That time Harry Reid snatched control of the Senate away from Bush and the Republicans • Nevada Current

The 2024 Senate map was always brutally tilted against Democrats.

Democrats have mounted an admirable effort. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen is poised to keep her seat in Nevada, and from the high desert to the Great Lakes, Democrats are holding their own or better in multiple competitive Senate races.

But Democrats have little to no margin for error, and if they lose just one competitive race – incumbent Sen. Jon Tester in Montana is the most vulnerable – Republicans will almost certainly take control of the Senate away from the Democrats.

Maybe Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell can upset Republican incumbent Sen. Rick Scott in Florida, nullifying a Democratic loss in Montana. Mucarsel-Powell is polling about the same or better in Florida than Tester has been in Montana, and all the kids seem (or seemed) to think Montana is (was) competitive. So maybe Florida is too?

Or maybe independent candidate Don Osborn will upset Republican incumbent Sen. Deb Fischer in Nebraska(!?) – and then caucus with Democrats (although he hasn’t declared as much and is being cagey about it).

Or maybe Chuck Shumer, leader of the Senate Democrats, will … pull a Harry Reid. 

In the 2000 election, Republicans lost four Senate seats, but that still left them with 50 senators. George W. Bush had just lost the popular vote, but had won the vote in the U.S. Supreme Court, so Bush became president. The vice president is the tiebreaker in a 50-50 Senate, so Republicans retained control, thanks to (newly confirmed Kamala Harris voter) Dick Cheney.

But Reid, then second in command among the Senate Democrats, got to doing what he always did best – conniving. Three months into Bush’s first term, in May 2001, and in concert with then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, Reid persuaded Vermont Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords to switch his affiliation from Republican to independent and caucus with the Senate Democrats. 

And just like that, Reid and the Democrats snatched control of the Senate away from the Republicans and their newby president. (Alas, having obtained control of the Senate in 2001, the most consequential thing Democrats did with it was give Bush a blank check to invade Iraq in 2002.)

So if Democrats lose Montana and/or Ohio this year, maybe Schumer can channel Harry Reid and persuade Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) or Sen. Lisa Murkowski (I-Alaska) to caucus with the Democrats?

Yeah, long shots at best.

If Kamala Harris wins the presidency but Republicans control the Senate, Republicans will be able to – and will – obstruct her agenda. Typically the most (and maybe only) productive years of a presidency are the first two. Republican control of the Senate would squelch that.

If Republicans win control of the Senate and Trump wins the presidency, maybe then Collins or Murkowski could be persuaded to caucus with Democrats and effectively give them control, neither Collins nor Murkowski having much use for Trump/Trumpism. Combined with Democratic control of the House (a decent possibility), that would at the least be helpful in hindering Trump’s rush to despotism. Said Pollyanna.

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Low-info voters in command of high-stakes election. The national media is now officially chock full o’ Harris-Trump pre-game, er, pre-debate coverage (the debate is Tuesday). Much of that coverage is marveling at the purported mad skills of Kamala Harris. Normally – and counterintuitively – this would be unsettling for the Harris faithful, because you don’t want your candidate stuck with unreasonably high expectations.

But another thing your national media is chock full of is analysis declaring the 2024 election will be decided by approximately 42 low-information voters in Reno. Okay that’s an exaggeration. It’s actually 42 low-information voters in suburban Pennsylvania. Okay, that’s an exaggeration too. But not much of one.

In other words, the expectations game is more than usually irrelevant this time, because the really rather small number of people who have yet to determine how/if they’ll vote  – and who are projected to decide the election – are by and large the same people who are paying no attention whatsoever to the expectation game.

There’s good reason to believe Tuesday’s show will be the most-viewed presidential debate ever. Which means some, maybe even a lot, of those low-info voters in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and the other battleground states will be watching. It might be the only, hence decisive, significant bit of information about the 2024 presidential campaign that some of them will ingest.

A popular media narrative/complaint – in every election cycle – is that candidates are not being specific about their positions on policies. Yes, a very high-minded concern, I’m sure. But it’s another thing that’s more than usually irrelevant this time, because of the aforementioned low-info yet election-deciding voters of 2024, who by definition are not going to be driven by policy specifics.

Oodles of smart and dedicated people are working tremendously hard to save, well, pretty much everything worth saving. That’s what’s at risk in this election.

Yet the whole shebang is probably going to be settled by the feelies of a few voters who may or may not even know they live in swing states. It’d be pretty funny, if the stakes weren’t so high.

Versions of this column were originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.