Control of the Senate is also at stake in 2024 election

With less than a week to go to the election, it’s kind of useful to look at the total picture, President, Senate, House, what’s happening? We don’t know yet, and frankly, the polls are, I think, very confusing. We do know that in early voting, Republicans have done better than in the past, and Democrats have done a little bit worse. We don’t know in the final week where there’ll be a big surge by the Democrats, or whether, in fact, the Republican trend will hold up. What we do know is that this is potentially either going to be a very close election or a remarkably big Trump victory, and we don’t know which of those two it’ll be. It’s the reason I say that is if the trends we’ve seen so far continue, President Trump was going to carry a lot of electoral college votes, much like Ronald Reagan did in 1980 against Jimmy Carter, when Reagan had the biggest electoral college victory against an incumbent president in history. On the other hand, if vice president Harris can turn out the vote, this could become a very narrow, very close race, ultimately centering in the Electoral College, on the key states we’ve all been watching all along. In addition to what’s happening at the presidential level, the Senate is a big deal. The Republicans are almost certainly guaranteed to pick up control. They’re going to win West Virginia. They’re probably going to win Montana, where the candidates ahead and where Trump is going to win by a huge margin. They could well win in Wisconsin. They could well win in Michigan. They could very well win in Pennsylvania. They were very likely to win in Ohio. Why does all this matter? Well, the way the Senate works. 1/3 of the Senate’s up every two years, and every once in a while, the geography favors one party or the other. This is a big Republican opportunity year because of the way the states are breaking this year. If, in fact, the Republicans end up at, say, 5556

57 they may be in a position to keep the Senate for a decade, if they’re at 51 or 52 then the Democrats have a lot of energy and drive to try to take it back in 26 so the Senate, I think, leans Republican. The question is, it’ll almost certainly be a Republican victory, but will the victory be big enough to enable a newly elected President Trump to govern, and will the victory be big enough that it controls the Senate for more than just the next two to four years? The other area is the house, and I can tell you, one of the House leaders, Republican leaders, said recently that there are 49 districts that are too close to call,

about half Democrat half Republican. If everything breaks right for the Republicans, they will gain seats. If everything breaks wrong for the Republicans, they will lose control. So the most likely outcome if President Trump wins, it will be because Democrats don’t turn out to vote, and if they don’t turn out to vote, remember, they don’t vote for vice president Harris, then they’re not there to vote for the Senate. They’re not there to vote for governor, they’re not there to vote for the house. That’s how you end up in crushing landslides. One side stays home. We’ll find out. It’s going to be a very exciting few days, and we’ll know maybe next Tuesday. But remember, George W Bush was not declared the winner for 46 days. So it isn’t just 2020 but we’ve had number of occasions where American elections get very exciting for a very long time. We’ll see, and we’ll talk about it after the election. I.