Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate are increasingly worried that voters’ concern about President Joe Biden’s age will drag down their own candidacies, especially in states and individual districts where the voting public is closely divided.
In the three weeks since Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate, efforts to persuade the 81-year-old incumbent to step aside have become increasingly public. With some polls showing Biden trailing former President Donald Trump in multiple states vital to an election victory, members of his own party have been voicing their concerns that his poor performance could doom their effort to maintain control of the Senate and to flip control of the House.
Emblematic of the party’s worries is Montana’s Jon Tester, one of the rare Democratic senators elected by voters in states that are otherwise reliably Republican. Tester, who is seeking his fourth term in the Senate, is locked in a tight campaign with Republican nominee Tim Sheehy. On Thursday, Tester said that he believes Biden ought to end his campaign for reelection.
“I have worked with President Biden when it has made Montana stronger, and I’ve never been afraid to stand up to him when he is wrong,” Tester said in a statement. “And while I appreciate his commitment to public service and our country, I believe President Biden should not seek reelection to another term.”
With Biden as nominee, ‘I think we lose’
Representative Adam Schiff, who is poised to win a seat in the Senate from California by a comfortable margin, this week became one of the most prominent Democrats to articulate the sentiment that many of his colleagues have been telling reporters under promises of anonymity.
“I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” Schiff said in private remarks at a fundraiser last weekend, according to The New York Times, which obtained a transcript of the event. “And we may very, very well lose the Senate and lose our chance to take back the House.”
In a statement released to the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, Schiff praised Biden’s accomplishments, but added, “A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November.”
Straight tickets and turnout
Drew McCoy, president of Decision Desk HQ, a provider of U.S. elections data, told VOA that there are two related factors causing concern that Biden’s performance could harm other Democratic candidates.
The first is that voters who select a Republican at the top of the ticket might be inclined to continue voting for GOP candidates in races farther down the ballot.
“There's a high correlation between people's vote at the presidential level and down ballot,” McCoy said, adding that fewer and fewer Americans are “split-ticket” voters, who choose members of different parties for different offices.
“That was fairly common up until 20 or 25 years ago. It's quite uncommon these days … so if [Biden] is not doing well, the people behind him are thinking they're not going to be doing well either.”
The second is that with Democratic voters demonstrably unenthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy, turnout might be diminished. In the coming days, McCoy said, “voters are going to be making up their minds whom to vote for and whether or not they're going to vote.”
Many Democratic House and Senate candidates are currently performing better in public polling than Biden is, but in a presidential election year, it is the candidate at the top of the ticket who has the largest effect on voter turnout. With Republican enthusiasm high, and Democratic morale ebbing, even Democrats polling ahead of the president right now might struggle in November.
McCoy said that polling data suggest that many Democrats support down-ballot candidates but say they cannot support Biden.
"Are those voters who show up? That's the question," McCoy said. "It's all well and good to have an eight- or 10-point lead, but these are people that actually may not vote, because they have questions about the top of the ticket."
Biden’s numbers fall
While Biden and his closest advisers continue to insist that he is remaining in the race and that he is best positioned to defeat Trump in November, polling data have been calling that assertion into question for months.
In nearly all public polling, Trump has maintained a small but consistent lead over Biden nationally, and that gap has only widened since the debate on June 27.
More important, Biden appears to be trailing Trump in the seven “swing states” of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. On Thursday, Emerson College released a poll indicating that Biden trails Trump in all seven, by a margin of at least 3 percentage points and, in the case of Arizona, by 10.
Polling also demonstrates that large segments of the voting public, including a substantial majority of Democratic voters, believe that Biden is too old to run for a second term.
A scenario in which Biden remains in the race and fails to make any significant headway “is not the kind of … situation where Democrats could be plausibly expected to win either the House or the Senate majority,” Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman, of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, wrote in an analysis published Thursday.
Congressional control in question
That is because the balance of power on Capitol Hill is teetering on a knife’s edge.
In the Senate, Democrats and independents who caucus with them control 51 seats, while Republicans control 49. However, because senators’ terms are staggered, only 34 seats are up for election in 2024 and 20 of those are currently held by Democrats.
In the House, Republicans hold a narrow 220-213 advantage, but most analysts expect control of the body in the next Congress to come down to about 18 individual races that are too close to call.
In Democrats’ nightmare scenario, Trump cruises to victory in November, and majorities of Republican House and Senate candidates ride his coattails into office, giving the GOP unified control of Washington for the next two years.
