As Hillary Clinton’s campaign struggle to regain the prior advantages, the poll numbers she enjoyed just a couple of weeks ago, the prospect of the Democrats capturing a Senate majority, which seemed so certain in mid-October, is now a toss-up.
A study by Third Way, a centrist research group, finds that moderate voters will decide the makeup of the Senate that is seated in January.
According to a new Third Way report, here is the situation heading into Tuesday:
This year’s most competitive Senate elections have become races to the middle, with both Democrats and Republicans looking to expand on their partisan bases and draw in swing voters to put their campaigns over the top on Election Day.
But how many moderate voters do the candidates really need to woo in order to win? In (our) report, we examine the ideological breakdown of the electorate in eleven battleground Senate states and model how many moderates each candidate would need in order to build a winning coalition. And since more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal in these 11 states, Democrats need more moderate voters than Republicans to prevail.
According to Third Way, the highly publicized hyper-partisanship that dominates American politics in 2016 leaves a plurality of voters, moderates, out of the equation. Historically, Democrats have won more moderates than have Republicans — in part because they need to compensate for the fact that more voters identify as conservatives than as liberals in practically every state in the country. In fact, to win the White House, Democrats typically need close to 6 in 10 moderate voters to win.
The most disturbing trend during the wild 2016 ride has taken place in Indiana, where centrist former Democratic senator Evan Bayh, after his surprise decision to re-enter politics, has seen his Senate chances nearly evaporate over the past several months.
Bayh was one of the last moderate senators to exit the Washington circus as the tea party took hold in 2010.
Bayh
In 2016, his relatively pro-business approach to public policy has been ignored by corporate PACs in favor of the GOP team approach – embracing the Republican candidate as a reliable ally of big business lobbyists on all things congressional.
According to Politico, Bayh, a former Indiana secretary of state who’s never lost a race in 30 years in politics, has seen a 20-plus percentage point lead slip to 6 points because of Trump-like attacks. The son of the late, beloved senator Birch Bayh, Evan is counting on support based on the Bayh name, which goes back six decades in Indiana politics,
But that makes the former senator a political insider.
If Bayh, a throwback to the days of pragmatism and compromise in the Senate, cannot win in 2016, the impact would be such that a President Hillary Clinton would face a U.S. Senate that would be far different than what she experienced during her service in 2001-07.
To read more on the data about voters in Senate races — liberals, conservatives, independent s and moderates – in key states, click here.
