The prognosis for Republicans is fairly optimistic, but the big four races remain very much up in the air, joined by a surprising fifth, New Hampshire.
Earlier today, I updated my layout of the status of the races for governor as of all the polls in through the end of Friday, in the same format I’ve used this fall. Now, let’s look at the Senate races. The prognosis for Republicans is fairly optimistic, but the big four races remain very much up in the air — Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona — joined by the surprising fifth, New Hampshire:
Tiffany Smiley and Joe O’Dea remain in the same category I used previously: the Beached Boat candidates, parked on the shore in hopes that a wave comes in big enough to carry them out to sea. It’s easy enough to conjure an optimistic scenario in which one or both of them win, but we should remain realistic that this is a best-case, not most-likely, scenario.
As for the tight races, Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz both hold razor-thin leads, but Walker will need to overperform his in order to avoid a runoff (it appears unlikely that Warnock can win without a runoff).
Looking at the trendlines, we see a much more uniform swing so far in the Senate races than the gubernatorial races. The only two races in which Republicans have lost a non-trivial amount of ground since mid-September are in Iowa (and the latest Des Moines Register poll just dropped showing Grassley up twelve points, so that race isn’t actually bucking the trend) and Vermont (in which there were nearly two months between the two polls).