This week alone, three high-profile potential candidates — Stacey Abrams of Georgia, Rep. Cindy Axne of Iowa and Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas — opted out of challenging Republicans standing for re-election in 2020.
They follow the leads of John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado; Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana; and Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from Texas who lost a Senate race last year. Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa, also passed.
The string of big-name misses is in part because so many Democrats, including O’Rourke, Bullock and Hickenlooper, would rather take a shot at unseating President Donald Trump. Still, it is surprising; often called “the world’s most exclusive club,” the Senate has always been an attractive job opportunity for former governors and other experienced politicians.
And Democrats are well aware that, even if they capture the presidency and keep the House, their ambitions are likely to die in a Republican-controlled Senate.
“You can’t beat a somebody with a nobody,” said Grant Woodard, a former Democratic campaign operative in Iowa, where Sen. Joni Ernst, a first-term Republican and top target of Democrats, is running unopposed. “Unfortunately, all the somebodys we have in Iowa have largely passed on this race. People here are very concerned.”
Top Democrats — including Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, who waged an intense courtship of Abrams — insist that it is still early in the campaign cycle, and they reject the notion that their recruitment is faltering. In an interview this week, Schumer promised that voters “will see a very impressive group of candidates,” including many women and veterans, by the end of the summer.
“We are just feeling a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among voters, among donors and among candidates about the Senate mainly because they realize how important it is — that even if we should get a Democratic president and retain a Democratic House, if Mitch McConnell stays the majority leader, nothing will get done,” Schumer said.
But while Schumer is busy recruiting, Republican incumbents are busy raising money. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a prime target of Democrats, has about $3.8 million in cash on hand and no credible challenger, though Sara Gideon, the speaker of the state House, is widely expected to run.
And in some Republican-leaning states crucial to the Democrats’ Senate ambitions — North Carolina, Iowa and Georgia — credible challengers have yet to emerge, forcing Democrats to sift through thin benches for little-known candidates.
Republicans now hold 53 Senate seats, which means Democrats will have to net three seats if they win the White House, and four if Trump is re-elected. But in that case, they would also have to re-elect every incumbent, including Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, whose special election victory in 2017 was widely considered an electoral fluke.
In addition to Maine, Democrats see strong opportunities to pick up seats in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina. They will face tougher challenges in Georgia and Texas but are not giving up there after Abrams nearly won Georgia’s governorship last year and O’Rourke came close to defeating Sen. Ted Cruz.
“The Senate map is not as friendly to Democrats as the numbers suggest,” said Jennifer E. Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report and was blunt about what she described as the Democrats’ “recruiting setbacks.”
In North Carolina, for instance, Democrats see a ripe target in Sen. Thom Tillis, the freshman who unseated Democrat Kay Hagan in 2014. But their top choice, Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general, declined to run for Senate in March and announced he would instead seek re-election, leaving Democrats to return to the drawing board.
“It’s like a buffalo hunt,” said Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist based in Raleigh. “Your goal is to get the biggest and strongest buffalo, and Stein was clearly that person.”
Even Schumer conceded that Abrams’ decision came as a blow, though he tried to put a positive spin on it.
“Stacey Abrams would have been a great candidate, and she’d be a great senator,” he said. “But the good news is twofold: We have other good candidates, the polling data shows that Georgia is very winnable and Stacey is going to go all out in terms of registering voters, so that we can win in 2020.”
Just who those other candidates are, however, is unclear. After Abrams bowed out, Teresa Tomlinson, a former mayor of Columbus, jumped in. Chuck Clay, a former chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, called Tomlinson “a strong and viable candidate.” But the national party has not embraced her, and Schumer is said to be looking for other contenders.
Still, many strategists say the outlook for the party is not all bad. Democrats have had strong success in Arizona, where Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut and the husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is challenging Republican Sen. Martha McSally. McSally’s hold is tenuous; she lost to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema last year but was appointed to fill the vacancy left by the death of Sen. John McCain. And Kelly has an advantage of $1 million cash on hand.
Democrats are extremely enthusiastic about the candidacy of M.J. Hegar, a motorcycle-riding, Purple Heart-winning woman who is a former Air Force helicopter pilot and who is challenging Sen. John Cornyn in Texas. Hegar narrowly lost a House race in November, and some party strategists say Democrats can coalesce around Hegar now that Castro has decided not to run.
“This is a really great environment for Democrats, and in key races we have really strong candidates,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster whose firm advises Senate candidates. “How can you argue with Mark Kelly and Ben Ray and Hegar?” he added, referring to Rep. Ben Ray Luján, who is seeking to succeed Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., who is retiring.
And while the map, as Duffy said, may not be as friendly to Democrats as the numbers suggest, it does look better for them in 2020 than it did in 2018, when the party was defending 10 seats in states won by Trump. This election cycle, Democrats are defending only two seats in those states: Alabama and Michigan, where Sen. Gary Peters has no credible Republican challenger.
The party will be on the offense in two states won by Hillary Clinton: Maine, where Collins, one of the few centrist Republicans left in Washington, is facing some headwinds after she voted to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and Colorado, where 10 candidates are vying for the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Cory Gardner. One of those candidates, Mike Johnston, a former state legislator, has raised $1.8 million — nearly as much as Gardner.
“We have really good candidates; our problem is not too few, but too many,” Schumer said.
Some Democrats hope that if the presidential aspirations of Hickenlooper and Bullock fizzle, they will embark on Senate races as a consolation prize — just as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., did in 2016. In Bullock’s case, that is unlikely: “I just don’t have an interest,” he said in announcing that he had ruled it out.
Jim Manley, a longtime Senate aide who worked for Harry Reid, the former Democratic leader, said the lack of former governors and other prominent politicians in the Democratic field was surprising. Beyond personal reasons and the lure of the presidency, he said, that may be because the Senate is no longer such a great place to work.
“I don’t think this is exactly the position where Sen. Schumer expected to be at the start of this cycle,” he said, adding, “It indicates how toxic, how polarized the Senate has become that some really good folks are taking a pass on running.”