GOP Senate Majority Depends on These Three Races

If Republicans hope to retake control of the Senate this November for the first time since 2020, it will likely have to come through ousting at least one of the Democrat incumbents in Pennsylvania (Bob Casey), Ohio (Sherrod Brown), or Montana (Jon Tester).

Democrats currently have a slim 51-49 majority in the upper chamber, meaning that Republicans will have to hold all GOP seats and flip at least one Democrat seat to achieve a majority – although this scenario would require the Republican presidential nominee to win the White House, ensuring a GOP vice president could break a 50-50 tie.

To ensure an outright majority, Republicans will need to flip at least two Democrat seats this fall. And to ensure that a few rogue GOP senators – namely figures like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – can’t single-handedly derail conservative legislation, Republicans should be aiming for a cushion of at least 52 or 53 seats.

By far the most likely state for a flip is West Virginia, where Democrat Joe Manchin has announced that he will not seek re-election. After the Mountain State went for Trump by nearly 40 points in 2020 and popular GOP Governor Jim Justice announced that he would be running for Senate, Republicans are heavily favored to pick up Manchin’s seat.

The next three states where Republicans appear to have the greatest chances of success are Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In all these states, voters are deeply unhappy with Joe Biden’s performance as president, and the incumbent Democrats running for re-election will be forced to defend their record of supporting this White House’s unpopular policies.

In 2021, for instance, Casey, Brown, and Tester all voted to pass Biden’s $1.9 trillion “America Rescue Plan” – the bill that touched off the inflationary crisis that the country is still embroiled in. Under the guise of COVID-19 relief, every Senate Democrat voted to pass this legislation, which sent hundreds of millions of dollars to fund various liberal pet projects throughout the country, as well as to illegal immigrants and violent felons in the form of stimulus checks.

A year later, these three vulnerable Democrats also voted to pass Biden’s egregiously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” – another trillion-dollar spending bill that exacerbated inflation by allocating hundreds of billions in subsidies in pursuit of Democrat fantasies of a “green revolution.”

Casey, Brown, and Tester also voted for the “For the People Act,” Democrats’ attempt to execute a federal takeover of the elections process and destroy election integrity. This bill would have outlawed Voter ID; mandated that states adopt universal mail-in voting and same-day voter registration; allowed states to accept ballots up to 10 days after Election Day; legalized widespread ballot harvesting; instituted public funding of elections; and transformed the Federal Elections Commission into a partisan body, among other egregious provisions.

Perhaps the most horrifying bill that all three senators voted for was the deceitfully named “Women’s Health Protection Act” in 2022. This bill would have repealed state laws that protect the unborn, prohibited any future state laws that would do the same, banned states from placing any limits on abortion, and forced doctors to perform abortions against their religious values.

Thanks to the Senate filibuster rule, that bill failed to pass the Senate. But Casey, Brown, and Tester all made abundantly clear that they stand with their party when it comes to supporting extreme late-term abortions and targeting pro-life Americans for their beliefs.

The three also voted to confirm Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Biden’s Supreme Court pick. Following Biden’s open admission that he only picked Jackson because she is a black woman and a disastrous confirmation hearing in which Jackson claimed she could not define the word “woman” because she is “not a biologist,” Casey, Brown, and Tester all voted to hand her a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court anyway.

Casey, Brown, and Tester have also remained glaringly silent on the deepening border crisis. While even some other Senate Democrats are now openly criticizing Biden for his failures on illegal immigration, these three vulnerable senators have said nothing despite the fact that every state is now facing the consequences of the crisis.

All of these positions are unlikely to sit well with voters. In Ohio and Montana in particular, which voted for Donald Trump by sizable margins in 2020, Brown and Tester should theoretically face an uphill battle to win over enough Republican voters to hang on to their seats. Joe Biden has just a 33 percent approval rating in Ohio and a dismal 25 percent approval rating in Montana. If the election is framed a referendum on the president and his policies, Brown and Tester will likely lose.

The race for Casey’s seat in Pennsylvania looks to be much more competitive. Biden officially won the state in 2020 by just over 80,000 votes (although there remain concerns about the integrity of the election process). Biden currently has just a 40 percent approval rating there, but Democrat John Fetterman did manage to flip the retiring Republican Pat Toomey’s seat in 2022.

The shape of these races will become clearer once Republicans select their nominees in the coming month. But what is already evident is that the GOP must prioritize winning in these three states to ensure a Republican Senate majority come January.

Alan Jamison is the pen name of a political writer with extensive experience writing for several notable politicians and news outlets.