For the GOP, Senate prospects look good, but polls show that the House is likely to fall to Democrats.
The upcoming 2018 midterm looks to be a strange one. Increasingly, it looks as though Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives. The newly released 538 predictive model gives them a better than 80 percent chance of success. This is due to increased liberal enthusiasm, soft support for President Donald Trump in typically Republican suburbs, and strong Democratic candidates in key races.
The battle for the Senate, on the other hand, might as well be occurring in an alternative universe. Democrats have a hard job to take control of the Senate, for two reasons. First of all, they have to defend seats in several reliably Republican states — notably North Dakota, West Virginia, Montana, and Indiana. In all of these places, support for the president is much stronger than it is in states with vulnerable GOP House seats. Second, Democrats have to defeat at least one Republican in a solidly Republican state.
The top targets on the latter front have been Tennessee and Arizona. Tennessee is one of the most rock-ribbed Republican bastions in the country, but the Democrats have nominated former two-term governor Phil Bredesen, a man with bipartisan appeal. Arizona, on the other hand, seems a little shaky in its Republicanism, at least of late. Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there in 2016, but by a relatively narrow margin of just four points. Over the past decade, the GOP’s margin in Arizona presidential elections has been closer to ten points.
Still, it would be no little feat for Democrats to snag these two states. They would have to convince some very traditionally Republican voters to do something they do not often do: cross the aisle and vote for Democrats.
The polling over the summer suggested that this might very well happen, and no doubt it might. Nevertheless, recent data should reinforce just how tough this will be, for it looks as though Republican voters are starting to come home to the GOP.
In Arizona, an OH Predictive Insights poll, taken at the beginning of the month, found that Republican Martha McSally, who is facing off against Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, had improved her standing among voters age 55–64 by a net of 19 points compared with her showing in a July poll; she has improved among voters with bachelor degrees by a net of 19 points. In Arizona, voters such as these have been the backbone of the Republican party. Similarly, a Gravis poll taken in July found McSally winning just 66 percent of self-identified Republicans, but in its poll last week, she was hauling in 86 percent of Republicans.
As for Tennessee, a Gravis poll from last December found Marsha Blackburn with just 68 percent support from Republicans, but in one taken in mid-August, that number had shot up to 86 percent.
The improvement for Blackburn and McSally has been good enough for both Tennessee and Arizona to move in the GOP direction in the RealClearPolitics polling averages.
To be certain, neither McSally nor Blackburn is out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. It is one thing to bring the solid Republicans home and quite another to lure in the soft Republicans, who will make or break both candidates. And their leads in the polling averages are very slight. McSally edges Sinema by just 0.3 percent and was found trailing by three points in a Fox News poll released earlier this week. Meanwhile, Blackburn still trails Bredesen by 0.3 percent, even though the last few polls have been more favorable to her.
All four Senate candidates — Blackburn and Bredesen in Tennessee, and McSalley and Sinema in Arizona — remain stuck in the mid-40s in terms of public support at the moment. The swing voters have not yet indicated which way they are going to go.
So these races remain too close to call, and the recent shifts in voter impressions do not alter that fact. What they should remind us of is that these states are still basically Republican in their political orientations. Democrats Bredesen and Sinema will need to persuade GOP voters to abandon their party, while McSally and Blackburn will need to bring them home.