For a couple of weeks now Democrats have been thinking they might hold the U.S. Senate in November in spite of themselves because of goofily bad Trumpian candidates on the Republican side in battleground states.
They mainly but not exclusively refer to Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and running back Herschel Walker in Georgia, both politically inept reflections of Trumpism's celebrity-based superficiality.
Pennsylvania would be a net GOP loss and Georgia would be a conceivable pickup squandered. Georgia has indeed become purple, but it is Trump and Trumpism making it seem bluer than it is quite ready to be on its own.
It turns out that Pennsylvanian swing voters might enjoy Dr. Oz on a television talk show but not embrace him as a senator. It turns out Georgians could cheer a great running back for the Bulldogs, but not see him as a senator.
That Tommy Tuberville could get elected to the Senate from Alabama though he didn't know the three branches of government caused Trumpism to over-rate the political value of television and SEC football.
Now there's talk among Democrats that, while they probably will still lose the House, it won't be by the red tide previously expected, and there is in fact a path, implausible but conceivable, by which Democrats would hold the narrow House majority.
First, and primarily, the full Roe v. Wade repeal by the U.S. Supreme Court has changed things among swing voters, independents and moderates. It's not that those voters are actively pro-choice; it's that a complete repeal without exception defines Republicans to them as extreme.
Second, Donald Trump is indeed increasingly discredited among those voters by the Jan. 6 commission's hearings and the evidence that he took classified documents into his post-presidency that he should not have taken, and could have put them at risk.
Third, of much less significance, because politics is more about what you oppose than support, is that Joe Biden has been less inept lately. Democrats in Washington have managed to accomplish three or four things Republicans deplore but that swing voters don't necessarily mind--like climate-change mitigations and negotiated drug prices under Medicare. Or even student-loan debt forgiveness, though Republicans are having some success exploiting that one, and will be working its supposed atrocity harder as we go along.
The best illustration of the reasoning for Democrats' House optimism, and of their continuing challenges, is a recent special House election in a nationally microcosmic swing district taking in a bit of the New York City northern exurb and extending northward to the Catskills and the Hudson Valley.
The district is not demographically a microcosm of the nation, just a voting one. It is 86 percent white and about 11 percent either Black or Hispanic. But its presidential votes are striking bellwethers.
The district favored Bill Clinton over Bob Dole by seven points in 1998; favored Bush II by two and then seven points over Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004; favored Barack Obama over John McCain by eight points in 2008 and then over Mitt Romney by six points in 2012; then favored Trump over Hillary Clinton by seven points in 2016, and then favored Biden over Trump by two points in 2020.
Obviously, the district has a willingness to go either way based on candidate strength and prevailing national mood.
So, in that special election for a short-term vacancy fill last week, Democrat Pat Ryan trailed his Republican opponent by several points in polls two months ago when Democrats were scraping the bottom. Then came the Roe v. Wade appeal and Trump's new troubles.
Ryan hammered the extremeness of the outright abortion-rights repeal and, in time, came to use the word "traitorous" for Trump actions. He ended up winning, 51.8 to 48.2, a margin of nearly four points, wider than Biden's over Trump in November 2020.
Obviously, the American microcosm had been moved quickly and significantly by abortion mainly and Trump troubles secondarily.
Nationally, Democrats are now hammering abortion harder than ever and Republicans are temporizing to say they absolutely continue to oppose abortion but it appears the people want an exception or two or three or four--the life of the mother, rape, incest and certain fetal anomalies--that they would be willing to go along with in deference to the people's will.
Now to the mitigating factor: Few congressional districts are national microcosms. Each decade after a new census, more and more of them get redrawn in more partisan ways--by both parties, but more by Republicans because they have lately controlled more statehouses.
So, it's rare to see such as microcosm as New York's 19th, and even it, by the way, has been redrawn mostly into a new 18th that is more conservative and a greater challenge for Ryan in November.
It's still advantage-GOP for the House and a tossup for the Senate, only, in the latter case, because of what Mitch McConnell has admitted--candidate quality, meaning poor on his side, meaning too Trumpy, meaning too shallow and inept.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.