David Drucker Breaks Down the Senate Map: ‘Even in Wave Years, These Races Are Razor-Thin’

EXCERPT:

DRUCKER: "I mean, you look at Democratic chances of winning back the Senate and it’s a gauntlet march through a host of red states. And what we’ve seen in this polarized era, the Trump era, but even preceding Donald Trump as president, is that a lot of these states have abandoned split-ticket voting. Voters don’t tend to do that in races for Congress anymore, and so these cultural, polarizing issues will pull voters back to where they feel the most comfortable. It’s really instructive that not since 2006 have we had a two chamber flip in a wave, right? In 2010, we had a one chamber flip to the Republicans, a historic gain. They gained a lot of Senate seats. They couldn’t get over the hump in the Senate. 2014, they finally get it done. You look at 2018, Democrats gained 40 seats in the House. They lost a couple of Senate seats on net. '22, Republicans barely win the House, Democrats gain a Senate seat. And that’s just a reflection of where the country is. And the other thing I think we have to remember, and look, Democratic professionals understand this, is we tend to look at these waves cumulatively as this party won that many seats, this party lost that many seats. Usually within these big gains, you have individual races that are razor thin. That includes House races and Senate races. And so Democrats have been through this before, at least their advisors have, their consultants have. And I don’t think anything is going to surprise them. But I think for voters looking at polls and trying to make heads or tails of it, what they have to understand is even in years where a normal president is an anchor on his party, let alone Trump, these are super close races. And given political polarization across the country, we actually haven’t seen what the polls are suggesting in quite some time."