Senate Democrats running away from Harris in ‘blue wall’ states
BY ALEXANDER BOLTON - 10/22/24 6:00 AM ET
Democrats running for the Senate in “blue wall” states that will be critical
to determining the outcome of the 2024 election are running away from
Vice President Harris, signaling that they are hoping to win over some of
former President Trump’s voters to keep their seats.
And Democratic candidates in those states have been careful about
criticizing Trump during the high-stakes debates. They have focused on
policy and their own records without taking many — or any — shots
against the Republican nominee.
Pennsylvania incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D) has even embraced Trump’s
tariff policies. His campaign launched an ad last week that described him
as “independent” and touted how he “bucked” the Biden administration to
protect fracking and “sided with Trump to end NAFTA.”
“There’s no party affiliation in Casey ads. I don’t recall seeing any that say
‘Democrat’ or anything like that. He’s running as an incumbent on his own
record,” said Berwood Yost, the director of the Center for Public Opinion
Research at Franklin & Marshall College.
“He’s trying to distance himself a little bit from an administration that is
viewed negatively by the most part. He doesn’t want to be tied to that
either through Biden or Harris,” he said.
Yost said Casey has dabbled in some of the populist messaging that is
Trump’s forte to drive a wedge between working-class, blue-collar voters
and his Republican opponent, David McCormick, the former CEO of
Bridgewater, one of the country’s biggest hedge funds.
“If you look at some of the messaging that Casey has put forward, he’s
tried to run some populist messaging against McCormick. He’s tied
McCormick very closely to the leadership of that hedge fund and tying
him [to] China,” he said.
Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, Casey harped on China repeatedly
during his debate against McCormick, hammering home the point that
McCormick’s hedge fund invested in the Chinese defense industry.
The strategy makes sense in a state where Trump is outpolling the
Republican Senate candidate.
Internal polling from the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned
with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), last week
showed Casey leading McCormick by 2 points, 48 percent to 46 percent,
while Trump trailed Harris by only 1 point in the state, 49 percent to 48
percent.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report on Monday shifted the Pennsylvania
Senate race from “lean Democrat” to a “toss-up,” reflecting the fact that
Casey’s lead in the polls is eroding as Trump gains on Harris in the
battleground state.
In Wisconsin, endangered incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) ignored
President Biden and Harris, and made only a passing reference to Trump,
in her one and only debate appearance Friday.
Her opponent, Republican businessman Eric Hovde, meanwhile, frantically
tried to connect the senator to the Biden-Harris administration — a
strategy Republicans have tried to employ in Pennsylvania and Michigan,
as well.
But Baldwin has focused on the issues in her race, hammering Hovde for
supporting tax cuts for “the rich,” accusing him of not supporting
government negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug
prices, and highlighting his years spent as a real estate mogul and banker
in California.
Baldwin has gone to the old Democratic playbook of accusing her
Republican opponent of favoring an austerity plan that would cut Social
Security and of putting women’s health in danger by opposing abortion
rights.
And while she talked some about Democrats’ efforts to pass legislation to
negotiate lower prices for some prescription drugs and to address water
pollution by PFAS, so-called “forever chemicals,” in a bipartisan
infrastructure bill, she was careful not to embrace the Biden-Harris
administration.
In a similar move to Casey’s attempt to ingratiate himself with working-
class voters, Baldwin nine months ago launched an ad that highlighted her
bill signed by Trump to require that domestic infrastructure project use
American and not Chinese steel.
“Tammy Baldwin got President Trump to sign her Made in America bill,
then she got President Biden to make it permanent,” the narrators say in
the ad, which featured men in hard hats talking to the senator.
Her campaign relaunched the ad on television last week.
Baldwin has also taken a more populist stance on tariffs. In May, she
called on the Biden administration to keep in place the Section 301 tariffs
that Trump imposed on Chinese imports in 2018.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) called out Casey
and Baldwin on Monday for trying to cozy up to Trump after clashing with
him repeatedly in Washington.
“These Senate Democrats all voted to impeach President Trump twice, so
it is surprising that they are now running ads praising his work as
President. Disingenuousness aside, these are the type of ads you run if
you think your nominee for president is going to lose,” NRSC
communications director Mike Berg said.
Andrew Mamo, a spokesperson for the Baldwin campaign, pushed back on
the notion that there’s anything disingenuous about Baldwin working with
the Trump administration to protect American jobs in 2018.
The aide noted that Baldwin is working with Trump’s running mate, Sen.
JD Vance (R-Ohio), and senior GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), on
legislation.
“Right now, she is working with Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD
Vance on a bill that would help our Made in America economy and
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley to continue cracking down on foreign
ownership of U.S. farmland,” Mamo told The Hill.
Hovde tried to score points at Friday’s debate by accusing Baldwin of
voting with Biden “95.5 percent of the time with President Biden.”
His campaign has run ads showing footage of Baldwin greeting Harris
warmly on an airport tarmac and has tried to link the senator to the Biden
administration’s immigration policies.
Baldwin insisted she “fights for Wisconsin and only Wisconsin.”
“I’ll work with Republicans or Democrats, Republican administrations or
Democratic administrations, to get the job done for Wisconsin. But I’ll also
stand up to them if necessary,” she declared.
Harris was in Wisconsin on Thursday, campaigning with former Rep. Liz
Cheney (R-Wyo.), making stops in Milwaukee, La Crosse and Green Bay.
Baldwin, however, did not campaign with her party’s nominee for
president.
On Tuesday, Baldwin will attend campaign events with Harris’s running
mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), and former President Obama. And she
participated in Harris’s first campaign rally in Milwaukee after becoming
the Democratic Party’s likely nominee in July.
In Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin, currently
wrapping her third term representing the state in the House of
Representatives, has sounded like a Republican at times, talking about her
home on a “dirt road” where no electric vehicle would dare go. She has
flashed Trumpian rhetoric about how Japan and South Korea “ate our
lunch” in the 1980s by being a step ahead of U.S. automakers in
promoting fuel-efficient vehicles.
Slotkin warned donors in a video call earlier this month that Harris was
struggling against Trump in Michigan.
“I’m not feeling my best right now about where we are on Kamala in a
place like Michigan right now. We have her underwater in our polling,”
Slotkin told supporters in a clip viewed by The Hill.
David Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University, located
outside of Detroit, said Slotkin is cautiously keeping her distance from the
Biden-Harris administration’s record.
“Slotkin isn’t talking about Biden simply because some of the issues
where voters are judging performance are not in the Democrats’ favor,” he
said, alluding to voters’ dissatisfaction over the economy, inflation, and
mass migration at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Slotkin is somebody who touts her bipartisan work across the aisle
proclivities,” he added.
She’s also soft-pedaling attacks on Trump in a state where he has many
supporters.
Slotkin, who represents Michigan’s moderate 7th Congressional District,
didn’t mention Trump at her last debate with her Republican opponent,
former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, until the end of the hour, when she
tagged Rogers for sitting by idly while Trump spreads “misinformation and
disinformation.”
Rogers repeatedly accused Slotkin of voting “100 percent” with Biden and
Harris.
The outcome of the presidential race heavily determined the outcome of
Senate races in 2016 and 2020, the last two times President Trump was
on the ballot.
Earlier this year, polls consistently showed Democratic candidates in
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin outperforming Biden, and later
Harris — something that was also true in Republican-leaning Montana and
Ohio.
But the separation between Democratic candidates and the Harris in
these battlegrounds are starting to narrow as Election Day approaches.
The Cook Political Report earlier this month shifted the Wisconsin Senate
race from lean-Democrat to “toss-up.”
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