My back was turned to them as they walked in, but I didn’t need to see them to feel their energy.
I’m talking about Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who met with reporters…before the third night of the Democratic National Convention to discuss why they’re so confident they’ll hold the Senate in November.
For the trio of senators I joined at the Loews Hotel about five miles west of the United Center…their pep is also due to what they believe to be a gift from the other side of the aisle come November: Poor Republican Senate candidates.
“There’s no question that candidate quality was really a deciding factor for us last cycle and it’s going to be a deciding factor again this cycle,” Peters, who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2022 and is chair for 2024, said. “Because voters, they go into a voting booth, they have a choice between two individuals with strengths and weaknesses and it’s important that a great campaign highlight those strengths and weaknesses.”
Among the key liabilities for Republicans is the question of residency.
“If you look at Republicans’ recruitment for their candidates, they tend to recruit folks who are very wealthy and who can self-finance, and so they like to have them because they can write big checks,” Peters said. “But the problem is they also tend to have fairly tenuous relations with the Senate and the state they’re running in.”
Peters pointed to Dr. Mehmet Oz’s and John Fetterman’s race two years ago.
This cycle, Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s other senator, is running against David McCormick, another wealthy Republican who Democrats accuse of parachuting into the state just to run for office.
McCormick voted for the first time in 16 years when his name was on the ballot in the 2022 primary election he ultimately lost to Oz. Three months after announcing that campaign, he reportedly sold a $6.5 million home in Fairfield, Connecticut. And despite buying a home in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood in 2022 and owning a family farm in Bloomsburg, he still rents a multimillion-dollar home on the harbor in Southport, uses his Connecticut address as a mailing address, and has conducted interviews from his Connecticut home.
Meanwhile, Casey has served in the Senate since 2006. He is the son of a former governor of Pennsylvania and is the first Democrat to win three straight terms in the Senate. He is also the current dean of the state’s congressional delegation.
We see a similar story with Eric Hovde, the Republican challenging Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who was a California banking executive before running for Senate and still spends significant time at his Laguna Beach mansion.
“Don’t underestimate how powerful that is, again, for voters who say this is not somebody from our state, this is not someone who’s going to care about me,” Peters said.
Beyond the questions about residency, Democrats believe their candidates are also on the right side of the issues.
As was the case in 2022, reproductive freedom will also be a salient factor for voters in this election.
“You have candidates coming in from out of state to move there, to run and then lean into this idea about preventing women from getting an abortion, they, already on the wrong side of issues,” Cortez Masto, who chaired the DSCC in 2020 before winning the tightest Senate race in 2022, said.
Several key states from Arizona to Montana to Nevada have abortion-related ballot initiatives that Democrats believe will boost their candidates.
It’s not enough for Democrats to have strong candidates who are right on the issues. They also have to run winning campaigns, a subject Warnock, who was on the ballot in five straight elections in Georgia—a special election in 2020, a runoff in 2021 and a primary, general and runoff election in 2022—knows something about.
“We tried to lean into the concerns of ordinary people and center their concerns,” Warnock said. “And I think I won two Senate races in a row in Georgia because people could see that I was focused on them and not on myself.”
