Republicans are still in bad shape, but the blue wave hasn’t swept them out to sea just yet.
There are a few bits of good news for Republicans in the polling.
I t’s time once again to update my look at the Senate polls a week before Election Day. Republicans are still in bad shape, but the blue wave hasn’t swept them out to sea just yet.
I last looked at the Senate on October 13. I kicked off this series on September 17 with an explanation of my metric for organizing and analyzing the RealClearPolitics poll averages (which are free thus far of fraudulent polls). To summarize here:
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 10/12” 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.
We are finally getting some fairly robust polling. We now have polls in two more races (South Dakota and Alabama) that hadn’t been polled the last time I reviewed the situation. With the conspicuous exception of Nebraska, every state with anything like a contested race has been polled with at least one poll that was still in the field after October 12, and only two other major battleground races (Kansas and South Carolina) have fewer than three fresh polls. With those preliminaries out of the way, here’s the lay of the land:
There are a few bits of good news for Republicans here, or at least postponement of bad news.
First, in years past, we have seen the candidates who are leading and have the wind of the national environment at their backs creep steadily closer to the magic 50 percent mark. That’s happening more slowly this year than usual, suggesting that voters still don’t think much of the Democrats and are swallowing hard before committing to them outside of the routs in Georgia and North Carolina. New Hampshire is the one state where that process appears to be racing forward at the usual pace, suggesting that John Sununu will probably be left in the dust in a race Republicans might have counted as a sleeper pickup in a less dismal environment.
Second, there’s still one toss-up race, in Iowa, where the Republican (Ashley Hinson) continues to cling stubbornly to a very narrow lead, and two other races on the board (in Montana and Florida) where Republicans seem to have put away the contest. Hinson, however, is still stuck barely above 46 percent, with her party’s nominee for governor already given up for dead. With North Carolina a lost cause, any scenario where Republicans keep the Senate is likely to require Hinson hanging on, along with holding the line in Nebraska, Kansas, and South Carolina.
If you’re looking at trends within the averages (or just grasping at straws for hope), Susan Collins has been tied in two of the last three polls in Maine, and Ken Paxton has been tied in two of the last four polls in Texas. Sherrod Brown in Ohio has cracked 50 percent in only one of the nine polls in the average, two of which show Jon Husted leading. That’s another race where the ongoing implosion of Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor could be the last straw for Husted. In Minnesota, a race that has proven competitive because of the statewide woes of Tim Walz’s scandal-ridden party, there are signs that Peggy Flanagan may finally be getting Democrats to fall in line, as the last two polls both had her at 48 percent.
With their hopes to gain a seat fading in New Hampshire and one lost seat in the bag in North Carolina, unless Republicans can pick up Michigan and/or Minnesota, that means that they cannot afford to lose more than two of the remaining Republican-held seats. If Ohio slides off the board, that margin drops to one. That means surviving the surprise challenges in Kansas, Nebraska, and South Carolina and winning at least three out of four of Maine, Alaska, Iowa, and Texas.
If we look at the trends since mid-September, only five races have seen a really large shift, and three of those (Arkansas, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts) are not actually competitive. In the other two, in Kansas and Montana, we may just be looking at races that weren’t adequately polled in mid-September. So the shifts have been comparatively modest. Otherwise, the two biggest moves in the Democrats’ column are in New Hampshire and North Carolina, the latter of which has been a blowout for a long time now. Florida has tightened a bit, reflecting the national environment and Angie Nixon’s having great gobs of money to spend, but it will be a big surprise if Ashley Moody has to sweat that race out on Election Night. On the other hand, Susan Collins and Dan Sullivan are still tenaciously hanging in there. Given the speed of vote-counting in Alaska, the fate of the Senate could easily end up unknown until well after Election Day.
What remains is a picture of campaigns that are still between the 40-yard lines, albeit with Democrats mostly closer to the end zone. It’s not hard to paint optimistic scenarios for Republicans when things are still this close this near to the end, given what we know historically about potential polling errors. But then, we should also remember the wise words of Red from The Shawshank Redemption: “Hope is a dangerous thing.” The more races still hold out hope, the larger the potential is for heartbreak on and after November 3.