Republicans eye soft Democratic Senate seats as 2024 targets
Rachel Schilke
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Republicans are adding several more Democratic Senate seats to their growing list of targets in the 2024 election.
Of the 34 Senate seats up for reelection, 23 of them are being defended by Democrats. Early on, the GOP set its sights on seats currently held by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Jon Tester (D-MT), viewed as the most vulnerable Democrats in the coming cycle.
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Now, Republicans are also looking to oust Democrats from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada — places where President Joe Biden won with narrow margins in 2020 or where Democratic senators struggled to hang on in 2022.
Wisconsin
In Wisconsin, GOP recruiters are pushing Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) to run against Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), with national Republicans believing he is their strongest possible nominee, according to Politico.
Baldwin is running to secure a third term as Wisconsin’s first female senator and the country’s first openly gay senator. She won her last election in 2018 by 11 points.
A National Republican Senatorial Committee poll from late May found Gallagher trailing Baldwin by 1 percentage point, 46% to 47%. Sources close to the discussions told Politico that Gallagher has met with the NRSC and has not closed the door on launching a campaign.
Gallagher, a rising star in the GOP, has burnished his record by openly criticizing former President Donald Trump and showing a command of policy as he leads the House committee on China.
Several Trump-backed candidates ran for state and federal offices during the 2022 midterm elections, and most lost. Republicans gained only a slight majority in the House.
Gallagher said in a March 2023 interview with PBS that Trump “lost my support” after the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol and that was not going to change.
If Gallagher runs for Senate, pro-Trump political consultant Alex Bruesewitz is preparing to launch a bid for the open House seat.
Michigan
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) announced in January that she would not seek reelection, making Michigan a crucial swing state for Republicans in 2024.
While Cook Political Report ranks the race as a “lean Democratic” seat, two Republicans have already launched bids to secure it for the GOP.
Nikki Snyder, a member of the Michigan Board of Education, became the first candidate to declare her campaign for the Senate seat in mid-February. She was one of only two Republicans on the eight-member board. Michael Hoover, a small business owner, has filed to run for office as well.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) is clearing the field for what was expected to be a messy Democratic primary, announcing in February that she would be running for Stabenow’s seat in 2024.
Snyder attempted to challenge Slotkin in 2020 for her House seat but was unable to make the primary ballot because she did not turn in enough petition signatures.
Michigan has been a reliably blue state in presidential contests since 1992, with a single exception coming in 2016, when Trump won 47.5% of the vote, compared to 47.3% of voters casting ballots for Hillary Clinton. The state has only elected one Republican senator in that time — Sen. Spencer Abraham, who lost reelection to Stabenow in 2001 after his first term.
Nevada
Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), one of the Senate’s centrist Democrats, launched her reelection campaign in April. Like Tester and Manchin, Rosen has joined Republicans on several votes this year, causing headaches for Biden and the Democratic Party.
Nevada is seen as one of Republicans’ best pickup opportunities in 2024. Rosen is headed into a tough reelection cycle, following in the footsteps of her colleague, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who hung on to win reelection last year in Nevada by less than 10,000 votes.
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Republicans ran longtime Trump ally and former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt against Cortez Masto in the midterm elections last year. Laxalt’s connection to the former president was the focal point of his campaign and served as a target for Democrats looking to capitalize on widespread disenchantment with Trump.
Now, a similar pattern is approaching after Nevada Republican Jim Marchant, an avid 2020 election denier, jumped into the Senate race on May 3. He told NBC News in 2022 that Biden’s 2020 victory was “almost statistically impossible” and that he wouldn’t have certified the election.