Democrats Are Obsessed With the Wrong Senate Races

I rise in defense of old white guys.

No, not the last president, who’s selfish insistence on running for re-election as he neared 82 begot the current White House occupant, whose daily degradations of the office are sure to worsen after he enters his 80s this summer.

No, I have in mind two baby boomers, the most underrated and under-covered candidates in this midterm: Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper.

In what’s shaping up to be a strong Democratic year, Brown and Cooper are linchpins of their party’s increasingly realistic, bordering on likely, prospects for reclaiming the Senate.

Each comes from a state that has been forbidding for Democrats in federal races. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that each may be the only person who could flip the seat for which they’re running.

Brown, 73, previously won three Senate races, the last in President Donald Trump’s first midterm, and Cooper, 68, just left office last year after serving two terms as governor. Both are about as well-known in their respective states as is possible in an era of media fragmentation.

If you doubt me, maybe you’ll be persuaded by Republicans. Just look at the top two television ad reservations laid down this week by the Senate GOP super PAC. Where are they planning to spend the most, whether on offense or defense? You guessed it, that would be in Ohio ($79 million) and North Carolina ($71 million). Yes, of course, the scale of that investment is partly because of the number and cost of media markets in the two states. But it also underscores real GOP concern in both states.

While those spending priorities wouldn’t surprise anyone working in electoral politics, they may stun, or at least confuse, the hobbyist class of activists.

Understanding that disconnect matters.

You, my dear reader, have likely heard more about a Senate race that’s far more of a long shot for Democrats (Texas) and another that’s far likelier to flip (Maine) than the two I present above.

There’s a recency bias in the case of Texas and the campaign of James Talarico, who just last month won a high-profile primary. Also, that primary was freighted with matters of race — Black, white and Hispanic — which are often at the heart of Democrats’ intra-party contests.

Similarly, the Maine primary reflects another enduring — and divisive — clash within the Democratic coalition, that between the male progressive and female establishmentarian. More than 10 years after Bernie vs. Hillary got underway, the proxy war rages on, this time with Graham Platner playing Bernie and Gov. Janet Mills as Hillary.

Now, I don’t mean to diminish how crucial Maine is to the Democrats’ electoral math. It’s hard to see how they win the Senate without defeating Sen. Susan Collins in what’s the only true-blue state held by a Republican on the map. Your sign-of-the-times fact: Collins is the last senator, Democrat or Republican, to represent a state won by the presidential nominee of the opposite party in the last three elections.

Yet this is the point: If Maine is the Democrats’ 48th seat, North Carolina and Ohio are 49 and 50 (Save your emails, Collins enthusiasts: She’s clearly the superior Republican running in the three races, but she hails from the most difficult state on the map and will suffer all the Trump downside with none of the Trump benefit without him on top of the ticket).

I know what you’re thinking: Ok, I get it, North Carolina and Ohio are crucial, but what’s the even more decisive, majority-making 51st seat for Democrats? That’s a column for another day (perhaps one with a WASILLA dateline).

Why are Brown and Cooper so scarcely discussed? Yes, there’s the fact that neither faced a primary while Texas and Maine had and have storylines that are catnip for Democrats and the press. And Texas is the perennial white whale for Democrats, while Collins falls in that category of Republicans-they’d-love-to-beat, which also explains why the party’s small-dollar donors showered tens of millions on opponents of Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and, well, Susan Collins in 2020.

Let’s be honest about the other reasons, though.

It’s also because both are old, male and pale (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Neither is going to run for president and both may only serve a single term, at most two. In a party that often favors the new, next and fresh — particularly when craving escapism from the dismal present — Brown and Cooper are none of those things.

Now, I don't think Cooper and Brown are such delicate flowers to be stung by the lack of attention. Given the political tilt of their states, they're surely just fine not seeing their races nationalized.

But you know what they are? Candidates who could help ensure Democrats control both chambers of Congress for Trump’s final two, potentially more reckless, years in office.

Which is supposed to be the point of elections, winning so you can control or at least have a say in the agenda.

“Neither Sherrod Brown nor Roy Cooper are designed to appeal to the Democratic activist base. They’re not sitting around planning how to shoot a viral video,” said Aaron Pickrell, a longtime Ohio-based Democratic strategist. “But they connect with regular voters in difficult states.”

For nearly two decades, just one Ohio Democrat has won a Senate seat or governor’s race: Brown.

In the same period, North Carolina Democrats have won a Senate race just once — the only year they carried the state in a presidential campaign this century (2008). Even as almost every GOP White House nominee was carrying Carolina, though, there was a Democrat who won a statewide election every four years between 2000 and 2020: Cooper.

Yet the two barely exist in the online political universe. And I’d be willing to bet the mortgage that even fewer hobbyists could name their Republican opponents: Sen. Jon Husted, the appointee to fill J.D. Vance’s old seat, and former RNC Chair Michael Whatley.

Senate appointees in competitive states can struggle to hold seats they didn’t win in their own right — see Martha McSally and Kelly Loeffler — and Whatley is wholly a Trump proxy who was decided on by DJT decree when presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump passed on the race.

Again, this is not trivial, let alone trivia. Literally, folks: These are two of the central races on the ballot in a critical year for American democracy.

What they are not is terribly clicky.

Which gets to the heart of what draws interest and coverage in an era when social media is increasingly the main source of information for voters and the de facto assignment editor for traditional media.

So you now have a situation in which Talarico — running as a known vegan sympathizer in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988 — raised over $14 million on fundraising platform ActBlue alone during the first two months of the year. As Shane Goldmacher of The New York Times notes, that’s more than any other Senate hopeful raised in an entire quarter last year.

We don’t yet have full first quarter numbers, but by comparison Brown raised $8.8 million and Cooper $9.5 million in the final quarter last year. So it’s not as if they’re being ignored — they’re raising significant cash. But that’s about a third of what Talarico will ultimately raise this quarter.

I get it. Sherrod Brown isn’t a 30-something seminarian refusing to cede the gospel to Republicans and Roy Cooper isn’t a military veteran turned oysterman with tattoos and taboos to match.

Which isn’t to say they’re not interesting, in their own way.

Brown is the son of a doctor and a teacher, a baseball nut with a penchant for union populism — and the satin jackets to match — who loves Bob Evans more than any other living Yalie.

Cooper’s mom was also a teacher and his dad a small-town lawyer and connected political player in the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina. Young Roy, who claims to have blocked a shot by Phil Ford when the two played for rival Nash County high schools, was a Morehead Scholar at Chapel Hill, where he definitely didn’t block any more Phil Ford shots.

Not moved yet?

Well, too bad, this isn’t about your feelings.

Maybe (old) white men can’t jump, but they can help deliver the Senate.