Republicans Still Have A Clear Path To Retaking The Senate In 2024 – By Geoffrey Skelley (FiveThirtyEight) / Dec 7, 2022
Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia provides a small buffer for Democrats, but they still have a ton of vulnerable seats.
In a bit of electoral déjà vu, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock won Georgia’s runoff on Tuesday, almost two years after he won a special election runoff to help hand Democrats a narrow 50-50 majority in the Senate via Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote. This time around, Warnock topped Republican Herschel Walker to earn a full six-year term, which will have major ramifications for how the new Senate will conduct business in January. Warnock’s win gives Democrats 51 seats — including independent Sens. Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — so the Democratic caucus will no longer have to constantly rely on Harris to break ties. Democrats will also now have majorities on each committee and will be able to more easily confirm President Biden’s judicial appointments.
Yet if we look even further into the future, it turns out the Georgia outcome could also play a role in deciding which party controls the Senate after the next election. The good news for Democrats is that they will have 51 seats instead of 50, which gives them a chance to maintain control even if they lose one seat, depending on whether the next vice president is a Democrat or Republican. The good news for Republicans, however, is that the 2024 Senate map puts them in a better position to take control of the chamber than it does for Democrats to hold onto it.
Democrats have more than twice as many Senate seats to defend in 2024 as Republicans, an imbalance that gives the GOP a clear path to capturing the Senate — even if the Georgia result has given Democrats a little breathing room. At present, 34 Senate seats will be up for election,1 and of those, Democrats (including the independent senators who caucus with them) hold 23 to the GOP’s 11, as the table below shows.
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