Republican Fears of Losing Senate “Continue to Grow” [CNN]

Perdue Sends Grim Warning To GOP Activists: Democrats Could “Take the Senate”

Warning Comes As Nonpartisan Election Analysts Continue to Move Ratings in Favor of the Democrats

A new report from CNN details the increasing fear within the GOP that the Democrats’ “chances of taking back the Senate continue to grow.” A “blunt warning” came from Georgia Senator David Perdue as vulnerable Republican incumbents face a “challenging” political landscape and a bevy of impressive Democratic challengers. Republicans have grown “increasingly nervous” as the warning signs have piled up and just this morning two major nonpartisan election analysts moved two more Senate races in the direction of the Democrats.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

CNN: GOP senator gives activists grim 2020 assessment amid fears over holding Senate

By Alex Rogers and Manu Raju

April 29, 2020

Key Points:

• Sen. David Perdue, a Georgia Republican up for reelection and a close Trump confidant, issued a blunt warning to GOP activists during an off-the-record conference call this week: Democrats are in position to turn his state blue and take the Senate.

• “Here’s the reality: The state of Georgia is in play,” Perdue said Monday, according to an audio recording of a call with “Women for Trump” obtained by CNN. “The Democrats have made it that way.”

• The stark warning from a GOP senator — who is not considered among the most vulnerable Republicans this election cycle — illustrates the fear among Republicans that Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate continue to grow.

• Already facing the prospect of defending the Senate with an unpopular Republican president in an election cycle with more seats to defend than to target, Republicans are up against a bevy of well-funded Democratic challengers and are now navigating a public health and economic crisis that has injected deep uncertainty into the national political landscape.

• Indeed, the political environment for GOP senators has only become more challenging in the past few months. Republican incumbents in Colorado, Arizona, Maine and North Carolina always knew they would face a tough path to reelection. Now Republicans in more conservative states — Georgia, Iowa, Montana and even Kansas — have realized the same.

• Republicans are particularly concerned that the intraparty battles in Kansas and Georgia, two states Trump carried in 2016, could make it easier for Democrats to gain the three seats they need to take back the Senate if former Vice President Joe Biden wins the presidency since the vice president breaks a 50-50 tie.

• “We have had our wake-up call in Georgia,” Perdue said, detailing the state’s recent electoral history of increasingly tight races. Perdue said he needs to win “twice the number of votes” than he did in his 2014 campaign to keep his seat due to the influx of new Democrats in Georgia. “The demographic moves against us. But we can still win this if we get out and make sure that all of our voters vote. That’s what this comes down to.”

• Perdue’s assessment is striking in part because both parties view his race as less competitive than the other Senate race in Georgia, a special election to fill the seat of the retired Sen. Johnny Isakson. In that race, candidates of all parties will be on the ballot in November — and whoever takes a majority of the vote will win the seat outright; otherwise there will be a runoff between the top two candidates.

• With Loeffler and Collins engaged in a ferocious and personal fight, Republican leaders are worried that it will only boost the chances of Reverend Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and a Democrat who raised $1.5 million in the first quarter.

• Republicans in Washington are worried that their incumbent senators are not getting the recognition they deserve for backing emergency rescue legislation to prop up the faltering economy, including hundreds of billions of dollars for small businesses, hospitals, workers and the unemployed. Instead, their governors are generally receiving the lion’s share of the credit for implementing the states’ response.

• What’s more: Republicans need Trump to steady his handling of the pandemic, given that many of their electoral prospects will depend on his performance at the polls.

• But the challenges for Republicans extend well outside of that race. In the first quarter of the year, Republicans in seven other Senate races — in Arizona, Maine, North Carolina, Colorado, Kansas, Georgia and Montana — were outraised by Democratic challengers.

• In Kansas, a state which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, Democratic state Sen. Barbara Bollier raised nearly $2.4 million, much more than any of her potential Republican challengers, in the first quarter of the year. The race has become one of the biggest headaches for Republicans, in large part because of the divisive primary.

• The National Republican Senatorial Committee has realized the threat of losing the Senate, reserving ads starting in June, earlier than the past cycle, with at least $31 million reserved for the cycle in seven states, an amount that is certain to grow. The Senate Leadership Fund, which is aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has already reserved $67 million in six key states, more than double its initial amount in 2018. It already has spent roughly $2 million against Collins in Georgia.

• “We do have a competitive situation in the Senate,” McConnell said on Wednesday, noting on Fox News radio that 23 Republican and only a dozen Democrats are up for reelection. “So yes, we’re on defense—and we’ve got competitive races all over the place.”

Read the full report here.

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