What are the chances of a disturbance in Texas or Florida?
“II was too “I’ve been saying this for months and a lot of people haven’t been listening, but now they are: The stars are aligning in Texas and Florida,” says Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Aboard a luxury campaign bus in Jacksonville, Florida’s largest city, Harrison’s tone turns somber as he explains that his party needs “multiple paths to a majority in the Senate.” In the final weeks of the campaign, the map became more difficult for Democrats. To their dismay, filling the Senate may now depend on flipping seats in America’s two largest Republican-controlled states, where Donald Trump is expected to win comfortably.
New polls have Democrats like Mr. Harrison feeling optimistic. Last week, an event in Texas showed Colin Allred, a linebacker-turned-congressman, in a heated conflict with Ted Cruz, the incumbent Republican president. In Florida, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, an Ecuadorian immigrant and one-term congresswoman, trails Rick Scott by at least two or three points in her best polls. but The EconomistA prediction model that takes into account other factors such as the candidate’s experience and voting history in the state shows a less rosy picture. We estimate that Democrats have a one in five chance of winning each race.
Yet the Democratic Party is pinning its hopes on these two races in part because the current Republican candidates are so disliked. Mr. Cruz, who has represented Texas since 2013, is a hardliner known for picking disputes and not being a team player. “If you kill Ted Cruz on the Senate floor, and the trial is in the Senate, no one is going to convict you,” Lindsey Graham, his fellow South Carolinian, said in 2016. In 2021, Cruz’s approval ratings fell in Texas when he set off for Cancun as his voters endured a winter storm that left millions without power. Politically, his indelible support for Texas’s near-total abortion ban, one of the harshest in America, has done nothing to endear him to the majority of Texans who support fewer restrictions.
Unpopularity contests
Mr. Scott, in Florida, may be the rare politician who has fewer friends than Mr. Cruz. He entered politics after the hospital chain he founded and ran was forced to pay out in America’s largest Medicare fraud. After serving two terms as governor, he won his Senate race in 2018 and was put in charge of the party’s campaign arm for the 2022 midterms. He presented a hard-right plan to reshape the Republican Party, which included a proposal to end entitlement programs that had done poorly nationally as they had In Florida, a state where one in five residents is retired. When Republicans did poorly, they blamed him.
Mr. Scott responded by challenging Mitch McConnell for Senate Majority Leader. “Now I am seeking to become the least popular man in Washington and I am happy to announce that I am making great progress,” he joked in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year. At home, his inability to curb Florida’s property insurance crisis throughout his political career left many locals suffering from hurricanes hitting the coast and families penniless.
Democrats wanted both Republicans to have to face up to these responsibilities. However, it was not until late September that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which elects Democrats, launched an offensive in Texas and Florida with multi-million dollar ad buys. Ms. Mucarsel-Powell, a Scott opponent who says her initials stand for “Don’t Mess with My People,” believes the money was too little, too late. In other battleground states, “you see investment, and of course then you see turnover,” she says, but without that kind of cash flow to help the campaign talk to voters, “nothing is going to happen.” Scott, who in the past has written himself big checks when he senses an opponent within striking distance, has not spent even half as much as he did in 2018, when he won by less than a point. Democrats hope ballot initiatives in Florida to legalize marijuana and legalize abortion rights will give Ms. Mucarsel-Powell a last-minute boost.
Stable poll numbers in Florida have national Democrats turning to Texas, where there appears to be better magic after he faced Allred Cruz in a debate two weeks ago. On October 25, Kamala Harris appeared at a rally with Mr. Allred in Houston. It was the first time in decades that a Democratic presidential candidate had visited the state so close to Election Day. But in such conservative terrain, any down-ballot Democrat is bound to struggle in the presidential cycle. “A vote against Ted Cruz this year is a vote against Donald Trump,” says Jason Sabo, a Democratic lobbyist in Austin.
We can forgive those who paid attention to the election campaigns for feeling as if they had seen it before. Democrats have always promised that increasing voter diversity would flip both states in their favor, but they have suffered repeated losses. This time some admit they are playing the long game. In Texas, a group of Democratic leaders launched the Agave Campaign Buck To build the party’s infrastructure and “get beyond the cycle of excitement and depression.” In Florida, Nikki Fried, the new chair of the state’s Democratic Party, speaks calmly about this year’s prospects. For the first time since the state flipped the Republican Party, the party is running state legislative candidates in every district, knowing they will lose in races big and small. “We have to start somewhere,” she says. ■