Democrats had good reason to celebrate last night in Pennsylvania. They’re optimistic about being able to beat Donald Trump in November and his landslide victories in the Northeast brought them that much closer to that match up. But the party establishment — both statewide and nationally — also got their wish when Kathleen McGinty won the Democratic nomination for Senate to oppose incumbent Republican Pat Toomey.
Party leaders such as Vice President Joe Biden worked hard to gain McGinty the nod over former admiral and congressman Joe Sestak, who narrowly lost the seat to Toomey in 2010 amid the Tea Party landslide that year. Part of their motivation was their distrust of Sestak, a left-wing free spirit who was not a team player. They even ran ads claiming that a left-winger like Sestak would endanger Social Security. But McGinty, an environmentalist with no experience in elected office, also fits in with their vision of how to win back the Senate from the Republicans. And Donald Trump is essential to their formula for victory.
Pennsylvania is key to the Democrats’ Senate hopes in 2016. Six years after 2010 the GOP has 23 seats up for grabs this year with the Democrats only defending ten. At the moment, Larry Sabato’s generally reliable Crystal Ball website rates the current election as a toss-up in the Senate. Of the 23 Republican seats, 12 are considered safe; three are likely to be held by the GOP and three are leaning in their direction. Two (Wisconsin and Illinois) are likely to be lost to the Democrats. That leaves them at 48. Five — New Hampshire, Florida, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania — are considered tossups.
Democrats have spent six years waiting for another shot at Toomey thinking that he would be easy to beat in a presidential election year where the massive Democratic registration advantage could be utilized. But unlike weaker GOP freshmen like Illinois’ Mark Kirk and Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, Toomey has tacked a bit to the center on some issues while maintaining his reputation as an intractable fiscal conservative, gaining unexpected popularity. That’s been reflected in polls that showed him winning big against either Sestak or McGinty.
Why then has the race been shifted from likely or leaning Republican to a toss-up? The answer lies in one word: Trump. Pennsylvania has gone Democratic in every presidential election for a generation, but it has often been relatively close. Though Trump clearly has the support of the Republican base — a fact substantiated by his huge win on Tuesday even as Toomey backed Ted Cruz — but polls indicate that in a general election he loses the state to Hillary Clinton in a landslide. As he would elsewhere, Trump loses women by a huge majority. Anger about his stands toward minorities also will generate the kind of turnout that only Barack Obama has generated. That means that Democrats are expecting Trump to both suppress GOP turnout from mainstream Republicans who are disgusted with their party’s likely nominee while hoping that he will also motivate their base in a way their candidate couldn’t accomplish on her own.
Trump’s shot at Clinton last night during his victory speech about Clinton playing “the woman card” and being unable to get five percent if she weren’t the wife of a former president, also feed Democratic optimism about beating Toomey.
To be fair to Trump, he’s right that Clinton’s credibility among female voters is low. Indeed, her political skills are so poor that it’s hard to imagine her winning high office without the leg up she got from being a president’s wife. But fair or not, those remarks feed into the narrative about disdain for women that Trump has created with his vile insults directed at a host of females that dared to challenge him.
So nominating a woman to face Toomey wasn’t just a matter of finding a more pliable Democrat than Sestak. Democrats see McGinty as benefiting from the perception that the GOP doesn’t care about the sort of suburban female voter that Toomey and any Republican needs to prevail in Pennsylvania. Having two women at the topic of their statewide ticket is just what they wanted to make that point.
Nevertheless, no one should count out Toomey. Though he began his political career with a reputation as an ideological hard-liner, he’s proven to be an able politician who understands how to win in a state like Pennsylvania where rural and suburban constituencies can balance out the Democrats’ enormous strength in the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. If left on his own, he can beat McGinty. But Toomey’s problem is that if the GOP ticket is led by a man that is regarded as offensive to women, the demographic edge held by the Democrats may be such that no Republican can win statewide in 2016.
If even a strong incumbent like Toomey can be swept away by Trump, Republicans shouldn’t count on any of their other endangered incumbents surviving this year. That means a Democratic Senate that will be able to not only confirm liberal Supreme Court Justices but to rubber-stamp the rest of the Clinton agenda.
These are facts that, as our Noah Rothman wrote earlier, Trump fans prefer to ignore. But as we start to examine each of the crucial races that will decide control of the Senate this year, the Trump factor is the card that Democrats have good reason to expect will bring them victory.
