February 26, 2016 04:17 PM UTC

Breaking the Seal of Inevitability

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• by: Colorado Pols

When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced today that he would endorse Donald Trump for President, the entire 2016 election cycle flipped upside down.

You could make a case that this was already happening — Trump has been steadily rising toward the Republican Presidential nomination for some time now — but Christie’s endorsement broke the seal of inevitability. Until today, Republicans still held out some hope that someone like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio could preserve a measure of control at the top of the GOP ticket; just last night, the conservative media had been working feverishly to give Rubio one last shove forward before Super Tuesday, declaring emphatically that he had wounded Trump during the GOP debate in Houston.

None of that matters now.

Trump emerged victorious in the last three early-voting states (New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada), but his candidacy still seemed more like a “what if” proposition at the beginning of this week. The real change began on Wednesday, when Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and Chris Collins (R-NY) became the first sitting Members of Congress to publicly back Trump for President, but the bombshell was Christie’s endorsement. Set aside the name ‘Chris Christie’ for a moment, because it’s not his name that matters; Christie is the Governor of New Jersey and, until recently, a Presidential candidate himself. Trump needed someone with Christie’s credentials to break through the front lines of the GOP establishment to give his campaign a legitimacy that social media and fawning press coverage could not do on their own.

Politics is all about perception, and Christie’s endorsement in effect brought Trump into the fold of the Republican Party. It was as much a submission as an endorsement from a term-limited Governor with little to lose (from a strategic political perspective, it made a lot of sense for Christie to be the first big name into the Trump pool, but that’s a story for another time).

Republicans now face a difficult set of choices ahead. Some will continue to lament the Trump phenomenon, but that seems like an historical argument for another time. There is another pressing problem beyond the White House for Republicans, who are rightly nervous about their chances of maintaining control of the U.S. Senate.

Democrats need to win back just five Senate seats in order to regain control of the top chamber of Congress. Democrats have an inherent advantage in 2016 in that they only need to defend 10 incumbents — among them Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Denver) — while Republicans have 24 incumbents that they must protect. Numerous polls have shown that a hypothetical Trump candidacy would be devastating for the rest of the Republican ticket, and now that Trump’s nomination seems all but inevitable, GOP strategists will need to take a new look at their big board for 2016.

Senate Republicans were already going to be hampered in 2016 after their distasteful response to filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and Democrats will no doubt benefit from this disarray. But Trump ups the ante. For Republicans, trying to win back Bennet’s Senate seat seems like a luxury that they can no longer afford. Take a look at how the Rothenberg & Gonzalez Political Report ranks the 2016 Senate seats:

♦ Three Senate seats are considered to be toss-up races at this point: Florida (R), Wisconsin (R), and Nevada (D).

♦ One seat is listed as “Toss-Up/Tilt Democrat” (Illinois), where Sen. Mark Kirk has been considered a “dead man walking” for more than a year now.

♦ The Colorado seat is listed as “Lean Democrat,” and eight other Senate seats are currently considered “Safe Democrat.”

♦ Republican Senate seats in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are labeled as “Toss-Up/Tilt Republican,” and two other GOP seats in North Carolina and Ohio are listed “Lean Republican.”

All told, that’s 7 Senate seats that Republicans should be nervous about retaining. Democrats, conversely, have only 2 such seats on the brink. If Democrats can hold both of those seats, they need only flip 5 of the 7 at-play Republican seats in order to regain control of the U.S. Senate.

Republicans desperately want to win back the White House in 2016, but the odds don’t look good in a hypothetical matchup between Trump and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. The real disaster for the GOP would be failing to re-take the Presidency and losing control of the U.S. Senate. If you are a Republican decision-maker, how would you allocate your resources? Do you direct the majority of those resources toward Trump? Do you spend $20 million trying to knock out Bennet when that money could make the difference in saving a handful of incumbents and retaining control of the Senate?

The 2016 election changed significantly today — for a lot of candidates around the country. If Trump performs well in Texas on Tuesday and in Florida the following week, he will essentially end the campaigns of Cruz and Rubio, respectively. The GOP has two weeks to figure out what it is going to do next.