The headline Senate races have tightened, and the battlefield has widened. That means there is hope — and even more peril — for Republicans.
The headline Senate races have tightened, and the battlefield has widened. That means there is hope, but also a lot more peril, for Republicans.
I t’s time to check in again on the Senate races. The good news is that the bottom has not dropped out for Republicans, with a few key races having tightened. The bad news is that few Republican candidates are close to victory, and new contested races keep coming on the board.
I began my periodic review of the Senate polling in mid-September. I will repeat here my explanation of my methodology:
Each election cycle since the 2014 midterms, I’ve used a metric for tracking statewide races for the Senate and the governorships that I’ve come to call the Breakers. This isn’t a predictive model, just some simple algebra applied to the RealClearPolitics poll averages over time to track where these races are headed and what the Republicans need to win each one . . .
For the polling averages, I look at the RealClearPolitics average for each race with particular attention to how far each candidate is from the magic 50 percent mark and what share of the remaining undecided vote would need to break in the Republican candidate’s direction to get to 50. (Or to 50 percent of the two-party vote, if there are third-party candidates being polled.) I typically flag how robust the data are for each race — how many polls make up each state’s average, and how many of those are relatively recent. I’m not making mathematical predictions or odds. I’m just collecting the data we have in one place, asking how much room there remains to move based on current polling, and drawing some conclusions about what races are most winnable if one party or the other has the wind in its favor.
“Last Poll” and my tracking of “Post 9/1” polls both use the last day a poll was in the field. Also, I’m using the final-outcome polling in Alaska and Maine, both of which have ranked-choice voting systems and, in Alaska, multiple candidates (including a guy named Dan Sullivan running as a “Republican” in Alaska solely to confuse voters and siphon votes away from incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan). Incumbents are in bold, and states are colored by 2024 results. “Break” shows what percentage of the remaining voters would need to break to the Republican candidate to win.
All of this assumes that the polls are, if not entirely reliable, at least in the ballpark of being accurate. More on that below, but as I detailed last time around, it is by no means the case that polls have been systematically biased in favor of Democrats. In the last midterm cycle, in 2022, they did the opposite.
Here’s where all the Senate races stand. There are still 16 races that haven’t been polled, three without robust enough polling for an average, and three others that haven’t been polled this month. In terms of the available polling data in the rest, we now have much more fresh polling than we did a month ago. Some of that, of course, is coming from pollsters with minimal or dubious track records.
And here’s the trendline since last month:
There’s some good news here for the GOP. Montana now looks fairly safe, as Democrats’ strategy of recruiting an “independent” candidate in Seth Bodnar has blown up in their face because the Democratic nominee, Alani Bankhead, has refused to drop out of the race, splitting the opposition vote neatly in half and leaving Kurt Alme firmly in command of the contest to replace the retiring Steve Daines, even though he has only a half-point lead over the combined Bodnar/Bankhead vote. If one of them was running in single digits, voters might abandon the third-place candidate, but it’s really hard to coordinate that sort of thing this late. Republicans need to keep spending money in Montana because it’s an open seat in a state that has been unpredictable before, but Alme looks pretty safe and has pulled much further ahead than he was a month ago.
The three races that have moved in the Republican direction by a net shift of at least half a point are in Minnesota, Maine, and Alaska.
Minnesota may frustrate Republicans this year. While statewide conditions are clearly very favorable due to the scandals that consumed Tim Walz, the fact that Amy Klobuchar had to parachute into the governor’s race to salvage the mess while Walz’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, runs for retiring Tina Smith’s Senate seat, and Republicans got the statewide slate they wanted in former sportscaster Michele Tafoya and state house speaker Lisa Demuth. But the national environment and Minnesota’s blue lean will make this a very hard sale for Tafoya to close. Even with the race drawing closer, she’s still just over 43 percent, which is a ways from the finish line. Another state where Republican optimism will likely reckon with disappointment is in New Hampshire, a sleeper race with a good candidate in John Sununu and a strong ticket-topper in governor Kelly Ayotte, but polling that hangs just out of reach.
Maine and Alaska have a few things in common: battle-hardened Republican incumbents, a history of unreliable polls, an eccentric ranked-choice voting system, and somewhat mediocre and untested Democratic candidates. Mary Peltola in Alaska has never won a statewide race that wasn’t against a past-her-prime Sarah Palin, and she’s taken some unanticipated friendly fire from the New York Times. My “Breakers” metric still has both Susan Collins and Dan Sullivan needing more than 60 percent of the outstanding vote to break their way — the line at which I mark the races in purple and classify them as de facto tossups — but given their strength as candidates and everything that goes into making sense of the polls in their states, they are both very much in the hunt.
There’s also a fairly long recent history of polls undercounting Republicans in Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio, as CNN’s Harry Enten has observed. Democrats must win at least two of those races to claim the Senate. But the voters that polls have missed in the past might not be as strongly pro-Trump this time. The polls thus far tell the story of softer Republican support among rural voters in the Rust Belt, Upper Midwest, and Great Plains states: that’s why we’re talking not only about Ohio and Iowa being on the table but also suddenly competitive polling in Kansas and Nebraska. Farmers, after all, have been hit hard both by trade wars that hurt their export crops and by rising fuel prices that hit a key component of the cost structure of modern agriculture.
I don’t actually expect Nebraska to be as close as the spotty polling would suggest. But it’s very likely to be a lot closer than we’ve seen in the Cornhusker State in the past. If we get more polling showing a race this close, it will be time to get alarmed. The widening battlefield is also apparent in South Carolina, where a weak Republican candidate in Darline Graham is beginning to look seriously vulnerable. If the dominoes start falling, she could go with them. Neighboring North Carolina is basically wrapped up already, with that race having fallen off the cliff after Donald Trump goaded incumbent Thom Tillis into retiring.
If there’s a global concern for Republicans as you look across the contested races, it’s that Ashley Moody in Florida is the only Republican candidate above 48 percent (or even 47.5 percent, if we’re splitting decimals). That means nobody else is all that close to closing a sale with voters, so even a modest late shift in the Democrats’ favor could swamp nearly every race that’s in play. And that kind of shift is quite common in years that feature the sort of wave dynamic suggested by Trump’s catastrophically low approval rating (at this writing, 21.4 points underwater, with 38.1 percent approving and 59.5 percent disapproving) and Democrats leading by more than eight points in the generic ballot, 50.4 percent to 42.1 percent.
The blue wave’s dimensions are yet undetermined, but even if the waters seem slightly calmer for now, don’t be surprised if many Republicans ultimately find themselves out to sea.