The 2024 Senate map is looking very different than what you’re hearing
If the Democrats win all the Senate races that are rated “Lean Democrat” in 2024 (the ones they’re expected to win), and they win two out of the three “Toss Up” races, and President Biden wins reelection, then the Democrats will keep a 50 seat de facto majority. All these headlines about how they’re likely to lose the Senate are… not based in reality.
This past week a major political site suggested the Democrats could lose as many as six senate seats in 2024. There are no race ratings, no modeling, no basis whatsoever for predicting such a scenario or anything close to it. But ‘Democrats may lose six Senate seats’ will get panic clicks, so the media runs with it.
How many folks on our side will see a fictional article like this and mistakenly believe that the Democrats are on track to get wiped out in the Senate, and not bother to donate or volunteer for the Democrats in the competitive Senate races?
The biggest threat we face is that the entire media (including the media on our “side”) spends all day every day flat out lying to us in a way that leaves us convinced we’re going to lose anyway, which keeps us from putting in the work to win and literally causes us to lose.
Remember, the news sites that publish this kind of crap know better. They do this for a living. They know how to read race ratings and such. They’re counting on you either not knowing better, or being too addicted to panicked fear to care what’s real.
To be absolutely clear: I am not saying “be optimistic.” It’s not about “optimism” or “keeping the faith” or any of those naive concepts. When it comes to the House and Senate races that we’re clearly not going to win, you don’t see me hyping them. In fact I’m usually the one urging everyone to stop wasting their time and money trying to flip some far right House district where the Democrats have no chance.
It’s not about “optimism.” It’s about facts. It’s about being scrutinizing enough that you don’t fall for it when you see an article suggesting that the Democrats might lose six Senate seats. You’ve either already looked at the race ratings and know that this isn’t even a possible scenario, or when you see a headline like this you immediately look up the race ratings for yourself. Or, if you don’t have time to be that scrutinizing, you learn to simply ignore such headlines entirely instead of having an emotional reaction to them.
If your goal is to help the Democrats keep the Senate in 2024, step one is to accurately understand what the prospects are in each race. Then you figure out which races you can make a difference in by donating to the candidate, or even just retweeting that candidate.
“Oh no we’re going to lose” is not a strategy. It’s not vigilance. It’s surrender. Worse than that, it’s self-sabotage. If you fall for the con artists in the media who spend every day trying to bait you into giving them clicks and ratings by telling you that you’ve already lost the next battle, then you’ll lose your will to fight that battle. And if you spread that doomsday hysteria, then you’ll cause others on your side to lose their will to fight that battle as well. You will have caused your side to lose.
So let’s all agree right now not to fall for the “oh no we’re going to lose” hysteria. The Democrats have a clear path to keep the Senate. All they have to do is win the races that they’re projected to win, and win two out of three in the middle. That’s not hard at all, so long as we stay focused on wanting to win (instead of wanting to panic about how we’re supposedly going to lose), and we put in the work required to win those winnable races. Anything else is beneath us.
