2024 is going to be a tough year for the Democrats. For starters, they have to run Joe Biden as their presidential nominee. Imagine trying to make the case for voting for him again with his record — talk about tough. It's no mystery why Democrats tried to convince him not to seek a second term and desperately want someone else to carry the torch.
Of course, the Democrats' goals go beyond the control of the White House. While Democrats are seen as favored to win back control of the House, generic ballot polls show it could go either way. As for the Senate, Democrats have their work cut out for them. This is because they have to defend a larger number of seats, and several of those seats are in battleground states like Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, or red states like Ohio and Montana.
Perhaps the biggest indication that Democrats are worried about the Senate is the growing push for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire while Biden is still president and they still have the upper chamber majority. Some have predicted that if Republicans win control of the Senate in November, it may take several cycles before Democrats will realistically have a chance of winning in back. “After 2025, Democrats may not hold the White House and the Senate for a decade+," predicted Mark Joseph Stern, a senior writer for Slate. "This argument should be taken seriously.”
Even if Biden somehow manages to win in November, a Republican majority in the Senate will send his judicial nomination spree to a screeching halt and make it nearly impossible to seat another radical leftist on the Supreme Court. If Trump wins the presidency and the GOP wins the Senate, we'll undoubtedly see another conservative transformation of the judiciary. Older conservative justices like Clarance Thomas may take the opportunity to retire, ensuring the conservative majority on the court, and any liberal retirement could secure a 7-2 majority.
The most likely liberal justice to retire, of course, is Sonia Sotomayor. Nominated by Barack Obama, she's now 70 years old and has diabetes. According to recent reports, she travels with a medic. There's been tremendous pressure building up for her to retire soon, including from Democrats in the Senate, who aren't making a secret of their unease about control of the upper chamber after November.
Also for our VIPs: Is There Any Fracking Way Biden Can Win Pennsylvania?
"If you’re someone who even vaguely cares about progressive political outcomes — someone who would rather not see a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court even if you don’t agree with liberals on every issue — you should want Sotomayor to retire and be replaced by a younger liberal justice," writes Nate Silver. "And — here’s the mean part — if you don’t want that, you deserve what you get."
To be fair, Sotomayor might eventually be replaced by another liberal justice even if she doesn’t step down now. But this year’s Senate map is very bad for Democrats — they’re almost certain to lose West Virginia, where Joe Manchin is retiring, and they’re under threat of losing Montana, Ohio, Arizona and Nevada, along with other states; meanwhile, their only real pickup opportunities are in Texas and maybe Florida, and both are stretches.
Silver notes that prediction markets only give Democrats a 25% chance of keeping the Senate this year, and thus believes that Sotomayor should retire. Pushing for a Latina justice to retire is a tricky proposition for the identity-obsessed left, but when there's a Supreme Court seat on the line, and the prospects of a liberal majority on the court look bad for the next ten years or so, you can expect that pressure on Sotomayor to retire now will get stronger in the coming months. Whether she'll react to that pressure is a whole other question. She's expressed frustration with the conservative majority and may prefer to leave sooner rather than later.
She has also only been on the court for 15 years, which is just below the average of 16 years but well below the longest term served by Justice William O. Douglas of just over 36 years and 7 months. At this point, the only thing that is likely keeping Sotomayor on the bench is the hope of being able to make her mark on the high court, and doing so with harshly worded dissents may not be what she was hoping for.
