This looks like a big blue wave — maybe a huge one. That’s no cause for despair just yet. But brace yourselves, because a bumpy ride might be coming.
I am a great believer in hope, and in the value of holding on to it even as the creeping sensation of doom approaches. Maybe I learned that as a Mets fan. So I am not here to crush your hopes for how tomorrow will go in the fight to control the Senate and stave off political process Armageddon in 2029–30. But the tidings are not good. You can catch up in my prior posts on my metric for organizing and analyzing the RealClearPolitics poll averages. The short summary:
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.
There’s been a rash of fresh polls in the final week across the major battlegrounds. The news may not be conclusive, but it is grim.
Polls can be wrong, but there are limits to how wrong they are apt to be — and you never want to be in the position of clinging to “the polls may be wrong” on the night before Election Day. That is precisely where Republicans are now in Senate races. They may feel good about Florida, but they have not quite closed the sale in should-be-safe states such as Nebraska and South Carolina. Ashley Hinson continues to cling to a stubbornly small lead in Iowa, but the trend in the rest of the state and the fact that she’s still below 47 percent does not bode well.
It gets uglier from there. The worst news is in Kansas, a state that looked like a long shot for Democrats until very late in the game and that now requires a leap of faith for Republicans. In Michigan, Maine, Texas, and Alaska, Democrats are polling just under 50 percent, and they have crossed that line in New Hampshire. There are still a number of ways that the prognosis could be wrong, but as of now, Republicans could be looking down the barrel of a net loss of six to nine Senate seats, only one of which (in Ohio) they will have an opportunity to reclaim within the next six years.
The trend lines look bad across the board. Only Montana and Alaska are in meaningfully better shape than where they were in mid-September, a general trend that confirms the numbers and the historic trends (when the president’s approval rating is in the toilet and the generic ballot is against his party). This looks like a big blue wave — maybe a huge one. That’s no cause for despair just yet. But brace yourselves, because a bumpy ride might be coming.