ICYMI: DSCC Vice Chair Sen. Tina Smith Discusses How Senate Democrats Will Win Again and The Stakes of The 2024 Election

This week – approaching one year out from the 2024 election – Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Vice Chair Senator Tina Smith joined The Laura Coates Show on SiriusXM to discuss how Senate Democrats will win again in 2024 and the stakes of the election. 

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

SiriusXM POTUS Politics: The Laura Coates Show
October 31, 2023
Key points:

• Sen. Smith: “We have such strong Democratic candidates, even in states that are so-called red states, candidates like Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown that are battle-tested and know how to win.” 

• Sen. Smith: “We have issues on our side. Particularly, I think a lot about the issues around abortion rights and what a big and important issue that will be in places like Nevada where Jacky Rosen is running for reelection and Wisconsin where Tammy Baldwin is running for reelection.”
  
  
• Sen. Smith: “We have such a leg up because we have candidates that have proven their ability to run and win…voters know them and trust them and believe that they have done a really good job. These are pretty battle-tested candidates.”
  
  
• Sen. Smith: “On the other hand, we have a lot of very messy Senate Republican primaries: candidates with a lot of baggage [and] a lot of interparty competition that makes it difficult for them to coalesce around one candidate, and when they do coalesce it tends to be around candidates that are way out of touch, like Kari Lake in Arizona, for example.”
  
  
• Sen. Smith: “I come from Minnesota where we believe so strongly in grassroots organizing, that power comes from people at the grassroots. And what we did in the 2022 elections is we put our money in that strategy and what that looked like on the ground is in states all across the country, the DSCC was investing in people and programs that were contacting voters one on one. It might have been at your door, or it might have been on the phone, it could have been a piece of mail that you got, but often it was a direct person to person contact…We’re doing that again, of course.”

• Laura Coates: “And also, there seemed to be an early and sustained investment in organizing communities of color.”

• Sen. Smith: “Yes, that is exactly right. And we’re doing that again. So you will see us putting resources on the ground and reaching out to voters of color in Ohio and Wisconsin and Nevada, and making sure that those voters are connected with efforts, and with our campaign from the very beginning and building those efforts.”

• Laura Coates: “I’m hearing more about GOP accountability staffing, and that the DSCC is expanding it to Texas and Florida. What exactly does that mean?”

• Sen. Smith: “What that means is that we take the initiative to make sure that those voters really understand who it is that they are voting for. Let’s take Florida, for example. There’s a really great Democrat running for Senate in Florida, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell…We’ve got Rick Scott, the incumbent Senator who’s never won any election by more than a little over a point. We nearly defeated him the last time that he was up. And here is a candidate who has extreme positions on sunsetting Social Security and Medicare, positions that are very out of touch with where Florida voters are, so that would be an example of how we go after holding him accountable on the ground in the middle of this election, and helping Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who is a really strong candidate.”

• Laura Coates: “This seems to be one of the largest investments in the accountability program…at this point in the cycle. In addition to Texas and Florida, there’s also funding of on-the-ground staffers focused on that same issue of Republican accountability in Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin, none of which seem to be a coincidence. Is there a particular focus on these states for a reason?”

• Sen. Smith: “Well, we are absolutely focused on states that we know are going to be intensely competitive in 2024…Sometimes candidates try to recreate themselves as they go into another round of elections and…our job is to make sure that that doesn’t happen. And in every single place where we have competitive races, you see the same kind of…dynamic playing out where you’ve got very extreme candidates on the Republican side, and we want to make sure that people know who they are.”

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