Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
There's something much worse than losing the House, and possibly the Senate, that's rattling top Democrats who are studying polling and election trends:
The big picture: It's the possibility of a re-elected President Trump with a compliant, filibuster-proof Senate majority in January 2025.
Why it matters: It's impossible to forecast elections. But you can look at the states with Senate elections in 2024 and see why some Democrats are sounding the alarm.
"Democrats are sleepwalking into a Senate disaster," Yale's Simon Bazelon wrote last week on Matt Yglesias' Substack, Slow Boring
Then factor in that most of the GOP senators who stood up to Trump and his brand of politics will be gone: Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who are retiring after this term, and former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona.
So you see why John Anzalone, President Biden's campaign pollster, recently told a Politico podcast this is "the worst political environment that I’ve lived through in 30 years of being a political consultant."
There are several ways Democrats could overcome the GOP’s decisive map edge:
The bottom line: David Shor, one of Democrats' most respected data scientists, has been sounding the alarm for months. "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition," he tweeted, the 2024 outcome could be "Donald Trump winning a *filibuster-proof trifecta* [House, Senate, White House] with a minority of the vote."
Editor's note: This article has been corrected to change "veto-proof" to "filibuster-proof" in the second paragraph.