2024 Senate Ratings: The GOP Faces a Bleak Future

How Kamala can win Congress, and what happens if she doesn't.

How much do you know about President Grover Cleveland?

If your answer is “very little,” you’re far from alone. Beyond the novelty of him being the first and (so far) only president to win, lose, and then win back the White House, Cleveland didn’t really do much to earn himself a place in the public’s collective consciousness during his two stints in power. There are just two things about him that connect this Gilded Age pol to today: one, that he was the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms, which Donald Trump is aiming to do, and two, the fact that he was the last Democrat to come into the White House without securing a trifecta. That was the outcome of the 1884 elections, and it has not happened once in all of the 140 years since.

It sounds strange, but it’s entirely true. Working backwards, Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Carter all came into office with control over the House and Senate. So did Kennedy, Roosevelt, Wilson, and even Cleveland himself when he won his second term in 1892. Every single one of these presidents was able to hit the ground running after coming into office. Every single one of them had the politics of their early presidency defined by a reaction to what they did, not what they were prevented from doing. But with the way things are going, Kamala Harris appears to be on track to break this streak. In spite of the GOP’s best efforts to choke every race they can, they are still likely to win a bare majority in the Senate that will allow them to block the agenda of a President Harris for at least her first two years. The fact that this hasn’t happened for a Democrat since the days of gas lighting means that, if it occurs, it will be entirely uncharted territory, where the rules of past elections will no longer apply.

And we may not even get to see it.

Thanks to years upon years of political malpractice on the part of the GOP, what should have been impossible—a Democratic trifecta in 2025—is still somehow within reach. The party’s path to a majority in the upper chamber is narrow, but it is real, and it goes through five unexpectedly competitive states: Ohio, Montana, Texas, Florida, and Nebraska. In this article, I’ll go through all of them in detail to answer the all-important question of this cycle: whether Blexas, Blorida, and even Blubraska are actually in the cards, and what it might take to get there. I’ll also look at the likely scenario where the GOP nets a narrow majority and explain why I would consider that to still be both a complete humiliation and a possible step on the road to long-term defeat. Here’s the state of the race for Congress, 2024, and why I think that, contrary to the consensus of the past few years, the GOP faces a very bleak future in the upper chamber.

The Official Ettingermentum Senate Race Ratings: September, 2024. No Tossups.