For Democrats, the Don Blankenship dream is over. The coal-mining baron and ex-con was a pleasant diversion—the prospect of yet another train-wreck Republican candidate was exactly the kind of opponent that Sen. Joe Manchin needed in his dicey reelection campaign in West Virginia—but now it’s back to the reality of a merciless map that offers little hope for Chuck Schumer’s dream of becoming majority leader.

It may be the cruelest irony of the Trump era. During an election season when the House seems to be a lost cause for Republicans and nearly every indicator suggests massive Democratic gains in November, the outlook for wresting the Senate away from the GOP remains grim.


The long list of flipped state legislative seats since Donald Trump’s election (40 at last count), the supercharged Democratic turnout in recent special congressional elections, the avalanche of small-donor cash, the geyser of grass-roots energy — none of it changes a Senate landscape where Democrats are defending more seats, in more hostile places, than at any other time in memory.

It’s hard to overstate the degree of difficulty in flipping the Senate this year. As Nate Silver has noted, it’s possible that Democrats are confronting the worst Senate map ever—as in, since direct Senate elections began in 1914.

Roughly one-third of the Senate is up for election every two years, but this time the Democrats are defending almost three times as many seats as the Republicans are: 26 to 9. While Democrats simply need to net a measly two seats to win back the majority, they must do it by running a gantlet through Appalachia and some of the whitest, most rural, least Democratic and pro-gun terrain in the nation.

First, the party must cull those two Republicans from a very small herd. Because the bulk of Republican incumbents up for reelection this year are in states that are nearly impregnable—think Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming—Democrats will almost certainly have to defeat Nevada’s Dean Heller and pick up the Arizona seat left open by Jeff Flake’s retirement.

Beyond that pair, everything else is a stretch. Rep. Marsha Blackburn appears capable of blowing a lay-up open seat in Tennessee for the Republicans, and there are signs that Sen. Ted Cruz could be ripe for a takedown from cash-flush Democrat Beto O’Rourke in Texas, but both of those races are mostly progressive wishcasting at this point.

In any case, picking up two seats is the easy part. The Democrats must also protect incumbents in 10 states that Trump won in 2016. Five of those senators (Indiana’s Joe Donnelly; Missouri’s Claire McCaskill; Montana’s Jon Tester; North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp; and Manchin) represent states where Hillary Clinton failed to muster even 40 percent of the vote.

The Democratic brand is no asset in many of these places. Equally important, the president known for his historically weak approval ratings at the national level remains popular locally in states like Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia.

That local strength explains why Trump was so quick to retaliate when Tester bucked the president on the nomination of Ronny Jackson for Veterans Administration secretary. After the Montana senator played a pivotal role in sinking Jackson’s nomination, Trump and the White House went into feral campaign mode, with the president characterizing Tester in a tweet as “very dishonest and sick.” In a state that Trump carried by more than 20 percentage points, the president called for Montanans to vote Tester out of office. A White House aide phoned a Montana radio station to say the president might travel there to campaign against the senator.

Tester isn’t without his own showman’s instincts: Days after the president attacked him, the farmer-turned-senator appeared above-the-fold on newspaper front pages across his home state, photographed in a tractor cab as he prepared to put seed in the ground.

Those red-state survival skills have helped Tester win two terms, but he’s also been lucky enough to run in two of the best Democratic election years of the past half-century—2006, a wave year when Democrats captured the House and Senate, and 2012, when Barack Obama’s reelection machine propelled an eight-seat gain for Democrats in the House and a two-seat gain in the Senate.

Now that 2018 shows signs of being the next Democratic wave year, it’s possible that once again Tester’s boat—and McCaskill’s, and Manchin’s, and all the rest—will be lifted. After all, in four of the five instances when the House changed control since World War II, the Senate has flipped along with it.

But there are crucial differences this year. Perhaps the biggest is that Trump has signaled his intent to leverage his popularity against Democratic Senate incumbents in the states where his approval ratings are strongest. His presidential travel schedule has closely overlapped the roster of states he carried in 2016. Trump could decide to try to zero in on Tester or another red-state Democrat with a disparaging nickname and a barrage of October tweets.

Then there’s the end of Blankenship. Democrats have feasted on Republican freak-show candidates in recent Senate elections. Donnelly and McCaskill both skated to victory in 2012 after their challengers made controversial remarks about rape, pregnancy and abortion.

With Blankenship’s defeat in West Virginia this week, Manchin has been denied that opportunity. Without the coal baron to kick around this fall, his reelection campaign—and Schumer’s quest to become majority leader—just got infinitely, if not insurmountably, harder.