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ALLEN, Tex. – Democrats are talking up Senate races in Texas and Florida as opportunities to keep their majority, a move designed to give them a fighting chance even if Montana Sen. Jon Tester loses re-election next month.
Republicans think that’s pretty funny, at times mocking Democrats’ efforts — even though multiple polls show Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, locked in a tight race and some vulnerabilities for Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. On the outer edges of the battleground, Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., is in a far tighter race than expected against independent labor leader Dan Osborn, although national Democrats are still skeptical of his chances.
And Cruz seems to recognize there’s no one Democrats would like to beat more than him — both to hold the majority and to oust one of their top foils.
“If you are a partisan left wing Democrat, after Donald Trump, there’s nobody in the country you want to beat more than me,” Cruz said after a campaign stop here. “What is happening is every wild eyed leftist in New York City and Chicago and San Francisco goes online and gives money to my opponent.”
To win the Senate, Cruz’s party needs to pick up two seats, or just one if Donald Trump wins the presidency and JD Vance casts the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Republican West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice will almost certainly replace Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.Va. And Tester has trailed in every public poll of his state since summer.
That math convinced some handicappers to predict a GOP takeover of the Senate. Democrats pushed back on that this fall, announcing that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would invest in both Texas and Florida.
“If you look at Ted Cruz in Texas, he just tends to be a more polarizing, partisan figure,” said DSCC Chair Gary Peters, D-Mich., in an interview with Semafor. “Rick Scott can be a very polarizing individual. If you look at his past races statewide, he’s never won by more than a little over 1%.”
The DSCC is in the midst of a “multimillion dollar” ad campaign in Florida and Texas. The group already launched ads with Rep. Colin Allred, Cruz’s challenger, and this week is kicking off joint ad buys this week with former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, D-Fla. Still, both states are expensive and it might take tens of millions to make a real impact in either.
Democrats also have had a dialed-in donor base this cycle, which has helped boost campaigns with much-needed hard money. Allred in particular is raking in the fundraising, giving him a fighting chance.
“We have to make sure that we can communicate across a state this size, and I think we have a great story to tell,” Allred told Semafor.
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The Senate campaign committees and their allied PACs have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in half a dozen states, with Democrats mostly playing defense on a sprawling map: Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. By recruiting former Gov. Larry Hogan to run for Maryland’s open seat, Republicans also forced Democrats to spend more than $15 million in a deep blue state, even as recent polling shows Democrat Angela Alsobrooks taking a solid lead.
Both parties are still trying to expand the map, with late outside GOP money coming against Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich. Democrats are anxiously eyeing Nebraska, but they can’t help Osborn without muddying his identity as an independent, and they’ve seen similar independent candidacies fall short in recent cycles after initially polling well.
Texas looks more and more competitive for Democrats, as Florida appears to drift further away. That makes Allred, who out-raised Cruz by nearly $10 million in the last three months, look compelling to donors after ex-Rep. Beto O’Rourke came less than 3 points from unseating the senator in 2018.
Allred, a former pro football player and civil rights attorney from the metroplex, has run a more careful campaign, against an incumbent with little crossover appeal who ran for president from the hard right.
“People in Texas know him,” Peters said of Cruz. “It’s pretty hard to rebrand yourself when you’ve already been branded.”
Democrats feel the same about Scott, who presided over the GOP’s poor 2022 cycle while campaigning on his own fiscally conservative “Rescue America” plan that featured a headline-grabbing proposal to sunset programs like Social Security (he later walked it back). Mucarsel-Powell, who served just one term in the House from South Florida, got some traction by running on abortion rights, with a popular abortion rights amendment on the ballot this November.
But Republicans still don’t see a serious threat to Scott, who has won races after trailing in the polls, and currently holds a lead. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell calls the Democrats’ offensive forays a “waste of money.”
“We don’t think we’re going to lose incumbents,” he said in a recent interview.
Still, Republicans are spending in Nebraska to blunt the independent candidacy of Osborn, a union organizer who turned down the Democratic nomination and has run surprisingly competitive with Fischer. Last week, a super PAC with ties to Nebraska GOP Sen. Pete Ricketts invested $2 million in ads against Osborn. Its competition: Super PACs funded by Democratic donors, but not directed by the party in the Senate.
David’s and Burgess’ View
Democrats are committed to Tester, who can win only by running far ahead of the presidential ticket and every current poll. Only one senator pulled this off recently: Maine’s Susan Collins, who outperformed every poll in her race. She’s had more cross-party appeal in her other races than Tester had in his.
This is why the party wants donors and reporters to see a larger map — one where they can trade Republican-trending Montana for Texas, or make a post-election deal with an independent senator in Nebraska. It’s important for Democrats to be able to present a pathway to a majority, however difficult, to keep raising money and getting attention.
There are also some candidate-specific factors. Cruz and Scott are far more polarizing than Sen. John Cornyn, who is up for re-election in 2026, and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who won by 16 points in 2022. So Democrats are taking their shots while they still can.
“In both states, the momentum is moving in a way that we like,” Peters said. “So I would expect that we’re going to continue to invest through the end.”
Notable
- In the New York Times, Carl Hulse writes about the historic meaning of a possible Tester defeat: “The prospect of being locked out on the Great Plains presents a significant long-term obstacle for Democrats in securing and preserving congressional majorities.”