The Party That Wins the White House in 2024 Could Sweep the House and Senate
Photo Credit: RacetotheWH Senate Forecast
By Logan Phillips
Date: March 30th, 2023
The 2024 election is primed to be one of the defining moments of the early 21st century for the United States. The Presidential election will almost certainly feature two candidates offering dramatically different visions for the country. Whoever wins could have a chance at making a lasting and powerful impact on the nation during the first two years of their new term, because the House and Senate are likely to be much more competitive than the average political cycle. That means both Democrats and Republicans have a viable chance to secure a trifecta and full control of the government.
The new Republican majority’s hold on the House is tenuous. It’s the GOP’s second-most narrow advantage since 1952. Democrats need to flip just five congressional districts to re-take the chamber, and there are eighteen Republicans representing districts that Joe Biden won in the last Presidential Election.
This map shows the members of Congress that won their last election by less than 5% that represent districts won by the Presidential candidate of the other party in 2020. There are other top-tier tossup races as well beyond this list. One of them is NY-3, represented by Congressman George Santos. Joe Biden won it by 8%
In California and New York alone, Republicans will have to defend five incumbents that won by 3% or less and who also happen to represent districts that President Joe Biden won in 2020. The promised red wave may not have washed across the country in 2022, but it made a splash in California and New York. Democrats are hopeful that the GOP will not be able to repeat their performance in those states, which benefitted from lackluster Democratic turnout that is unlikely to happen again in a presidential election.
Last cycle, our House Forecast came within one seat of perfectly predicting the number of seats the GOP’s new House majority would win. Today, our early internal House forecast projects that Democrats are very slight favorites to retake the House, especially if President Joe Biden has enough support nationwide to secure re-election.
On the other side of Congress, it's the GOP that has the best opportunities to make inroads, and our now-live Senate Forecast considers them modest favorites to flip the chamber. The odds would be far more dire for Democrats if they hadn’t successfully pulled off a victory in Pennsylvania and defended all of their endangered incumbents in the 2022 mid-term elections.
That performance swelled their ranks from 50 to 51. If Republicans win the White House, they’ll need only one seat to flip the Senate. Conversely, should Joe Biden wins re-election, Democrats can survive with their majority so long as they only lose one seat.
Chances are they will need that cushion because the political geography of the 34 Senate races of the 2024 election cycle overwhelmingly favors the GOP. The Senate forecast finds that there are 11 races where both parties have at least a 10% chance of winning the election. Democratic Senators are running for re-election in nine of those races.
The two even somewhat competitive Republican-held seats are in Florida and Texas. Florida appears to be a long shot after the 2022 election, but Democrats could have a fighting shot in Texas if they continue to make serious inroads in the Lonestar state and have a strong national performance in 2024.
Republicans, on the other hand, will target Democrat-held seats in much more competitive swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The saving grace for Democrats is that they have at least a 70% chance of winning all but three of their nine vulnerable seats – although the GOP could move Arizona and Michigan into the tossup column if they nominate a strong candidate.
The danger for Democrats looms largest in the deep red states where Democratic Senators will have to outrun the party by wide margins to survive. Even twenty years ago, this wouldn’t be that steep of a challenge. Voters were far more willing to cross party lines to support politicians that they trusted. In 2003, 27 of the nation’s 100 Senators represented a state won by the Presidential candidate from the other party.
That’s become a much harder task in our current hyper-political era, and now there are only five Senators of this kind left standing. Three of them are Democrats, and they’re all up for re-election in 2024.
The most endangered is West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. His 2018 victory was one the most impressive electoral achievements of any Senator this millennium, because he won the state by 3.3% just two years after President Trump won it by 42%. However, it is far from clear that he can continue to outperform the party by such a massive margin.
Jon Tester won re-election in 2018 thanks to broad cross-party support. He touted his ability to work with President Trump in this TV ad.
Joe Manchin’s popularity declined after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Plan, and recent polls indicate that his unfavourability rating is now higher than his favorability rating.
Manchin is a talented communicator and political tactician representing a small state that he knows intimately well, so it would be foolish to dismiss his chances of winning entirely. Nonetheless, he still enters this cycle as the clear underdog and could face popular Republican Governor Jim Justice in the general election. There’s also the chance that Manchin opts to retire, which would all but guarantee a Republican victory in West Virginia.
The other two vulnerable Democrats are Ohio’s Incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown and Montana’s Incumbent Senator Jon Tester. Barring a successful upset in Florida, Texas, or West Virginia, Democrats will need to win both states to keep their majority.
Our Senate forecast ranks both races as tossups, and projects Senator Sherrod Brown as the narrowest of favorites, on track to win by 1.5%. We’re still waiting for our first head-to-head poll for the race, so that could change once we get more information.
The Senate Forecast finds that Montana, which voted 8 points to the right of Ohio in 2020, is the race most likely to decide the Senate in 2024. If Democrats hold on in Montana, Sherrod Brown would be more likely than not, to also win another term.
This leaves the eyes of the nation squarely focused on Jon Tester - the rancher Senator who has proven to be one of the strongest survivors of Democratic slaughters in red states. Tester has successfully cultivated a unique and powerful brand, distinct from the national Democratic party, and successfully won considerable cross-party support.
Partisan polarity in the U.S. has increased in almost every recent election cycle, and Tester may not be able to evade the partisan riptide once again in a state that voted for Trump by 16%. Republican dominance in presidential races is not new; the GOP has won the state of Montana in every Presidential election since 1992, mostly by double-digit margins. Unlike their counterparts in most other red states, Democrats were far from sidelined in Montana state politics, because Montanans kept bucking national trends of hyper-partisanship, crossing party lines at a much higher rate than voters in other states. In fact, Democrats controlled at least half of the state's eight statewide offices for the first sixteen years of this millennium.
National trends finally broke through in the Big Sky state in the 2020 election. Republicans blew Democrats out of the proverbial water, securing seven of eight statewide positions. Today, Tester is Montana’s one surviving Democrat and likely faces this most challenging election since 2006 when he usurped incumbent Senator Conrad Burns.
The early polling suggests Tester has at least a fighting shot of defying political gravity once again. Morning Consult polled every state in the nation, and they found that Jon Tester is one of the ten most popular Senators with their states’ voters. That’s a stunning achievement for a Montana Democrat, because every other Senator on the top ten list was either a Democrat representing a deep blue state, or a Republican representing a deep red state.
Sixty percent of Montanans approved of Tester’s performance, compared to just thirty percent that disapproved in the Morning Consult poll, a result echoed by a GOP polling firm that placed Tester’s approval at 56%. If the election were today, Tester would be the clear favorite. That could change after months of sustained fire from GOP firms and a heated presidential election that will almost certainly push some Republicans that personally like Jon Tester to vote for his opponent.
We will be following the Montana election very closely all cycle long at RacetotheWH. Last cycle, we released full-paged interactive election forecasts for every major Senate race, and we’re going to do the same in 2024, beginning today with our brand new Montana’s Senate Forecast.
We're projecting not only Tester's odds of winning re-election but how he currently stacks up against each of the most likely potential Republican challengers for his Senate seat. Explore our forecast to learn how Senator Tester survived in the past election cycles, and to learn more about Montana political battleground. Track the latest polling, and follow our interactive charts. They will be updated daily with the latest data and polling.
Once Montana GOP challengers launch their campaigns, we'll add GOP primary predictions to our MT Senate forecast.
Rumors abound that Congressman Matt Rosendale will run for the Senate once again, after falling 3.5% short of the GOP 2018 nomination. However, the national GOP worries that Rosendale may be a bit too extreme to pull off a victory against Tester’s seasoned political prowess. They have ben aggressively recruiting a political newcomer: Bridger Aerospace CEO Tim Sheehy.
Senator Steve Daines, the new head of the National Republican Senate Campaign Committee, raved about Sheehy’s prospects. History suggests that there is a risk in nominating Sheehy. First-time political candidates historically perform worse, on average, than politicians with a history of winning. There are exceptions, like Raphael Warnock and Glenn Youngkin, but many promising newcomers lack the political skills needed to win or have previously unknown scandals lurking in their past.
The dream Montana GOP recruit could be Governor Greg Gianforte, the only candidate to beat Tester in a February Republican poll. But, thus far, he’s declined to run, and instead, has encouraged Sheehy to get into the race. Also rumored to be potential candidates are former Secretary of the Interior and current Congressman Ryan Zinke and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen.
Keep a close eye on RacetotheWH.com in the coming weeks and months. Our next interactive Senate forecast will be for Ohio, followed shortly by forecasts for Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Montana Senate Forecast
The Senate Majority could be decided by Montanans, who will decide whether to send the Senator-Rancher back to Washington DC for another term. Here’s the latest predictions and polling for the race.