of the campaigns.  That’s just the way it is.

To finally make their choices, Iowans will gather in one of the 1,681 precinct locations to which they’ve been assigned at 7:00 PM on February 3, 2020.  There, they will listen to speeches, wander around, argue among themselves, and vote twice – with the first vote eliminating candidates that don’t meet a predefined percentage threshold.  Each individual precinct will have been tasked with selecting a given number of party convention delegates based on its population and each will eventually determine their delegate(s) based on the percentage of caucus votes that each candidate receives.

And that’s the short version.

Iowans claims that the above combination of retail politics and caucus voting structure represents true democracy in action.

No.  It does not.

The caucus system itself favors voters that have the schedule flexibility, physical stamina, and personal inclination to spend hours in a loud, crowded room on one specific date and time, endure boring speeches and pushy neighbors, and eventually cast votes.  If someone was designing a system to discourage participation in an election, this might be it.

The Iowa instance of this system is mostly a huge national gift to Iowa.  While the Iowa hotel, restaurant, and rental car industries certainly thrive from all of the candidate visits and media attention, Iowa is not exactly a microcosm of America.

41% of Iowans live in rural areas as opposed to 19% nationwide.  Ethanol subsides suddenly become a critical policy position for the candidates when there might be just one or two other issues of greater national importance.  Iowa is also 91% Caucasian.  While there are a few states with an even whiter population and Obama did win Iowa twice, the fact remains that the U.S. population is only 76% Caucasian.

We are already seeing Iowa polls for 2020.  A recent one puts Biden and Sanders even at 27% each with everyone else polling under 10%.  Interesting?  Not really.  Biden hasn’t even announced yet and the Iowa caucuses are still 11 months away.

But isn’t Iowa a swing state, you ask?  Yes, it is.  And Iowa’s eight Electoral votes could come in handy for Democrats.  There’s just one small problem.  Ignoring all incumbent Presidents seeking a second term (since that’s a different game), there have been nine competitive Democratic presidential preference caucuses in Iowa since 1972.  Five of the Iowa winners went on to win the Democratic nomination, including all of the last four.  While that’s a decent track record of predicting the Democratic nominee, exactly one of the Iowa winners in the past half-century has gone on to win the general election (Barack Obama).  On the other hand, two of the Iowa losers went on to win the general election (Jimmy Carter & Bill Clinton).  The Iowa caucuses could thus be deemed counter-predictive of a Presidential victory.  Dandy.

Is the Iowa process charming?  Sure.  With Iowans acting as proxies for the rest of America, the candidates’ performances in intimate settings are useful data points as the electorate gets to know the players.

Is the Iowa process a good means of kick-starting the selection of a winning candidate?   No.  The Iowa caucuses and the preceding circus are expensive, non-representative, counter-predictive anachronisms.  We’re unfortunately stuck with them for 2020.  But perhaps this time we can take the Iowa results with a grain of salt… or at least with a kernel of corn.