Down Ticket #25: Could James Comey’s revived Clinton email probe swing the Senate to Republicans?

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Senate Democrats had all the momentum. Then came the Clinton email news. Did James Comey just save the GOP majority?

Another day, another October surprise — this one, of course, involving FBI Director James Comey and a new cache of thousands of Hillary Clinton emails found on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, the disgraced sext-addict husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

The conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., is that 2016’s latest autumnal “bombshell” won’t alter the outcome of the presidential election, which the former secretary of state has long been favored to win. At the same time, though, the thinking is that it might prevent Democrats from flipping the four seats they need to take back the upper chamber of Congress.

“This won’t save the WH campaign,” Republican strategist John Weaver tweeted Friday, “but Carlos Danger may have saved the GOP Senate.” (“Carlos Danger” was one of Weiner’s sexting aliases.)

All of which got Down Ticket wondering: Could Weaver & Co. be correct? Could James Comey and Carlos Danger really throw the Senate to the GOP?

It’s still early — the polls typically take a few days to catch up to the news — but at least the presidential part of Weaver’s prediction appears to be on point. A Politico/Morning Consult survey conducted right before Comey’s announcement showed Clinton leading Trump 42 percent to 39 percent; a separate poll conducted by same firm immediately after Comey’s announcement found no movement for either candidate. And while 42 percent of undecideds insisted that the email revelation would make them less likely to vote for Clinton, pretty much the same number — 41 percent — said it would make no difference either way.

“It is unlikely that there will be a dramatic shift in the polls before Election Day,” said Morning Consult cofounder and Chief Research Officer Kyle Dropp. “While Friday’s news may be considered an ‘October surprise,’ it doesn’t seem to be moving the needle as of now.”

The Senate fallout, however, could be trickier to calculate.

For the most part, voters already know how they feel about Trump and Clinton — and they are unlikely to change their minds just because the FBI has found some new emails that may or may not be relevant. But when it comes to down-ballot races, public opinion isn’t quite as calcified.

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll of North Carolinians asked an interesting question: “Would you say you strongly support [your preferred candidate], somewhat support them, or do you think you might vote differently on Election Day?” In the presidential contest, 69 percent of likely voters said they strongly supported their candidate of choice; only 2 percent said they might vote differently. But in the neck-and-neck Senate contest, which pits Republican incumbent Richard Burr against Democratic challenger Deborah Ross, only 55 percent of likely voters characterized their support as strong — and 5 percent admitted they could still be swayed to the other side.

This means, in theory, that there might be a little more “give” in the latest Senate numbers — and that Clinton’s latest emails woes may be more helpful to down-ballot Republicans than to the mogul at the top of the ticket.

Democrats still have a couple of advantages here. The first is early voting: In states with close Senate contests, the party has been banking millions of ballots for weeks now — and the vast majority of these votes were cast before Comey’s announcement.

In Arizona, the GOP’s usual early-vote turnout edge is half as big as it was in 2012. In Colorado, Democrats are ahead by about 27,000 votes, which is a significant reversal from 2012, when Republicans were leading by about 19,000 votes. In Florida, registered Republicans have a 14,000-vote lead — down from 44,000 votes at this point in 2008. In North Carolina, Democrats are routing Republicans by more than 186,000 votes, or 15 percentage points. And as of Sunday morning, registered Democrats were outpacing registered Republicans by 7 points in Nevada.

“I would wager in Nevada turnout is so strong [that] Hillary could build an insurmountable lead in the coming days,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook boasted on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The Democrats’ second advantage is their ground game. According to a recent report in the Hill, campaign finance reports show that together, the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and Democratic state party operations employ 5,138 staffers across 15 battleground states — nearly 4,000 more staffers than their Republican counterparts.

The gap is particularly wide in states with heated Senate races: North Carolina (300 Democratic staffers vs. 100 Republican staffers); Nevada (240 Democratic staffers vs. 67 Republican staffers); Pennsylvania (508 Democratic staffers vs. 62 Republican staffers); Florida (678 Democratic staffers vs. 150 Republican staffers); and Arizona (230 Democratic staffers vs. 12 Republican staffers). Usually, both parties’ Senate candidates benefit from big presidential get-out-the-vote operations — but only Democrats will be getting a boost this year.

Even so, Senate Republicans still have a chance to capitalize on Comey’s revelation. For one thing, they’re already doing a lot better than Trump: Of the 13 most competitive Senate races this cycle, Republicans are outperforming the Donald in nine. In Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and North Carolina — the states that will likely decide control of the Senate — Trump is trailing by 3 to 5 percentage points; his GOP Senate counterparts, meanwhile, are essentially tied with their Democratic rivals. This puts them in a better position to pull ahead. It’s much easier to imagine the email news swinging 1 percent of the vote than, say, 5 percent — and in some of these Senate races, 1 percent might be all it takes.

Comey’s announcement also gives Republican Senate candidates something they seemed, until now, to have lacked: a closing argument. Forced for weeks to play defense after each of Trump’s fumbles, their messaging had basically been reduced to “Yes, I still support the nominee” or “No, I can no longer support the nominee,” depending on the severity of Trump’s latest transgression.

But now Republicans are reveling in the fact that they get to say stuff like this:

And this:

And this:

As Republican strategist Doug Heye put it on Saturday, Republicans in tight down-ballot races “can [now] wave in the air the Comey letter and push their opponent for … being wishy-washy. The ability to change that conversation and not wake up tomorrow morning and have every question be about Donald Trump” is, according to Heye, a tremendous boon.

Yet Comey’s letter doesn’t simply allow GOP Senate candidates to change the subject — it allows them to change the subject to exactly what they’ve been trying to talk about all along. That’s the real upside here. In the waning days of the campaign, many Republicans have been writing off Trump and pitching themselves as a check on the next President Clinton. What better argument for the necessity of electing a Republican Congress — in their minds, at least — than the FBI’s 11th-hour decision to revive its Clinton email probe? You think this is bad? they might say. Just imagine the kind of hijinks Hillary will engage in without at least 51 GOP senators to police her.

Whether voters agree remains to be seen. They could side instead with Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican leader of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and conclude that Comey’s “disclosure is not fair to Congress, the American people or Secretary Clinton.” They could continue to see Trump and Clinton as creatures unto themselves and disregard the ticket-toppers when casting their down-ballot votes.

Or the news could rile up just enough hardcore conservatives, and discourage just enough Bernie Sanders liberals, and swing just enough undecided voters to tip just enough of the seven too-close-to-call Senate races just enough to keep Democrats from notching the four pickups they need.

We’ll know more in the days ahead; the post-Comey Senate public polling has yet to materialize. (Internal campaign polls aren’t showing any shifts yet.) But Republicans are hoping that one data point from New Hampshire proves prophetic.

In a GOP poll conducted from Oct. 26 to Oct. 28, voters were asked whether the fact that Hassan is “a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton” who “believes Clinton is honest and trustworthy” makes them more or less likely to vote for Hassan on Nov. 8: 28.3 percent said more likely; 48.6 percent said less likely. “Unaffiliated” voters — the key to victory in the Granite State — were also less likely to vote for Hassan after hearing of her ties to Clinton, by a 4-point margin.

And this was before Comey’s letter. If the gap widens in the final week of the campaign, Hassan will have a hard time unseating Ayotte, who currently leads by about 2 percentage points, on average. And that could spell trouble for Hassan’s fellow Democratic challengers as well.

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Darrell Issa isn’t the only California Republican in danger. How the whole state party could ‘sink so low’ on Election Day, it’ll ‘never come back.’

It’s not every day that you get to watch in real time as one of the two major political parties basically goes extinct in America’s most populous state. But that’s exactly what could happen when California goes to the polls on Nov. 8.

The marquee contest is the one between Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican incumbent in California’s 49th Congressional District, just north of San Diego, and retired Marine Col. Doug Applegate, his Democratic challenger. Issa was first elected to Congress in 2000, and since then, no Democrat has come within 16 percentage points of defeating him. Safely ensconced in his seat — he’s also one of America’s wealthiest politicians — Issa developed a reputation in Congress as a partisan brawler, using his perch as chairman of the House Oversight Committee to torture the Obama Administration at every turn.

But now, with Applegate attacking him for supporting Donald Trump and internal polls showing a tied race, Issa is flailing, embracing Obama and saying he would have signed on as one of Clinton’s advisers if asked.

“That is the definition of chutzpah,” Obama said after Issa bragged in a campaign mailer about working with him on a bill.

Yet Issa isn’t the only California Republican in danger. In the Modesto area, third-term Rep. Jeff Denham is struggling against Democrat Michael Eggman, a beekeeper, the same man he beat just two years ago by 12 points (even as a majority of Denham’s constituents voted for President Obama). In the Central Valley’s 21st District, the national Democratic Party is spending big money to tie Rep. David Valadao to Trump, even though the Republican has said for months that he won’t support his party’s nominee. In the 25th District, north of Los Angeles, freshman Rep. Steve Knight — a top target for national Democrats — was recently named California’s most endangered incumbent. And a recent Politico analysis showed that Democrats — who already control both chambers of the California legislature — were likely to gain a supermajority in the state Assembly and come within striking distance in the state Senate.

Once upon a time, California was the center of the conservative movement in America. Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda; Ronald Reagan served as governor for two terms.

But not any more. This year, two simultaneous trends may shrink the state’s already diminished GOP to the point of utter irrelevance. The first is Trump’s astounding unpopularity. According to the new Hoover Institution Golden State Poll, the Republican nominee is currently losing to Clinton by 24 percentage points in California; his support, now at 30 percent, could be the lowest ever for a GOP presidential candidate in the state.

“Thirty percent is a terrible place to be at statewide for Republicans in California,”

Hoover fellow Bill Whalen told Politico earlier this week. “[Trump] is looking at potentially the worst performance by Republicans since Alf Landon won 31 percent of the vote here in 1936.” Nationally, Landon lost 46 of the 48 states.

The second is demographics. Overall, Latinos now outnumber non-Latino whites in California, and their numbers are growing rapidly in districts once thought to be safely Republican. Thanks to robust Democratic voter registration efforts, Republican Party registration has fallen below 27 percent statewide, down from 30 percent in 2012. As a result, statewide Democratic turnout would have improved this year by an average of 5 percentage points over 2012, no matter who was on the ballot. Trump, with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, has simply made matters worse.

“If these figures hold throughout the whole period of the early vote,” Tony Quinn, a political analyst and former Republican legislative aide, recently explained, Republicans are “going to lose virtually all of these contested races.”

“It’s going to kill them,” Quinn added. “They could just sink so low that they never come back.”

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