How the Campaigns Are Breaking Entering the Final Week

C atching up on crunching the numbers for the latest polling in the statewide midterm races for the Senate and the governorships, let’s update my method, described here and applied further here and here. The picture in the Senate is growing clearer on the margins than in the center, as we have a few polls clarifying which races aren’t on the table:

Oklahoma is off the board. Mike Lee leads by ten points in the latest Emerson poll, the first poll in this race by a big national pollster, and the first showing any candidate above 42 percent, which suggests that the prior Deseret News polls (the News is supportive of Evan McMullin) weren’t pushing people very hard to decide. Emerson is an A-rated pollster in the FiveThirtyEight rankings, and there’s little in the way of a prior track record for the Deseret News’s polling. (In 2010, its polls more or less called Mike Lee’s first victory, but also had a lot of undecideds. It doesn’t seem to have conducted polls in 2016). Eric Schmitt appears to have put Missouri away. Marco Rubio’s race is off the board, and the open-seat race in Alabama was finally polled, showing a 29-point lead for Katie Boyd Britt. By contrast, we still have sparse polling in Iowa, Kansas, Alaska, and Vermont.

In the headline races, there has been serious positive movement in favor of Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker, although not enough to really inspire great confidence except as part of a wider national shift that shows Republicans better off in a bunch of places than they were in mid September, and seemingly pulling away in Wisconsin and North Carolina — races that once inspired high Democratic hopes:

Then, the races for governor:

Here, too, fresh polls — such as Emerson’s polls showing a 19-point lead for Kirsti Noem and a relief-inducing nine-point lead for Kevin Stitt in South Dakota and Oklahoma, respectively — have taken some races off the board that we already knew were unlikely to be competitive. Here, too, there is a dearth of fresh polling in Iowa, Kansas, and Alaska, as well as Maine and Rhode Island:

Looking at the trend lines, Ron DeSantis has now blown the doors off of the Florida race. And even in the contests that were always going to be a blowout for one party or the other, there’s a subtle sign. Democratic candidates with big leads have mostly seen their races tighten by a few points, while Republicans with big leads have mostly stayed steady in the polls or gained even more ground:

So, where do we stand? Among the Republicans still locked in reasonably close races, nearly all of them have had to come from behind; Republicans who had non-trivial leads going into September have nearly all put away their races by now. I’m basically sorting the remaining races into two buckets: the Wave Surfers and the Beached Boats.

The Wave Surfers are the candidates who have closed the gap enough that they either (1) are currently ahead or effectively tied in the polls; or (2) have sufficient momentum and are close enough that they stand a good chance of being ahead or effectively tied in the polls on Election Day. Given the historical trends in midterm wave elections, and assuming that the polls are not systemically overestimating Republicans (which is possible, though not probable), we would expect all or almost all of these candidates to win without needing anything extraordinary to happen on Election Day.

In the Senate, the Wave Surfers are Ron Johnson, Ted Budd, J. D. Vance, Herschel Walker, Adam Laxalt, Dr. Oz, and Blake Masters. Johnson, Budd, and Vance look pretty locked-in by now. Walker might be the least likely of these candidates to win on Election Day, only because he needs to get to 50 percent of the vote (without which his race against Raphael Warnock goes to a runoff). Masters is the most likely to lose outright on Election Day, although the news that the Libertarian Party candidate has dropped out and endorsed Masters may give him some crucial help at the margin.

In the gubernatorial races, the Wave Surfers are Christine Drazan, Kari Lake, Joe Lombardo, Stitt, Derek Schmidt, and Tim Michels. Maybe you could persuade me with one more poll to slide Scott Jensen into this bracket.

The Beached Boat candidates are in a different boat, if you will. They have made up a lot of ground and unexpectedly turned their races into real contests. But by and large, they are likely to go into Election Day down anywhere from three to seven points. If we take the poll averages as accurate predictors of outcomes, these candidates would likely lose. But we’ve seen enough examples in recent years of polls’ underestimating Republicans, and enough of late-breaking wave-year dynamics, that it would be foolish to just write off the possibility that any of these candidates could pull an upset. They are, in essence, parked on the shore, hoping and waiting for a wave large enough to carry them out to sea.

In the Senate, the Beached Boat candidates are Don Bolduc, Tiffany Smiley, Joe O’Dea, and Gerald Malloy. Leora Levy in Connecticut stalled out too far away from her opponent to get into this category, and whether or not Tammy Duckworth is over 50 percent in the polls, Kathy Salvi is too far back to consider the possibility that she might upset Duckworth.

In the gubernatorial races, the Beached Boat candidates are Jensen, Mark Ronchetti, Tudor Dixon, Lee Zeldin, Ashley Kalus, Paul LePage, and maybe (if you squint really hard) Doug Mastriano. I don’t see Mastriano’s making it even with a very big high tide, and the same goes for Darren Bailey in Illinois and Bob Stefanowski in his Connecticut rematch with Ned Lamont. The wildest card in an unpolled open-seat race remains Republican Duke Aiona in Hawaii.

We will get more polls, maybe coming fast and furious, over the next week. But I strongly suspect that not many Republican candidates in those two categories will need to be reclassified between now and November 8.