2024 will be the largest election year in history. For the first time ever, nations consisting of over four billion people will participate in elections – including eight of the ten most populous countries and the three largest democracies: India, the European Union, and the United States. This is inspiring, but it comes in the wake of a recent struggle for liberal and electoral democracies, whose march – once buoyed by the postwar and post-USSR expansion of liberties over the course of most of the last 80 years – has become stagnant, or even diminished, in the last decade. Democratic backsliding has strengthened its grip in much of the free world as a result of increased tolerance for political violence, the failures of nation building, an overall lapse in trust of core institutions, and citizen disengagement. In general, we at The Postrider attempt to eschew the easy takes, even if writing about discontent is easy – we try to ground it in reality. And, we pretty exclusively cover American elections, which – while not the largest election this year in terms of sheer numbers – will incontrovertibly be the most important in the course of the globe for the next four years.

We’ll have a lot to say in the year to come. Our Senate and presidential ratings will be back – we’re hoping with some additional features! – and we’ll have a fair share of complementary content to boot, but we’re now within a year from November 2024. As everything comes together, we’re wondering: what can we say right now that frames how we’re viewing the race that lies ahead?

By no means our official “rating,” and still much too early to effectively assess the state of many races, it is at least useful to think of where, once we do start to look into the state of the nation’s major elections, we can start. What are the fundamentals, factors, and elements that we can use to frame that starting point? This series of articles are written in that vein, to peer through the murkiness of early polls and commentary, looking at what actually will matter when we turn to the particulars of each race.

The House of Representatives | The Senate | The Presidency

Obviously, we’re saving the big race for last, but the race for control of the Senate is close to the top of the ticket so let’s get it out of the way. We previewed which Senate races you should watch a few months ago, and will loosely summarize again here (check out that article for some more detail). There are functionally 51 Democratic senators,1Enter my usual complaints about two “independents” who use the Democratic infrastructure to get elected but then eschew the party’s name, Maine’s Angus King (who voted with President Biden’s agenda about 99% of the time in the 117th Congress, which wrapped up this January) and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders (voting with the president about 91% of the time that Congress), and then the more genuine “independent” (at least she’s not using the party name to get elected anymore, if anything she has the opposite problem!) – Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema (who voted with Democrats 100% of the time last Congress). so a loss of two seats, or a loss of the presidential election and just one seat, and Democrats will have lost the upper chamber of Congress. Three incumbent Democrats are in states Trump won twice, whereas the two “most” vulnerable Republicans are incumbents in Florida and Texas – not exactly Democratic-leaning states.

This sums up to the fact that Democrats have a lot of defense to play and pretty limited offensive opportunities, and we’ll be checking in on the race for the Senate plenty as it begins to take fuller shape in 2024. For a more complete picture of the characters and candidates that will dominate most of these races (sans Joe Manchin – who we will update you on now), check out our earlier article. 

Since we wrote our Senate preview, Democrat’s incumbent in West Virginia, Senator Joe Manchin, announced he would retire, a move which all-but-guarantees one seat gain for Republicans in a deep-red state where Manchin scraped by on name recognition, grit, tough votes, and good will… often to the national party’s chagrin. That leaves the Senate tied, in Democratic control only if Biden wins reelection. The Democrats in the other red-leaning states, Montana’s Jon Tester and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, will receive outsized attention – but both races will be real nail biters to see if they can hold on. Without saying too much this early on, polling for both is about what they’d want to see – but it’s been a while since either of them had to face an electorate that is also turning out to vote in a presidential race that almost certainly went towards the other party in their respective state (it has never happened for Brown, as Obama also won Ohio in 2012; it happened for Tester in 2012, when Obama lost Montana but Tester held on).

An aggressive array of options exist for Republicans to draw Democratic attention away from those two must-win races too, as Republicans will target Democratic-held seats in Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan. That said, Democrats have one thing going for them: very strong candidates. Their presumptive nominees in Nevada and Wisconsin are battle-tested incumbents; and the Democrats leading in seeking the open nominations in Arizona and Michigan have the right coalitions and resources to succeed. It turns out that these stronger Democratic candidates may ultimately boost the real top-of-the-ticket race, something we’ll cover in the next article in a bit more depth.

That said, expect control of the Senate to come down to just one or two serious races, with a lot depending on how well these candidates can differentiate themselves from the partisan leanings of their states, or how the margin for the real top-of-the-ticket race shapes out…