While the focus of the 2024 election has been largely trained on the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, downballot races will play a major role in how the next president — whoever it is — puts their agenda into action. Yahoo News Reporter Andrew Romano walks through the Senate races he’s watching as voters head to the polls.
Video Transcript
Here are the Senate races that I’ll be watching on election night.
Democrats currently have a 5149 majority over the Republicans and they basically already lost one of the seats they control West Virginia.
Joe Manchin is retiring.
That race is almost certain to be won by a Republican and that brings the count down to 5050.
And in that case, the vice president of the United States, whoever it is after the election would cast the tiebreaking vote.
The problem is for Democrats that they’re endangered in a couple of other seats as well.
The big one to watch is Montana Democrat, Jon Tester has been in office for many, many years.
He has a strong challenger in Tim.
She, if one of them is going to go for Republicans, that’s probably going to be the first one.
The other problem for Democrats is they’re playing defense across some key battleground states where they have incumbents Wisconsin Nevada.
Pennsylvania polls have showed leads for these incumbents but anything can happen on election day.
The bigger risk is probably in Ohio where long time Senator Sherrod Brown is in the race of his life against Republican Bernie Moreno, that could be another seat that Democrats lose.
But Democrats do have a chance to potentially pick up Republican seats.
The places to watch are Texas where Ted Cruz is defending his senate seat and Florida, where Rick Scott is defending his seat.
But as usual, we have to wait for the results to know what will really happen.