With the latest victories in Alaska and North Carolina, Republicans will hold 50 seats in the coming Senate. They will now look to deny Democrats a tiebreaker majority in the Jan. 5 special elections in Georgia. But it’s not just 2020 that should worry Republicans. The 2022 Senate map is not kind to the GOP, and even one Democratic win in Georgia could make the majority difficult to hold.
Barring some sort of Democratic scandal, Republicans only have two apparent pickup opportunities in 2022. The first would be the seat Republicans just lost in Arizona, as special election winner Mark Kelly will have to make a quick turnaround and defend it two years later. The second is Nevada, a state where Republicans have tended to lose narrowly in recent cycles. Joe Biden won both states, and in typically red Arizona, Republicans have now lost both Senate seats in just three years.
Beyond that, there is little opportunity for Republicans to make gains. Their next best option is probably Sen. Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, assuming a strong candidate such as Gov. Chris Sununu can be recruited. But New Hampshire just reelected its other Democratic senator by 15 points.
The next closest state? An ever-bluer Colorado.
With limited opportunities on offense, Republicans will also be playing defense in two hotly contested swing states. They will have to defend seats in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two states that each have one Democratic senator already. Both states went for Biden in 2020, both have Democratic governors, and Republicans won’t have an incumbency advantage in at least one of them: Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey is not running for reelection.
Republicans will also be defending seats in red-leaning states that could still cause problems. Sens. Rob Portman in Ohio and Marco Rubio in Florida will both face reelection. There is also the conundrum of North Carolina, where Sen. Richard Burr said in 2016 that he would not run for reelection. Republicans will likely be better off if he keeps his word, as Burr has been marred by an insider trading scandal. But as this year’s Senate race showed, it’s a tough, competitive state.
With Republicans staring at a likely net loss of one or two seats in 2022, victories by David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler (whose seat will also be up again next year) would be crucial either to keeping control of the Senate or forcing moderate Sen. Joe Manchin to be the Democrat’s majority maker. Georgians aren’t just deciding how the first two years of Biden’s presidency will go — they are deciding how much opposition he will face in the Senate for his entire first and perhaps only term.
