The question donors should ask themselves about the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the body in charge of winning the upper chamber of Congress, is simple: Is it possible to separate the DSCC from the Democratic Party’s record in Senate elections? Because that record has been pretty lousy in the past decade.
After briefly achieving an effective 59-41 majority in the Senate (including a couple of aligned independents) in 2009, Democrats have been hit by multiple brutal cycles. They lost six seats in the 2010 midterms and nine more in 2014, with modest two-seat gains in 2012 and 2016 being offset by a two-seat loss in 2018, the year of the “blue wave” in the House. In 2020, they managed to net three seats thanks to unexpected victories in Georgia, but they also had some disappointing losses in North Carolina, Maine and Iowa, all states where Democrats were supposed to be competitive. The DSCC spends a significant amount of money in about nine races every cycle; in the last four cycles, it has gone 10-26 in the 36 races where it spent the most money.
But you can't conclude that the DSCC is to blame for all these losses, as Blue Tent explains in our recently published research brief: Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee: What Donors Need to Know.
The Senate has a well-known Republican bias because small states with majorities of rural white voters get the same amount of representation as large states dominated by densely populated, diverse urban centers. Many Democratic losses have occurred in states like North Dakota, West Virginia and Missouri, and the party shouldn’t be expected to win in those places. The fact that there were Democratic senators from these states to begin with is partly a legacy of a time when the parties were less clearly ideologically sorted; the country has entered a more partisan era, and the landscape has shifted. There’s nothing the party as a whole or the DSCC, in particular, can do about that.
The DSCC can only really have an impact in the few close races that occur every cycle, races where things like candidate quality or good messaging could be the difference between a win and a loss.
In the 2021 Georgia special elections, Democrats won thanks to a couple of great candidates who were helped by a storm of fundraising and a ground game that local activists had been building up for years. But the other close races in that cycle went poorly. The DSCC endorsed Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, for which the committee was slammed by famed progressive leader Rev. William Barber for picking a white moderate over a Black candidate. Cunningham went on to lose by less than 2% after leaked texts revealed he was having an extramarital affair. In Maine, Democratic candidate Sara Gideon raised so much money that she had $14 million left over after the election, but that fundraising haul didn’t stop her from losing by almost 10 points to Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who had been polling poorly and was seen as vulnerable.
Progressives have long criticized the DSCC for intervening in primaries on behalf of the more moderate candidate—in one recent example, the DSCC backed Amy McGrath over Charles Booker in the 2020 Kentucky Senate primary. Of course, the DSCC’s mission is to win elections and it is merely picking candidates it thinks has the best chance to win—but a lot of these candidates have gone on to lose, sometimes badly, as McGrath did despite getting a lot of fundraising help from the committee. Even relative moderates like former Alabama Senator Doug Jones, have criticized the DSCC for not having a good enough message or strong enough infrastructure to compete in red states.
Donors have to keep that track record in mind when considering gifts to the DSCC, but there are a lot of other things to think about, like other options for a Senate-focused donor, or how the DSCC spends its money. Blue Tent explores all these questions in our full briefing on the DSCC, available to subscribers here.