'Down ballot' races hold high stakes in U.S. election
Republicans look to maintain control of both House, Senate to thwart a Clinton presidency
Now that it looks like Donald Trump will end up with the silver medal in next month's presidential election, Washington political chatter is turning away from the race for the White House and toward "down ballot" races.
"Down ballot" is what politicos here call all the other elections that voters will decide on Nov. 8. That includes for 34 Senate seats, 435 House seats, 12 state governors, hundreds of state senators, thousands of state house representatives, plus judges, mayors, district attorneys, attorneys general and so on.
And the stakes are high. President Barack Obama explained them this way:
"We can't elect Hillary and then saddle her with a Congress that's do-nothing, won't even try to do something," he said in Nevada, where he was stumping for Democrat Catherine Cortez Mastro in the hope she'll be the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate.
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The Hillary Clinton campaign has made the pivot. She's said she will no longer react to every flare Trump's campaign sends up because she's already debated him for more than four hours and wants to concentrate instead on the down ballot races.
The down ballot is equally important to Republicans but for a different reason — they want to tie Clinton's hands as they have Obama's for most of his presidency.
In upstate New York, a Republican TV ad tells voters that their candidate for the House will "stand up to Hillary Clinton" — effectively conceding the White House in an effort to add drama and urgency to their congressional campaign.
Democrats have edge to win Senate
Forecasting models give the Democrats a slight edge to win control of the Senate. In that case, Clinton would have an easier time getting Senate confirmations for all the appointments an incoming president needs to make.
One appointment in particular would be smoother: filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
You'll remember that Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill the seat that opened when Antonin Scalia died suddenly in February. And remember that Republicans, who currently control the Senate, refused to even hold hearings on whether to confirm Garland. They argued they were protecting the constitutional prerogative of the next president to make court appointments.
Republicans were on shaky constitutional ground with that tactic, and if they lose the Senate in November, they will have squandered their say in the process.
Garland is as moderate a nominee as Republicans were likely to get from a Democratic president.
If Clinton is elected and Democrats win a Senate majority, she can nominate someone much more liberal than Garland. Or Clinton can re-nominate Garland and maybe even build some political capital with Republicans who feared the worst and might be grateful she's offered them a do-over.
But Democrats need House too
But for her legislative agenda to succeed Clinton will also need the House.
It has been the House of Representatives — more precisely, the Republican caucus in the House — that set the tone in Washington for Obama, and that would be true for Clinton too.
The Republicans will be as divided on the Hill as they have been on the hustings when the next Congress meets. They are far from settling the differences between their Tea Party wing and their establishment wing, and now they will likely have a new Trump wing to manage too.
But they will probably unify around one issue, and that will be whether to co-operate with a Clinton White House.
The campaign against her has been ugly and personal — "crooked Hillary", "lock her up," "nasty woman" — so Republicans haven't left themselves much space for compromise.
Trump's stumbles toward the finish line are shaking up House races and offering a glimpse of unexpected opportunities. On top of that is surging public approval for Obama.
A president who finishes two terms with an approval rating over 50 per cent is always an asset in his would-be successor's campaign, and Obama recently hit 57 percent in a Gallup poll. That's encouraging him to throw himself into down ballot races in a way he never has before.
He'll endorse 150 candidates for House and Senate races at the state level, and even a candidate for the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Obama has his eye so far down the ballot, he might soon endorse Democrats running for school board.
Danger in ousting moderate Republicans
But the House is tough for Democrats to crack. They need to flip at least 30 Republican seats, and that is a heavy lift given that Republican states have drawn their electoral districts — some say gerrymandered — to maximize what's called their vote efficiency.
In the past, that's meant that even when Democrats won more votes, Republicans won more seats — "House GOP won 49 per cent of votes, 54 per cent of seats" read a headline from the nonpartisan Cook Political Report after the 2012 election.
But the worst thing for Clinton might be for Democrats to make breakthroughs in down ballot races and fall just short of taking control of the House.
That's because the seats most likely to flip to Democrats would oust the most moderate Republicans. The result could be a smaller but even more radical House Republican caucus than the one that ate its own speaker, John Boehner, in the last Congress.
Not only might it be hard for Clinton to deal with such a reality in Congress, it might even be hard to know who exactly is in charge there.
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