Call them the 49 percent majority makers, a path blazed 20 years ago that Democrats probably need to replicate this fall.
Back in 2006, when they gained six seats and the Senate majority, Democrats relied on a trio of victories that came courtesy of a plurality: Claire McCaskill winning Missouri with 49.6 percent of the vote; Jon Tester winning Montana with 49.2 percent; and Jim Webb winning Virginia with 49.6 percent.
In each race, a small but significant bloc of voters ignored the two major parties’ candidates and cast ballots for independent options or wrote in their own alternative. Democratic challengers didn’t need to clear 50 percent to win in those solidly red states, opening the door for plurality victories and the narrowest possible majority, 51-49, in January 2007.
Two decades later, again needing wins in deeply conservative states, Democrats might have to get lucky in a few places with Republican-leaning voters who instead land on an independent candidate.
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“In really close races, it can be the difference,” McCaskill, who served two Senate terms before losing in 2018, told NOTUS in an interview Thursday.
David Winston, a pollster who advised Senate Republican leaders in 2006, told NOTUS it’s difficult to really know who those voters would have preferred, as those are often just protest votes against both parties.
The real difference maker this fall will be whether voters who identify politically as independent remain as angry at Republicans as they were 20 years ago, according to Winston’s review of exit polling data. In 2006, those voters favored Democrats by 8 to 24 percentage points in Missouri, Montana and Virginia, the sort of margins that could spell doomsday for Republicans if they are replicated this fall.
“If Democrats win by double digits among independents and can sustain leads on the economy, a blue wave could be possible,” the Republican pollster said.
With Republicans holding 53 seats, Democrats need to flip four seats while defending all of their own to claim another 51-49 majority. North Carolina offers their ripest opportunity, as former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper leads in public polling and has already won six statewide elections. Maine, which has voted Democratic in nine straight presidential elections, is their next objective with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) locked in her usually tough fight.
Their next handful of targets — Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas — all voted for President Donald Trump by double-digit margins two years ago. Even with his approval ratings sinking, Democratic candidates in these states will struggle to crest the 50-percent level if it’s truly a one-on-one race.
Using forecaster Nate Silver’s analysis, Democrat James Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton in Texas in the average of polls, but the Democrat is barely above 47 percent. In Iowa, Democrat Josh Turek is statistically tied with Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson at almost 47 percent.
And in Ohio, Sherrod Brown has a narrow lead over the appointed Republican Sen. Jon Husted, but the former Democratic senator is still sitting just a hair over 49 percent in the polling averages.
Those Democrats appear to have locked down their party’s voters and independents willing to support them, but getting those last few percentage points to guarantee victory can be exceedingly difficult, especially in very large states.
Brown lost by just 3.5 percentage points in 2024, but he fell 207,000 votes shy of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). In 2018, Beto O’Rourke received enormous attention for his very close race against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), losing by about 2.5 percent. But the Democrat still came up 215,000 votes shy of Cruz.
Democratic chances will increase if a critical sliver of the usual Republican coalition either doesn’t show up or casts a protest vote for a third-party candidate. There’s some evidence that those types of Republican voters are out there: Republicans who do not identify with the MAGA label make up roughly 30 percent of the party’s coalition. Just 51 percent of those non-MAGA Republicans approve of the president’s job performance, according to this week’s Economist/YouGov poll.
And one key difference between now and 2006 is the dramatically looser campaign finance laws that allow super PACs to effectively serve as political boosters for the third-party candidates who might peel away votes.
Republicans in Alaska have accused Democrats of secretly supporting Dan J. Sullivan, a neophyte candidate who advanced to the November election this week, as a way to sabotage two-term Sen. Dan Sullivan’s reelection bid.
The Libertarian Party has candidates on the ballot in Iowa, Ohio and Texas, which will prove tempting for outside Democratic groups to try to support.
Ted Brown, a Libertarian activist for more than 45 years, might feel like a safe protest vote for a traditional Republican who is uncomfortable with scandal-plagued Paxton in November. As of the most recent federal filing, Brown’s campaign had raised less than $7,500 — with $5,000 of that coming from his own checkbook.
That’s probably an insufficient haul to run a high school student council race, let alone statewide in Texas, but some Democratic allies of Talarico will be tempted to try to fund an effort to persuade conservatives to back Brown.
McCaskill, however, warned that subterfuge could backfire if the lines back to one of the major party candidates were crystal clear, allowing an opponent to accuse the other campaign of trying to cheat.
“If it is being manipulated and there are fingerprints, it can hurt,” she said.
The most famous spoiler candidacies have happened at the presidential level, with many Democrats convinced that Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy crippled Al Gore’s White House bid in 2000. And Republicans remain bitter over billionaire Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign, denting support for George H.W. Bush’s re-election bid.
Just a few weeks ago, Mallory McMorrow’s name remained on the ballot in Michigan’s bitterly Democratic primary for the Senate. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens by less than 16,000 votes — while the zombie campaign of McMorrow received more than 61,000.
In 2006, even Republicans had grown tired of George W. Bush’s presidency, with the Iraq war in a slog and corruption cases that involved GOP lawmakers and administration officials. So some voters who would have normally pulled the Republican lever found other alternatives.
“That happened organically. We had nothing to do with it,” McCaskill recalled of the nearly 48,000 votes that went to the Libertarian that year in Missouri.
Her margin of victory was about 49,000, out of more than 2.1 million cast, and a more liberal third-party candidate pulled 17,000 votes.
Webb, who had served as Navy secretary during the Reagan administration, defeated the incumbent, George Allen, by a little more than 9,000 votes while a liberal leaning independent candidate received more than 26,000 votes and almost 2,500 wrote in another candidate.
Tester had the clearest benefit from a Libertarian on the ballot. Tester won by about 3,500 votes over a scandal-plagued incumbent, and the more conservative Libertarian pulled more than 10,000 votes.
Six years later, Tester won with barely 48 percent of the vote after allies ran a pretty direct campaign to boost the Libertarian candidate.
Winston, the pollster, said Republicans would not have any worries if they simply could answer the economic concerns of voters not registered with either major party. That would seal victory without fearing third-party confusion as a factor.
“The key question is, again,” he told NOTUS, “where are independents?”
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