Joe Manchin, Democratic Senator from West Virginia, in the Capitol this Wednesday. MICHAEL REYNOLDS (EFE)
Joe Biden has a very difficult time getting re-elected in November 2024 against the impeached Donald Trump. But his task is nothing compared to the difficulty of maintaining control of the Senate, which now has a 51-49 Democratic majority. In the 2024 elections, a third of the upper house will be renewed and the majority of the seats will belong to the Democrats. Among them are several senators from states that have become significantly more conservative than in 2018, when they were elected to six-year terms. With West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s announcement that he will not run for re-election in 2024, Republicans have the clearest path to winning the majority.
Joe Manchin is the most Republican Democrat in Washington. His rebellion within the party is a constant headache for Biden, who only managed to win him over through concessions to the cause of the Inflation Reduction Act, his signature measure on climate, tax and health issues. At the time, Manchin was considered the only Democrat with a chance of keeping Biden’s party’s seat in West Virginia. As governor, he gained popularity in his state and was first elected senator in 2010. He won the seat by a slim margin in 2018, but Trump won his state in 2020 with 68.6% of the vote, a percentage only exceeded for Wyoming. His re-election was already very difficult. Now a victory for the Democrats seems impossible.
With the West Virginia seat all but secured, the Republican Party now has several options to land the other senator it would need to wrest the majority from the Democrats. Of the 35 senators up for renewal in 2024 (33 again and two more to fill vacancies in California and Nebraska), 24 are Democrats and only 11 are Republicans, who favor all pools.
Donald Trump’s party can expect to keep all of its senators. There are 38 who will continue in their mandate, and the other 11 seats will be in decidedly Republican states: Wyoming, Utah, Indiana, North Dakota, Missouri, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and two Nebraska. A sign change in one of them would be a surprise.
The opposite is happening to the Democrats. The West Virginia case is the clearest, but there are two other senators defending their position in states where Trump clearly won: Jon Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. In addition, several Democratic seats are up for grabs in states where Biden narrowly won, such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan. As if that wasn’t enough, the other rebel Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema, has left the party and will seek re-election in Arizona as an independent. That presents Democrats with the dilemma of whether to support his re-election or put forward their own candidate, with the risk that the vote-splitting process could end up giving Trump’s candidate, Kari Lake, the job.
Losing just the West Virginia seat would result in a 50-50 tie that would be broken by whoever holds the vice presidency. To achieve the majority, however, it is enough for the Republicans to take away another half dozen vulnerable positions from the Democrats. And if Trump wins the presidential election, he wouldn’t even need that extra senator; a 50-50 tie and the deciding vote from his vice president would be enough.
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Control of the Senate is key to any president’s policy agenda. Not only is its majority required to pass any law, it is also the House of Representatives that has the power to ratify or veto the appointments of federal judges (including those of the Supreme Court, as Barack Obama knows well), ambassadors and advisers to appeal to the Federal Reserve and many other senior officials. A second Biden term with the Senate in Republican hands would be hell for the president.
The outcome of the House of Representatives renewing its 435 members is much more unpredictable. In the 2022 parliamentary elections, a total of 11 seats were decided by a margin of less than 1% of the vote and over 20 seats were decided by a margin of less than 3%. The winner of presidential elections does not always wield enough influence to guarantee a majority. It remains to be seen whether voters will punish the spectacle of chaos and ungovernability that occurred with the firing of Kevin McCarthy and the election of Mike Johnson as president. In any case, there is still almost a year until the elections and any prediction in the House of Commons is very premature.
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