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Highlights from The Downballot: A Crystal Ball look at 2024 [1]

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Date: 2023-02-02  

First up, Beard took a look at a potential free for all for a Senate seat in California with many Democrats lining up incumbent Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat — as she is expected to retire and not run in 2024. Rep. Katie Porter has declared her candidacy; Rep. Barbara Lee will also reportedly toss her hat in the ring, though she hasn't officially announced yet; and this past week Rep. Adam Schiff also declared that he is running for this seat as well.

Beard’s analysis considers the fact that all three candidates have strong favorability ratings among national Democrats for different reasons:

Schiff of course rose to providence on the intelligence committee. He also led the first impeachment against Donald Trump. Porter, as we've talked about, is a protege of Elizabeth Warren, has been prominent in a number of hearings against corporate executives. Lee is one of the most progressive members of Congress. She was the lone vote against authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan, which really gave her an enormous amount of credibility among the left for many years. Of course, there's a number of other candidates who could run. This is still very early, so we don't know how long the list of prominent Democrats this is going to be. The one benefit that Schiff has is that he has a ton of money because he didn't have a competitive race like Katie Porter has. He has over $20 million in the bank while Porter had to spend a lot of her money making sure that she won re-election in 2022.

Next up, the hosts also discussed an open seat in Indiana, where for once — at least for the moment — it seems like Republicans are not in disarray regarding a GOP Senate primary. The current incumbent Mike Braun is running for governor and far right Congressman Jim Banks currently has the field to himself. Former governor Mitch Daniels, a classical establishment Republican, had been looking at the race, but ultimately said that he wasn't going to run.

The situation got a little thornier from there on out, according to Nir, but ultimately worked itself out:

In response, the NRSC put out a statement that all but endorsed Banks that the committee said that it was looking forward to working with him as a top recruit. He also has the support of the Club for Growth and Donald Trump, and this trifecta is pretty unusual because the Club and Trump are now back to hating one another. He recently called them the Club for No Growth. That is so, so clever, just vintage Donald Trump humor. But they've all lined up behind Banks in this case. There are still however, some prominent Republicans who are still thinking about running, including Congresswoman Victoria Spartz. Maybe Banks will get some kind of a challenge, remains to be seen. No matter what though Indiana has become such a red state. I think that even if there is unexpectedly yet another GOP shit show primary, it's almost impossible to imagine them somehow fumbling this seat in the general election. At the very least, Republicans will be glad not to have yet another mess on their hands. But the reality is it doesn't really help them take back the Senate in any particularly direct way because they need to beat some Democrats to do that, and this is an open seat that by all rights they should hold without breaking a sweat.

Nir and Beard identified the Kentucky governor's race as potentially the marquee race of the year, though it has not received a lot of national coverage yet:

It's sort of still bubbling under a little bit, but we did just get a poll from Mason-Dixon, which is a pretty reputable pollster, and it showed that Democratic incumbent governor Andy Beshear is leading the GOP front runner Attorney General Daniel Cameron 49 to 40. Pretty healthy lead from this one poll and actually does even better against the rest of the field that they polled, leading by double digits comfortably.

Now, this is of course just one poll of a very tough red state, so I don't think people should go all in on the fact that Beshear has a near 10 point lead here. Four years ago, the same pollster found Andy Beshear starting with a similar lead against then incumbent GOP Governor Matt Bevin, only for them to come up with a tied poll in October. I think it's very clear that this race is going to be very close and very competitive, regardless of where it might be now before the campaign has really engaged fully.

But polls do show that the Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who also has the backing of Trump, does have a clear primary lead, so I think you have to start him as the favorite. He would be the first black governor of Kentucky.

One last race on the ballot in 2023 the hosts touched on is a fight for an open seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Democrats currently have a 4-2 majority on the court because the Chief Judge, Max Baer, unexpectedly passed away last year and his seat currently remains vacant. The State Democratic Party recently endorsed appellate judge Daniel McCaffery over a colleague, Deborah Kunselman, for this race.

Even if Republicans win, Democrats would still have a four to three majority. However, this does not necessarily mean that Democrats will have a consistent majority, Nir said, as in some recent cases on major issues — including voting rights — a Democratic justice has cited with Republicans. “Again, it didn't affect the outcome, but if you have a four three court instead of a five two court, then if a Democrat switches sides like that, then you could see the outcome affected. And that could be particularly devastating in voting rights matters,” he elaborated. “So this race might not be quite as high profile as the April battle to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but this is definitely the second most important state Supreme Court race of the year that's going to be on the ballot this fall.”

Staggered Supreme Court elections, which a number of these states have, have shown Democrats that they cannot afford to take a cycle off, Beard added: “So we don't want to be like, oh, the control of the court is fine. We've got four Democrats on there and let that go. We want to make sure and hold that fifth Democratic seat in Pennsylvania.”

Nir agreed, adding, “We always have to play the long game.”

After a brief break, Kondik joined the hosts — as one of the top observers of elections in the country, a very common presence on Twitter, Kondik was able to explain many of the patterns we’ve witnessed in the last few election cycles.

Nir and Beard asked Kondik about his time on the CBS’s election night decision desk, which he was asked to join last fall ahead of the November midterms. Kondik shared these insights about his time at the election desk:

We actually didn't get to do it on election night because the house ended up being so close, but in the system there's like a button that says, call the house. And first of all, if I tried to touch that button, it wouldn't do anything. My system didn't have access to that, which I was very happy about. But we were thinking, given my own expectations and other expectations that the Republicans would win sort of a clear victory in the house, we thought that there would be a point where we would hit that button. And so part of the prep work was trying to think about the races that we thought were the most important and doing some sort of back of the envelope math about how we expected the West Coast races to break so that you could sort of assume like a floor for the parties. But it ended up not being something that was callable on election night, as we all know now, and the Republican majority ended up being relatively small, but ultimately you've got all of the backend technology stuff and all of the models and whatnot, but ultimately the people working on the desk have to work collaboratively together to ultimately render the judgments. And so there's a lot of quantitative information, but it's ultimately this sort of qualitative judgment. And actually in some ways it's kind of like what we do at the Crystal Ball, in that we're not a model. It's ultimately judgments about what we think the rating should be. Now we take a lot of things into account to do that, but ultimately we have, I guess, we have agency to decide what we want to do. It's not just the model sort of spitting out what the projection is. It's ultimately a judgment call that we make. Sometimes we make the right judgment, sometimes we don't, but that's how it ends up working out.

“So, to dial back a little bit earlier in the night, 2022 was obviously a very strange and unusual election in so many ways. Was there any particular point, any particular race or state that you saw the data coming in? Maybe you made a call, maybe you didn't want to make a call and you thought, "Huh, this night might actually not be so terrible for Democrats after all,” Nir asked.

Kondik replied that he had been tracking two races in particular, both of which the Democrats ended up winning:

One of them was Rhode Island Two, which, of course, I actually kind of thought would flip, but Republicans are trying to make these inroads into New England, and there was the open seat in Rhode Island Two. Republicans had a pretty strong candidate in Alan Fung, but ultimately it became relatively clear that Seth Magaziner was going to win. I think he ended up winning by four or five points, the Democrat. And so, that was one that was sort of on the wave watch. It's like if that one flips, it probably means Republicans are sort of winning the House going away. And then, more specifically, and the one that I really was tracking very closely, was Abigail Spanberger of Virginia Seven. And that was one where we're starting to get...I remember working through it with other people on the desk about talking about, like, “Oh, well, in these particular places...Yesli Vega's running ahead, but it's all election day, so we have to be careful about that.” And here's a locality where we have everything, at least, that's what the system says. And Spanberger is running decently well, or just a little bit behind Biden. Of course, Biden won that district by 6.5 points. So, there was a little bit of slack there for Spanberger. And that's one that I really ended up spending a lot of time on that evening...at least, early in the evening. We were able to make a call there for Spanberger, and that was also another one that was sort of in the Wave Watch category. So, I think those are the two that I think of in terms of early in the evening.

The trio turned the topic of forecasts for 2024. Sabato’s Crystal Ball released its initial 2024 Senate map and its ratings. One of the races that has gotten the most early coverage is in Arizona. “We've talked about it a fair amount already on the podcast, but what's your take on it and how hard is it to project a race with the potential for three major candidates to be going to the general election?” Beard asked.

In some ways, it is easy because it can be thrown in the tossup column. However, Kondik elaborated, it would be a harder call if Sinema had not switched parties:

Again, it would've maybe been a little bit more complicated from a rating perspective, but I didn't really see any reason with the likelihood of it being a three-way race. I think you just have to sort of toss it in the tossup column. You've got a credible Democrat running, Ruben Gallego, who, I think it's fair to say, doesn't start...maybe starts as a more like clearly kind of liberal/progressive candidate compared to where Sinema was in the 2018 cycle. And also, Mark Kelly when he first started out. And then you've got Sinema maybe not running again, and then the Republican side, who knows who it's going to be. It could end up being one of their fairly weak candidates from 2022. Kari Lake or Blake Masters could be someone stronger than that, could be someone weaker than that. So I think you just set it aside and put it in tossup for now.

On seats that Democrats could target in 2024, Beard said, considering the map, it is extremely slim pickings in terms of targets for Democrats to try to pick up a seat: “There are basically two that are in the realm of possibility, neither of which I would consider to be good targets. That's Texas and Florida. I think you started both of those in the likely Republican category.” He then asked Kondik his thoughts about which state might be possible for Democrats.

Kondik doesn’t see a huge difference between the two states:

Texas historically is more Republican, but I think Texas is getting a little more competitive and Florida maybe getting a little less competitive. And it wouldn't stun me actually, if at some point Texas passed Florida in terms of competitiveness. I think that the presidential vote in Texas, it was Trump by about five and a half there and Trump won Florida by a little more than three. So they've gotten a lot closer in recent years. I wrote something last year just about some of the places in the country that are growing the fastest and Florida and Texas are both really fast growing states. And so it's no surprise that there are a lot of counties in both states that are growing quite quickly. A lot of those fast growing places are very Republican, particularly in Texas, but some of the fast growing places in Texas are Republican but getting a little more democratic and a lot of the fast growing places in Florida, which I think a lot of them are pretty retiree heavy, a lot of those places are actually getting more Republican in Trump era and so I just wonder about those demographic trends, the fact that the Democrats seem to be losing ground in Miami-Dade and some other places. And I just wonder if Texas may eventually become more competitive. But in the context of 2024, I think both states are pretty similarly positioned and unfortunately for Democrats, similarly positioned right of center. I would say that particularly, if there's a prominent Democrat who runs against Ted Cruz, my guess is that raising money will not be that much of a problem. That is an advantage that Democrats have taken from Republicans in recent years, that Democrats have all this small dollar fundraising might. And I suspect that an email marketing campaign from Ted Cruz's opponent would probably lead to a lot of money, particularly if it's someone credible like Colin Allred, the house member from Dallas area, former football player. He's sometimes mentioned. I don't know if he's actually going to do it or not, but he's the sort of person who probably would be able to launch a credible campaign and raise money. But to what end? I think that Democrats are going to want to play offense somewhere. It's just bleak options. And Democrats did have, I think a pretty credible candidate in Florida in 2022, in Val Demings, and she just got swamped like basically the Democrats did in everything else and in Florida. And so where do they go in that state?

Ultimately, he concluded, it is just a bad map, as the Democrats are simply defending so many more seats than Republicans are — making it structurally pretty difficult to pick up seats.

The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts! As a reminder, you can reach our hosts by email at thedownballot@dailykos.com. Please send in any questions you may have for next week's mailbag. You can also reach out via Twitter at @DKElections.

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