Democrats target GOP strongholds Texas and Florida with Senate majority on the line
WASHINGTON — Democrats hoping to maintain their narrow Senate majority beyond November are looking to unrest in two unlikely places, Texas and Florida, to help neutralize potential setbacks elsewhere.
But that means the best opportunities for President Joe Biden’s party to commit political offense in the Senate races are in America’s largest, reliably red state and a once-quintessential battleground that has moved decidedly to the right in recent years.
But now that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is not seeking re-election, his seat will likely go Republican. Maintaining their 51-49 lead in the Senate likely means Democrats will have to defend their remaining 22 seats in the 2024 elections — including incumbents and independents who align with them — while also gaining seats, and they say Texas and Florida are their best chances.
Democrats across the country support abortion rights and want to build on gains among suburban women and other key voters since the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision in 2022. The party believes that many voters from Texas and Florida believe in the Republicans with them. have gone too far in restricting reproductive freedom.
Dallas mother Kate Cox made national headlines when she was recently forced to leave Texas to terminate a non-viable pregnancy after Republican officials argued that she did not qualify for an exception to the near-total abortion ban.
In Florida, activists have collected enough signatures to place a referendum enshrining abortion access in the state constitution on the November ballot — following statewide votes defending abortion access in Republican-leaning Ohio and the even more solidly red Kansas and Kentucky.
Democrats are also encouraged by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who won reelection in 2018 by less than 3 percentage points over Democrat Beto O’Rourke. In Florida, Republican Senator Rick Scott won his seat that year by about 10,000 votes out of more than 8.1 million votes cast.
“I think they’re winnable states with the right Democratic candidate and the right Republican candidate,” said Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “And I think we’ll have both.”
Florida’s Senate candidate is Democratic former Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who upset two-term Republican Carlos Curbelo in 2018 but lost her seat in 2020 representing part of Miami and the Florida Keys. In Texas, Democratic Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas will have to defeat primary challenger Roland Gutierrez, a senator from San Antonio, before he can face Cruz.
Texas last voted for Democrats for president in 1976. The party hasn’t won any of the 28 statewide offices there in 30 years. O’Rourke, after nearly toppling Cruz and unsuccessfully running for president in 2020, lost the 2022 governor’s race.
Florida voted for Donald Trump twice, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ran for re-election in 2022, as did Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.
“Just because they’re the best options they have doesn’t mean they’re winnable, but it doesn’t mean they’re competitive either,” said Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak of Texas.
However, Peters points to the most recent midterm elections, when Democrats defied Biden’s low approval ratings and historical precedent to gain a seat in the Senate and only narrowly lose the majority in the House of Representatives.
“When people say, ‘Well, the cards are against you if you run in the election,’ it’s exactly the same as what happened last cycle,” he said.
The Republicans only have to defend ten seats and want to flip as many as eight of the Democrats’ seats, including West Virginia.
Senator Steve Daines of Montana, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm, said: “We know the Democrats are going to dump millions of dollars (of) out-of-state money to buy those two seats.” Florida and Texas, but he believes Scott and Cruz are strong established players.
National Republicans are looking to Ohio, where Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown was first elected in 2006, and Jon Tester of Montana, also a three-term Democratic incumbent. Both states are expected to vote Republicans for president.
“This team isn’t too confident,” Daines said. “We know we have a great card too, but you can’t fall in love with the card.”
He said strong candidates and messaging will make a difference, as will a renewed push to encourage early and mail-in voting after Trump discouraged them in 2020.
Biden’s approval ratings remain weak, which could hurt Democrats in Senate races, although Trump also appears to be his party’s likely presidential nominee and would bring his own negatives.
Only three of the six Trump-backed Senate candidates won in 2022. Still, Daines said his party “learned from ’22,” and that he spoke with Trump and his team “often” while “working closely with the president to ensure ensuring we stand behind candidates who can win both the general election and the primaries.”
Democrats have tried to characterize Republicans, who are both allies of Trump and more moderate, as extreme on abortion, arguing that the GOP wants to cut access.
“We don’t like the government telling us what to do. That’s part of our personality,” said Mucarsel-Powell, who helped collect signatures for the Florida abortion referendum.
Allred said the Cox case makes the consequences of strict abortion limits “very real for Texans. It is no longer theoretical.”
“I think it’s going to have a huge political impact,” he said. “I think it also has a huge impact on the psyche of so many Texans. I have had so many people contact me about this because this is something that can happen to anyone and it is just an example of the most extreme policy taken to its limits.”
Another major issue for Mucarsel-Powell is Scott unveiling a 2022 proposal that calls for all federal legislation to expire within five years. That would force Congress to reauthorize what it deems worthy, including Social Security and Medicare — issues of extreme importance to older Floridians.
“Rick Scott is the most vulnerable senator alive,” Mucarsel-Powell said.
Scott has since revised the plan to include exceptions for Social Security, Medicare and things like veterans benefits. Biden nevertheless long denounced the original, which was also used as a political attack during the 2022 races that Democrats won in six swing House districts in Illinois, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
“Debbie Mucarsel-Powell clearly does not want Floridians to know that she fully supports the Biden agenda that is devastating Florida families,” Scott campaign spokesman Jonathan Turcotte said, referring to issues of inflation and an influx of immigrants at the border between the US and Mexico. “That’s why Florida rejected her once and will reject her again in November.”
Asked about Biden’s potential vulnerabilities, Mucarsel-Powell said she was running her own race. She emigrated from Ecuador at age 14 and is seeking to become the second Hispanic woman elected to the Senate, joining Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. She regularly appears on Spanish-language radio, answering questions without translation — potentially limiting some of Scott’s 2018 success in Spanish-language advertising and outreach.
Allred, meanwhile, recalled that Cruz left for Mexico during a deadly ice storm in Texas in 2021. He called the senator, who relished his role as a conservative troublemaker when he arrived in Washington in 2012 and is now closely associated with Trump, “the senator with most divided in the country’.
“Some people say a Democrat can’t win in Texas and I say, ‘Well, a guy like me should never have made it this far,’” said Allred, who was raised by a single mother, played linebacker in the NFL and a civil rights attorney before flipping a Republican seat in Congress in 2018.
The Senate Democrats’ campaign arm is involving Texas and Florida in an investment worth at least $1 million in research and communications staffers in nine states total, tasked with highlighting potential weaknesses of Republican candidates.
Trump’s margin of victory in Texas fell from 9 percentage points to less than 6 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, but Cruz has worked on bipartisan legislation that is working well in his state, increasing investment in space and protecting women in the army has improved. As he announced his re-election bid, Cruz said “never before has our country needed strong, conservative leaders more to fight against advancing left-wing ideas and politicians.”
Republicans are now happy with his chances.
“The nominee will not be Beto,” MacKowiak said, “and the year will not be 2018.”