Three Presidential Candidates Who Need to Grow Up Fast

One of the keys required for the Democratic party to take over the Senate in 2020 is to mount as many strong campaigns as possible against Republican incumbents.

There are 22 Republican seats up for grabs in 2020 versus 12 Democratic seats. That would seem to give the Democrats a better than average shot at picking up enough Senate seats to wrest control of the Senate away from Mitch McConnell.

Handicapping the Lineup

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report doesn’t see it that way. They list Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho. Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and West Virginia as done deals, and consider Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and North Carolina as likely. Three states considered at risk: Arizona, Colorado, and Maine. To round out the 22, there are also two open seats formerly held by Republicans: Tennessee and Wyoming, neither of which is at risk.

The Democratic party has probably safe seats coming up in Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Michigan, and Minnesota. New Mexico’s seat is vacant but will probably stay in the Democratic column.  The only chink the Democratic armor is Jones in Alabama.

There are some big names running for re-election on the Republican tickets, including Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham. The heavy hitters on the Democratic slate include Corey Booker, Dick Durban, and John Warner.

How to Make Lemonade

As it stands right now, there aren’t enough Republican seats at risk to turn the Senate over to the Democrats.  Even if they pick up all three of the at-risk seats identified by the Cook Political Report, that would still leave them two seats short if Trump wins re-election and sends Mike Pence back to the Senate with the tie-breaking vote, and one seat short if Trump loses…and this assumes that they would be able to hold onto Alabama, which is by no means certain.

What is needed is a few good politicians who are willing to put party before personal ambition, pull out of the insanely stupid Democratic primaries, which will end up giving us the Biden-Warren ticket, and attack some less vulnerable but not solidly Republican Senate seats.

There are at least three Democratic presidential candidates who need to grow up fast, throw in their towels on the Democratic presidential nomination, and file papers to run for Senate seats in their respective states.

In Colorado, the very popular former two-term governor John Hickenlooper never had a chance to win the Democratic presidential nomination. He has huge name recognition. Who can forget a name like Hickenlooper?  His name, however, is also his nemesis as a presidential candidate. No one wants to vote for a president named Hickenlooper. Really. Ask around. Everyone knows who he is, but no one KNOWS who he is.

He would, however, be a shoe-in for the Democratic senatorial candidate for Colorado. He would beat the other thirteen declared but mostly unknown candidates and walk all over first-termncumbent Republican Seat Warmer Cory Gardner.  This is a done deal. All Hickenlooper has to do is rein in his ego and play the money game.

We don’t need another also-ran in the ridiculous Democratic primaries. We need Governor Hickenlooper to become Senator Hickenlooper (where his name would not be such an anomaly) forthwith.

In Texas,  where failed 2018 Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke is beating a dead horse in his also-ran race for the Democratic presidential nomination, the guy who almost beat Ted Cruz, losing by a mere 215,000 votes (which really is “mere” in Texas) against a very popular incumbent Cruz. In 2020, he would be facing off with the much less popular Republican incumbent, John Cornyn.  Cruz and Cornyn don’t like each other very much, so there’s not much hope that Cruz will lend much, if any, of his star power to Cornyn, while O’Rourke has charisma to spare, and growing support from middle of the road Republicans who are tired of the Trump’s obsession with The Wall, which is not nearly as important to Texans as it is to people who are far from the border. (Texans make a lot of their money from the cross border traffic, both legal and illegal, and don’t really like Trump’s Manana Wall.)

The trick that O’Rourke has to pull off is to figure out how to pull out of the presidential race before he gets sent to the showers by the party managers who don’t think that O’Rourke is ready for the Oval Office. He has to get out of the presidential race without looking like either a loser or a quitter in time to file for the Senate race. He’s young enough to wait his turn. He might very well become president somewhere down the line, but he isn’t there yet and neither is the country.

In Montana, we have a real conundrum. Neither Hickenlooper nor O’Rourke ever had a shot at the prize, but Steve Bullock did. He just didn’t get in it until it was already too late to win it. He came too late to the party, and didn’t bring enough cash along with him. Under-funded and little known back east, he was never going to make the final cut, but he would be a shoe-in for Senator in a state where he won re-election to the governor’s office against a Trump sweep in his state. That says a lot for him right there.

Bullock, however, doesn’t want the job….which is a big mistake for him, and for the party.  He’s not going to be in the next debate and once you’re out of the debates, there really isn’t any way to get back in them.

The term-limited Bullock has two choices. He can run for president, and not make it through the primaries, or he can run for the Senate…but he might have fight for the nomination against his friend and political mentor Brian Schweitzer, who was Bullock’s predecessor as governor of Montana. putting together 14 years of Democratic governorships in a Republican state. (Bullock still has 1.5 years left on his term.)

Like Massachusetts, a strongly Democratic state that has a propensity for electing Republican governors, Montana is a strongly Republican state that elects and re-elects popular Democratic governors. Unfortunately for Montana, neither Schweitzer nor Bullock can run again in 2020. The rule in Montana is that you can only serve as governor for eight out of any consecutive 16 year period.

If Bullock really is adamant about not sticking his nose into the 2020 Senate race, then maybe Schweitzer will take a stab at it. In truth, Schweitzer is probably more popular in Montana than Bullock because Schweitzer left behind a billion plus surplus when he turned over his office to Bullock.

So, there you have it. The Senate match-up in a nutshell, with one Democratic seat and three Republican seats in serious contention, which means that the Democrats have to win all four of the contentious seats…and the presidency…our face four more years of divided rule.

It ain’t pretty. It’s politics.