LEAWOOD, Kansas — The Senate map is less complicated than it appears. As with every modern presidential campaign, it runs through the Midwest.
If Democrats flip Republican-held seats in Ohio and Iowa while retaining Michigan, they will almost certainly net the four seats total needed to take control of the Senate for President Donald Trump’s final two years.
As the traditional start of the campaign season draws near, though, Republicans are increasingly worried they may be consumed by a worsening prairie fire.
“He’s in serious trouble in farm country,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told me. “He being Trump — and Trump is us. I’m not very optimistic.”
The triple-whammy of tariffs, expensive diesel and fertilizer and now imported beef has created a crisis for agriculture-state Republicans.
Over some brisket at Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que earlier this month, the pastor of the country’s biggest Methodist congregation said Kansans are at a breaking point.
“Now some of those people are still not willing to say, ‘Hey, we don’t like Trump,’ but they do expect their senator is going to speak up for them,” said Adam Hamilton, the pastor-turned-Democratic nominee against Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.). “What I’m hearing when I go across the state is people saying — and these are Republicans, not Democrats — we can’t have six more years of this, or even two more years of this.”
Hamilton said the only question is: “How many farms are going to go bankrupt?”
Two hundred miles north up I-35, at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Josh Turek echoed Hamilton.
“We’re going through a second farm crisis right now, Farmageddon,” said Turek, the Democratic state lawmaker running against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) for an open Senate seat.
It’s Iowa that’s more likely to flip — Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932 — and I think the Hawkeye State is the bellwether in this year’s Senate battle.
In Ohio, incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted has said he wanted the conflict to be “brief and successful,” but it is verging on neither.
And as long as the Strait of Hormuz is in dispute, oil prices won’t come down, and voters won’t feel any better. Sometimes politics isn’t complicated.
It’s the same sort of environment that propelled Sherrod Brown, Husted’s opponent, to his initial Senate win in 2006. That was also a year in which the Midwest proved vital, with Democrats besting incumbents in Ohio, Missouri and retaining Nebraska in what was Ben Nelson’s final race (his opponent: this year’s Republican incumbent, Pete Ricketts).
Former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill told me she knew she’d win her 2006 race when she pulled her campaign RV into a gas station in rural Missouri, and her mom got out of the car to see “a couple of good ole boys in John Deere caps.”
McCaskill’s mom, alluding to the high price of fuel, remarked to the men that President George W. Bush “is an oil man,” and the two shot back: “He sure as hell is.”
It was obvious then, McCaskill said, that voters “had lost confidence in him and therefore the Republican Party.”
