Why I'm obsessed with winning the Senate - Matt Yglesias

[In It to Win It]

https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-im-obsessed-with-winning-the

[T]he reason I’m obsessed with the Senate map is that I am, in fact, alarmed about Trump’s threat to democracy and the rule of law. The good news is that so far, the judicial system continues to do its job and Trump is losing in court, even before judges who were appointed by George W. Bush or by Trump himself during his first term. The bad news about judges is that the president gets to appoint new ones. And unlike during Trump 1.0, Senate Republicans are not constraining Trump here. He has an unqualified lackey as Secretary of Defense. He fired the Chair of the Joint Chiefs for no reason to install a loyalist. He has a stooge running the FBI.

These are legitimate uses of presidential power in a constitutional sense, but the Senate is supposed to prevent the president from wildly inappropriate appointments.

They’re not doing that, in part because a lot of them are now genuinely in the MAGA cult, but also because basically nobody in the GOP caucus is all that worried about losing elections to Democrats.

No excuses for the midterm

Democrats seem to be convincing themselves that winning the House while failing to gain much ground in the Senate would constitute a good midterm. They think, rightly, that it’s not especially plausible to gain many Senate seats vis-a-vis the 2026 Senate map. But the problem with that reasoning is that while the 2026 map is terrible, it’s not uniquely terrible.

Check out the 2028 map. The best pickup opportunity for Democrats here is Wisconsin, a Trump-Biden-Trump state. But Democrats are defending three seats — Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — in Trump-Biden-Trump states. Plus they need to defend the Clinton-Biden-Trump state of Nevada. You could easily imagine this map generating one or two net seats for the GOP, even in a scenario where J.D. Vance loses the election narrowly.

[Mountainguy]

1. We give up too much

by essentially punting in rural areas and relying heavily of urban areas. We need to run up margins in the urban areas, of course, but we also need candidates who can in in rurals