Ten Red-State Democrats May Hold the Balance of Power
By Gerald F. Seib
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They are the 10 Democrats in the Senate who will be up for re-election in 2018 in states Republican Donald Trump carried in November.
They will be the Democrats most susceptible to pressure to break ranks and support the initiatives of a President Trump, which means that on key issues they figure to hold the balance of power. They could provide the additional votes required to get Senate Republicans from the 52 seats they hold to the 60 votes they will need to break the filibusters that stand as the biggest roadblock to the Republican agenda. Or they could decline to do so, thereby dooming key elements of that agenda.
They also may be the canaries in the coal mine in judging the political success or failure of the great Trump experiment. As they look forward to their own re-election battles just up the road, they will be highly attuned to the question of whether the new president is pleasing or disappointing the voters who swung behind him in the key states to provide his margin of victory.
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In political terms, the Democratic 10 actually divide into two subgroups, those from states Mr. Trump carried easily and those from states he barely won. In the former category are West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Montana’s Jon Tester, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill and Indiana’s Joe Donnelly. On the other end of the scale are those from states Mr. Trump won in a squeaker: Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, Florida’s Bill Nelson and Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow. Somewhere in the middle is Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, from a state Mr. Trump won by eight points.
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One thing these Democrats know is that they will enter the 2018 election cycle with a giant bull’s-eye on their backs. Republicans will consider them the most vulnerable opponents in a year in which Democrats will have to defend a stunning 25 Senate seats—including two independents who caucus with Democrats—of the 33 up for re-election.
Democrats console themselves with the fact that many of these red-state Democratic senators have their own power bases and nonpartisan images back home—and that in five of the last nine elections after a new president took office, his party actually lost Senate seats.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ten-red-state-democrats-may-hold-the-balance-of-power-1482772184
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