The Senate is as much of a problem as Trump. If we don't fix it, the pres in 2020 won't be enough.

[sharedvalues]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/opinion/sunday/senate-democrats-trump.html

"Politics is unpredictable and events matter, but it’s also clear that Republicans are on the verge of a durable structural advantage in the Senate that will make Democratic majorities rare outside of the occasional 'wave' election."

The Senate is a problem for Democrats.

Well, it’s two problems.

The first is short term. The odds that the Democratic Party will win a Senate majority in 2020 are slim. To get to 50 seats — which is enough only if they win the White House — they need a net gain of three seats.

But while there are 22 Republicans up for re-election next year, only two of them are in Democratic-leaning states, and one of those incumbents — Susan Collins of Maine — is incredibly popular with her constituents. There are almost-swing states that Democrats could win, but the strongest candidates have either declined to run (Stacey Abrams of Georgia) or set their eyes on the presidency (Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro of Texas). And there are states that Democrats hold, like Alabama, that will fall back to Republicans unless everything breaks in the incumbent’s favor.

If, somehow, Democrats win a Senate majority and defeat President Trump, they’ll have to make fundamental changes to the rules of the chamber — like ending the filibuster — if they want their agenda to move forward.
And if they can’t win a majority, Mitch McConnell may cripple a Democratic presidency from the start.

Without the Senate in hand, Democrats could win the immediate fight against Donald Trump in 2020 but lose the larger battle against the Republican Party that supported and enabled him.

As it stands now, the Senate is highly undemocratic and strikingly unrepresentative, with an affluent membership composed mostly of white men, who are about 30 percent of the population but hold 71 of the seats. Under current demographic trends this will get worse, as whites become a plurality of all Americans but remain a majority in most states.

The Republican coalition of rural whites, exurban whites and anti-tax suburbanites may not be large enough to win the national popular vote in a head-to-head matchup with Democrats. But it covers a much larger part of the country’s landmass, giving it a powerful advantage in the Senate. And while this coalition — or its Democratic counterpart of liberal whites and the overwhelming majority of nonwhites — isn’t set in stone, it could be years, even decades, before we see meaningful change in the demographic contours of our partisan divides.

Link to tweet

Jamelle Bouie is awesome. A must read, as always.

And let's not forget Rick Scott (R-FL) stole his Senate seat with voter suppression. Bill Nelson should be in that seat. Scott is illegitimate, and Dems should refuse to traffic with him. He stole that Senate seat. Dems should only need two in 2020, not three.

[Funtatlaguy]

1. DC and PR statehood needs to happen for 4 more Senators.

[Celerity]

2. split California (my state) into 2 as well, that yields 6 new Dems in the Senate (counting PR & DC)

Adding new Senators is the only possible fix short of redoing the Constitution or breaking the nation up. The country by 2035 or 2040 will have 30% of the population electing 70% of the Senate, and that 30% is far less educated, far more rural, more white, more reactionary RW and more fundie xian than the other 70%.

If the SCOTUS is stacked (via a Trump win and RGB, Breyer retiring or dying, and Sotomayor retiring or dying due toher chronic (and worsening) diabetes) to 9-1 hard RW, they will eventually roll back most all civil rights gained since the 1950's, and also empower a corporate oligarchy to truly tyrannous, ruinous levels. If the Rethugs are ot crushed at state level in 2020, they will also be able to do even more gerrymandering after the 2020 census as well, and atm the Trump administration is trying to rig that via the citizenship question and defunding as well.

There is no way the Blue states will consent to this possibly coming 'Handmaid's Tale-level' repressive RW federal government for more than a decade or two or three (3 max, and remember 2 or 3 decades may seem an eternity, but in a few months, 1990 will be 30 years ago, 9-11 is less than 28 months away from its 20th anniversary) more, so it will likely end up splitting up the nation by 2050 or so.

[MBS]

3. strongly agree.

We need a majority, and we also need to defeat McConnell (among others).