How the Races Are Breaking, Thursday Morning Edition

I’ve been following the status of the polls for the Senate and governors’ races (using a method described here), and more are coming in by the hour. I will do at least one more fuller roundup in the next few days, but here is a quick update as of this morning:

In the Senate races, we had one race come off the board that was not a big shocker: The first poll in seven weeks in Vermont shows Democrat Peter Welch with the race well in hand. With an open seat race in a small TV market, Vermont was worth a shot by Republicans, but even with Governor Phil Scott walking away with reelection, it was always going to be a long shot even in the best Republican year. At the other end of the scale, Eric Schmitt, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Ted Budd all look to be putting their races out of reach, while it’s been a while since we had a poll in Iowa.

My last column divided the Republican hopefuls into “Wave Surfers” who stood positioned to at least draw even by Election Day in the public polls, and “Beached Boats” who were just trying to get in range enough that a shock-the-polls upset was plausible. Already, just in two days, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire has moved into the Wave Surfer category, as he is now just 0.5 points down in the RealClearPolitics poll average, almost as close as Dr. Oz, who is down 0.2 percent. That leaves Tiffany Smiley and Joe O’Dea in the Beached Boat category.

In the governors’ races, less has changed, although a new Emerson poll in Kansas shows that Laura Kelly continues to cling to a three-point lead, while Kevin Stitt in neighboring Oklahoma is now in healthier shape, if not entirely out of the woods. Kari Lake no longer seems to be pulling away, although she does retain a persistent lead in Arizona, and Joe Lombardo in Nevada is not that far behind in his race. Tim Michels is now leading in Wisconsin, a state where polls have tended to badly underestimate Republicans in recent years. I’d still like to see another poll of Rhode Island, or even one poll of Hawaii, to know where things stand there. The Beached Boat category is larger in the governors’ races: Mark Ronchetti, Scott Jensen, Ashley Kalus, Tudor Dixon, Lee Zeldin, and Paul LePage. If it’s a big Republican night, several of those could win, but they all remain underdogs.

One traditional rule of thumb is that incumbents, with their advantages of name recognition and the rest, should be worried if they are polling below 50 percent going into the election. That obviously applies more strongly to incumbents from the party on the losing side of a wave election. There’s quite a few Democratic incumbents in that boat now:

By contrast, only three Republicans are currently polling below 50 percent: Stitt, Mike Lee, and Chuck Grassley. Both Stitt and Lee are over 50 in the most recent polls, and Grassley’s race hasn’t been polled since October 12. I’d put money right now on every Republican incumbent winning, with the unknowable exception of Lisa Murkowski, who is being challenged by a more conservative Republican. I don’t think too many of even the most optimistic Democrats would say the same right now for their incumbents.