Democrats face a challenging path to taking over the Senate in 2020, but their chances just got a little bit better.
On Tuesday, my colleague David Drucker revealed that Roy Moore is poised to run again for the Alabama Senate seat he handed to Democrats in 2017. Already a controversial candidate due to his career as a suspended judge and history of inflammatory statements, Moore faltered after multiple women accused him of sexually assaulting them when they were teenagers, and his responses were so unconvincing that voters in a heavily Republican state elected Democrat Doug Jones to the Senate in the special election.
Going into 2020, Democrats face an uphill battle in the Senate, as most of the seats Republicans will be defending are in states President Trump carried in 2016. What has made things look particularly daunting is the fact that Jones is facing reelection in a presidential election year in a state Trump won by nearly 30 points last time against a candidate who up until now, was assumed to be somebody other than the disastrous Moore. If Republicans take back the Alabama Senate seat, it would mean that Democrats would need to win at least four seats to take back the Senate were they to also win the presidency.
As I’ve written previously: “Of the 22 seats Republicans will have to defend in 2020, Trump carried 15 of them by double digits in 2016. Just two — Sens. Cory Gardner in Colorado and Susan Collins in Maine — are in states that Trump lost. Three more are in states that Trump won by within about five points: Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. One might want to add Sen. Joni Ernst as potentially vulnerable in Iowa, which has proven a swing state in recent political history, even though Trump carried it by 9.4 points in 2016.”
It’s much easier to conceive of a scenario in which Democrats could take three of those seats than they can take four. And their odds of that happening increase with Moore as the Republican nominee.
A poll released Tuesday confirmed Jones was vulnerable, but also showed Moore on top of the Republican field with 27 percent of the vote, trailed by Rep. Mo Brooks at 18 percent, followed by Rep. Bradley Byrne, who declared a run for Senate earlier this year and was at 13 percent.
To be sure, there’s no guarantee that if Moore runs, that he’ll win the Republican primary. If the anti-Moore Republicans are able to coalesce around one of his challengers, he’s certainly beatable. And at the same time, in a presidential election year, Moore would still go into the general election as a favorite over Jones in Alabama.
However, as long as Moore is in the picture, Democrats’ chances of retaining that seat are higher than they otherwise would be. An Alabama conservative Republican without baggage is as close to a lock as you can get in politics. Moore already lost once, so at a minimum, the race has to be considered in play for Democrats. And if they are able to hang on to Alabama, their path to the Senate majority is much clearer.
