GAME ON

Against all odds, Democrats have a good shot at keeping the Senate-or even picking up seats. The GOP won't go down wITHOUT A FIGHT

- Steve Friess

WITH INFLATION AND GAS PRICES soaring and President Joe Biden’s approval ratings near historic lows, the Republican Party should have a strong wind at its back in its quest to retake control of the United States Senate. Yet as Labor Day, the traditional launch of general election campaigns, fast approaches, one big shock in American politics is that the stage appears set for Democrats to keep the upper house of Congress—and possibly even expand their current razor-thin control.

Such a prospect seemed far-fetched only a few weeks ago—before Republicans picked extremists as their Senate nominees in several states (“our parade of kooks,” one GOP insider calls it), before those candidates committed a series of political faux pas and before the U.S. Supreme Court redefined the stakes by overturning the constitutional right to abortion. What’s more, several GOP nominees earned endorsements from former President Donald Trump by embracing his lie that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and the January 6th attack on the Capitol was no big deal. Those views are popular among GOP primary voters but a major turnoff to independents and Democrats, polls show.

The same partisan divide seems to be forming around the August 8 search by the FBI of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence for classified documents he allegedly took with him when he left the White House—which Trump-backed Senate candidates swiftly condemned. Early polling shows Republicans are mostly sympathetic to the ex-president but a large majority of Democrats and a plurality of independents approve of the FBI’s actions and believe Trump broke the law while in office.