Chris Crucial: The Senate map takes a turn for the worse for Democrats ⬇️

PLUS: The Trump hush money trial will go on!

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1. The Senate map: It was always going to be tough for Democrats to keep control of the Senate majority in the 2024 election.

The numbers alone are daunting: Democrats have to defend 23 seats while Republicans have just 11 of their own seats on the ballot.

But dig into the states and the problems for Democrats become even more clear. They are trying to hold three states (West Virginia, Ohio and Montana) that Donald Trump won in 2020 — and will undoubtedly win again in 2024. There are another 5 states — Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada — where the 2020 presidential race was extremely close.

What Democrats need to do then is to start taking some of those second-tier races off the board, making them less competitive so that they can concentrate on winning the toughest fights in Ohio and Montana. (West Virginia is a lost cause. Republicans will win that state — likely in the form of Gov. Jim Justice.)

The opposite of that happened Wednesday when the Cook Political Report with Amy Water, a prominent political handicapping site, moved the Nevada Senate race from “lean Democratic” to “Toss Up.”