Last week, we wrote about the biggest challenge for Republicans in 2024: recruiting strong candidates and ensuring weak ones don’t win a primary. This week, we look at Senate Democrats’ biggest hurdle: outrunning President Joe Biden in states where former President Donald Trump won big two cycles in a row.
Democrats had a similar challenge in 2022. And, like last cycle, we’re using polling data and historic performance as an early baseline for understanding just how significant the challenge for each of these Democratic senators will be. But the difference is that last year we were comparing Democrats’ numbers to Biden’s approval ratings. Now we will have Biden’s actual share of the vote – which is often harder to outpace – even though on the ballot he has performed better than his approval ratings.
The last time all three Democrats sitting in states that Trump carried twice, ran in a presidential cycle was 2012. Let’s compare the electoral performance of then-President Barack Obama with how West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Montana’s Jon Tester and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown did in
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