MI-SEN 2024 Megathread - Meijer out

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This will surprise many - I know her pollsters were not expecting this, at the least.

Slotkin will be pressured into defending her seat. Benson and Stevens are likely to be top recruits, and if Stevens lands it then it's a clear opening for Mallory McMorrow to ascend to Congress. Incredibly strong bench in the state.

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I don't see why Lisa McClain is expected to be a good candidate,  she's only run in a completely safe district in the Thumb area for two whole elections ever.   There's not much to distinguish her from any other candidate and most voters outside of the Thumb probably know nothing about her.

The thumb is heavily in the Detroit media market, which also contains Oakland and Macomb, Ann Arbor, and critical Livingston County which will be key in a GOP primary. Very possible she has higher name ID than we might realize from the outset (even if not at saturation levels of course).

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Dems really going to avoid yet ANOTHER contentious primary, it seems. You love to see it.

It seems MI/WI/MN Dems actually learned a lesson from 2016.

It's actually pretty incredible how Trump's win and narrative of Rust Belt strength (real though drastically exaggerated by the media) led to these three states' + PA's Democratic parties building absolutely behemoth organizations and their Republican parties to learn all the wrong lessons and crater.

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I was thinking about something similar recently, but on more national lines.  Elections come down to (a) successfully turning out your base voters (and hoping the other side is less successful at turning out theirs) and (b) persuading the persuadable voters.  In 2016, Trump managed to both turn out lots of low-propensity Republican voters and to persuade some swing voters who were put off of Hillary, and the combination gave him a victory by the skin of his teeth.  Credit where it's due to the Trump campaign for finding this strategy; it was one that looked unlikely to pay off, but it was the only one that could have won for him, and it did.

However, the Republicans learned at least one critically wrong lesson from that victory: they thought, and some continue to think, that the same strategy that eked out a victory once is guaranteed to work again.  They failed to realize that any set of actions creates consequences and reactions. Trump's term as President horrified so many people that in subsequent elections, it both activated Democratic base turnout and shifted many persuadable voters to the Democratic camp (even worse for the Republicans, the latter group includes high-propensity voters like college-educated suburbanites).  Boosting turnouts from both bases is a contest that increasingly favors Democrats for demographic reasons.  Trump staying in the spotlight, and many Republicans continuing to support him and his messages, just continues these trends.

The Republicans are like a poker player who once won a big pot by filling an inside straight and concluded that drawing to an inside straight is always a smart play.  It's not; although the straight will occasionally get filled (probability requires it), it loses much more often, and in the long run will lose lots of money.  If the Republicans run on a platform that's focused on the economy and crime, de-emphasize the culture war stuff, and push Trump and other crazies to the side, they can win; look at what happened in New York and California last November.  However, to do this consistently on a national scale, they need to kick Trump & Co. to the curb.  While this would certainly cause them some short-term pain, if they don't do it they're going to spend a long time in the wilderness.

I agree a lot with your general vibe here but I think a bigger culprit is complacency, in multiple forms. It's easy to forget today but all the money was on HRC in 2016 (anyone who tells you they firmly expected Trump to win is likely lying/engaging in revisionism) so lots of people who likely otherwise leaned left/centrist sat the Presidential race out and/or voted third party (especially in the Midwest - I'm sure I don't have to remind anyone how low the two major party vote shares were in MI, WI, MN, etc) out of complacency with the comfort of the assumption that the status quo would continue.

When this didn't happen, Democrats responded with a laser-like focus on electability, strengthening organizations, and building turnout and small-dollar fundraising machines largely in the exact places they were most complacent. Republicans on the other hand saw Trump's victory as an affront to these exact concepts (it wasn't, obviously) and developed a complacency of their own with the idea that they can discount wide appeal/swing and non-base voters and nominate the candidates who energize the id of the party base. Trump and his yes-men's clown show after the 2020 election served to add strength to this complacency at the exact moment when it was best poised to be reversed.

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Heard last night that Slotkin has parted ways with the polling team that did her Congressional races and hired Whitmer's pollsters for this race.

I doubt accuracy was the concern here - there wasn't a single Democratic polling firm that got Michigan's statewide races right last cycle (including Whitmer's) - but perhaps a signal about the kind of campaign that Slotkin plans to run.

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Daines' strategy of recruiting self-funders with no electoral experience to run against proven electoral and fundraising powerhouses is...gutsy...to say the least.

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It is noteworthy how all three of the Republican candidates here have genuine anti-Trump credibility. Especially with the primary being separate from the already-held Presidential, I'm very interested in seeing what turnout looks like, and where.