How the Campaigns Are Breaking, Two Weeks Out

L ast week, I looked at how the races for Senate and the governorships were breaking, using a rough metric to measure late movement in wave elections that I explained in the column on the Senate races.

Let’s take a look, two weeks from Election Day, at where things stand, using the polling in the RealClearPolitics poll averages through Tuesday.

There are still a number of sparsely polled Senate races that are probably not as close as they look (or, in the case of Vermont, potentially closer), but the overall picture continues to shift in favor of Republicans. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin is starting to look like a candidate who has put it out of reach, especially given how relentlessly polls in recent years have underestimated Republicans in general and Johnson in particular in Wisconsin. North Carolina and Ohio appear ready to slide off the board as well for Democrats.

At this point, I am putting the Senate races in tiers, assuming (maybe optimistically) that Johnson, Ted Budd, and J. D. Vance win and that there are no downside surprises in places such as Utah or Iowa. The seat likeliest to get Republicans to 50 (where they are already) is Nevada, in which Adam Laxalt has a steady but modest lead. The 51st and 52nd seats, which depend upon a modest final break in the Republican direction, would be in Georgia and Pennsylvania. In both races, Republicans have flawed candidates who are busting their tails and hoping for help from the environment. The 53rd seat, at the outer limit of realistic expectations, is Arizona, which is just outside of the core battleground zone: Based on the current poll averages, Blake Masters needs 61.5 percent of undecided voters to break in his direction over the final two weeks. That is eminently possible.

It’s after Masters that Republican hopes for the 54th or 55th seats get very speculative. A very big wave indeed will be needed to bring in Joe O’Dea in Colorado and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire — big, but within the realm of historic precedents. National Republicans are now putting money back into Bolduc’s race, just in case things turn out that well.

56 or more seats is in “Hey, anything can happen” territory. Washington and Vermont would be the likeliest places for a truly enormous shocker, followed by Connecticut. It is hard to look at the rest of the list and come up with even a daydreamer’s chance. But realistically, given this playing field, 53 seats would be a very big win, and anything beyond that would be as impressive as 2014, when Republicans gained nine seats.

That’s the state of play. What about the trends? Among the races polled in the past week, only Washington is in meaningfully weaker shape than it was in mid September, while there has been significant movement in the Republican direction in Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New Hampshire, among seriously contested races, plus Connecticut. Masters and O’Dea have seen their prospects improve only mildly.

Let’s turn to the campaigns for governor:

The governors’ races have seen more late-breaking action as more campaigns tighten.

Here, again, we have some races such as South Dakota and Kansas that are very weakly polled, but also a bunch of races that suddenly look competitive, those being suddenly embattled incumbents in Minnesota, Michigan, New Mexico, and New York. I have to wonder if Kathy Hochul, as an appointed governor without a strong profile of her own, is now regretting spending nearly all of her advertising budget raising Lee Zeldin’s name recognition with negative ads, and nearly none of it introducing herself to her state’s voters. But the commonality of the trend across these states — even against opponents such as Tudor Dixon, who have little money and are just starting to run ads — suggests that this is all just the tide coming in. Don’t be surprised if we get a poll showing the same thing is happening in Rhode Island.

One interesting dynamic: If there are two incumbents in the Senate and governors races that have Republicans sweating a bit in lightly polled races, they would be Kevin Stitt and Mike Lee. What do they have in common? Neither is facing a candidate running openly as a faithful Democrat. Stitt’s opponent is a lifelong Republican who only just switched parties and brands herself as a conservative, and Lee’s opponent, Evan McMullin, introduced himself to the country as a conservative and claims to be an independent. Maybe Democrats should have tried running more candidates who can claim to have nothing to do with their unpopular party, their unpopular president, or their unpopular agenda.

As far as the trends are concerned, those Democratic incumbents stick out, but so does Ron DeSantis, who looked stalled for a bit in the polls simply because nobody was polling that race after one or two polls favorable to Charlie Crist. DeSantis is now over 50 percent, while Crist is sagging to a double-digit deficit. The Greg Abbott–Beto O’Rourke contest in Texas is telling a similar story at a smaller scale.

The red wave is coming. The question is simply how high the tide rises.