Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer may be out of a job next year.
It’s all because his Senate majority could come crashing down.
And now, Schumer is getting word that one forgotten battleground could stage a major Biden backlash in 2022.
Senate Democrats are hanging on to their Senate majority by the skin of their teeth.
With only 50 seats in the chamber held by the “majority party” Democrats literally cannot afford to lose a single seat in the 2022 midterms if they hope to retain their majority in the Senate.
With Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie breaking vote, Democrats can’t even rely on their individual senators to usher through bills.
And with two Democrats in the Senate, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, remaining a major obstacle for Schumer’s agenda, the Democrat agenda in Congress remains stalled unless the party can pick off additional seats in other battlegrounds across the nation.
But while Democrats wish to focus on Senate races in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, there’s one state in particular that they never imagined would become a battleground.
Enter Nevada, a state that has voted for a Democrat for President in every election since 2008.
On paper, Nevada appears to be a safe blue state, with Democrats holding a majority of the state’s congressional seats, both chambers of the state legislature, the Governor’s mansion, and both Senate seats in the U.S. Senate.
However, beneath the surface, a major anti-Biden backlash is brewing that could spell the end of Schumer’s Senate majority.
The Associated Press reports, “In a western battleground state that could decide which party controls the U.S. Senate, Republican Adam Laxalt has early on targeted those who feel angered and afraid, telling them the stakes of next year’s race against Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto are no less than existential.”
“Since launching his campaign with a good-versus-evil, ‘Star Wars’-themed ad titled ‘The Good Guys,’ Laxalt has railed against Democrats and an unholy trinity he says is working in parallel to “radically transform” the United States — the media, Hollywood and Big Tech,” adds the Associated Press.
Laxalt would be challenging a freshman Democrat Senator who won in 2016 in one of the most hotly contested Senate races in the country.
But Cortez Masto, a member of Harry Reid’s old political machine in Nevada, is now emerging as one of the most vulnerable members of the Senate next year.
Not only did Nevada vote more to the right in 2020 than it did in 2012 or 2008, but there’s signs that Trump’s appeal to working class voters and Hispanics could end up flipping the state red in 2022 and possibly 2024.
“Despite their recent string of defeats, including losing the 2020 presidential race by 2.4 percentage points, Republicans hope historic trends that favor the minority party in midterm elections will help them regain the majority in the evenly split U.S. Senate,” concludes the Associated Press.
Nevada’s Senate race could end up being the decisive state that will determine control of the upper chamber of Congress next year.
