While there is reason for some Republican optimism, it depends heavily on the gravitational pull of the presidential race.
Every two years, when I look at the fall polling in Senate races, I use the same basic framework, which I explained here and here:
First, I note that mid-September polls are typically not the last word in these races, which tend to move in a wave direction nationally, either in the direction of reflecting toward the president’s approval rating (in midterm years) or with the presidential race (in presidential years). Second, I look at the RealClearPolitics poll averages 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. I typically also 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.
My approach is, I stress, a metric, not a model. 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 the current polling, and drawing from that some conclusions about what races are most winnable if one party or the other has the wind in its favor. There are mathematical models that will get you a more precise way of doing the same thing, but we should all remain skeptical about the illusion of certainty produced by putting those kinds of numbers on what amounts to educated guesswork. The biggest problem is that history can inform our reading of polls, but the methodology of polling is such a moving target that every time you think you understand it, it’s already changed on you.
With that preliminary, here is where the Senate polling stands as of today:
We’re now starting to get to the point where we have reasonably regular and current polling in almost every race that seems competitive. The only race with neither candidate polling at or above 50 percent that hasn’t been polled in the past month is New Jersey, where we’re still stuck with a single poll from April (that’s why I left it off the graph at the top of this post). We finally got a new poll in Washington since the last time I ran these numbers on September 19, which properly resulted in that race sliding into uncompetitive territory. The one race that has attracted coverage but no independent polling is Nebraska, where “independent” Dan Osborn has received some hype and some good results from partisan polls against Deb Fischer. (Jim Geraghty has offered skepticism here and here about that race, which seems headed in the same trajectory as Greg Orman’s “independent” race against Pat Roberts in Kansas in 2014, which Roberts ended up winning by double digits.)
The first thing that really jumps off the page is how few really tight races there are this year. In every single race, there’s a clear front-runner. Michigan has the only Senate race with less than a two-point lead (Elissa Slotkin is up by 1.9 points over Mike Rogers); there’s only one other race separated by less than three points (in Ohio) and two others separated by less than four (in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, although Tammy Baldwin’s 3.9-point lead is only a little tighter than Rick Scott’s four-point lead in Florida). Jon Tester may be a hard target historically who has pulled upsets before, but with Tim Sheehy up seven points and above 51 percent, that’s the only reason to think Montana is still a real race.
Realistically, the Senate map right now is just those four races, three in the states most hotly contested at the presidential level (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), and one (Ohio) in a state where Donald Trump and his Ohioan running mate are going to win easily. That doesn’t mean anyone should totally tune out the other races. Scott and Ted Cruz are going to need to run through the tape, as both of them have done in prior nail-biter races, and it would be imprudent for Fischer not to take the Osborn threat seriously. At the other end of the spectrum, given the history of Nevada polling, it’s possible to conceive a scenario where Sam Brown still pulls an upset. But all of those are increasingly long shots. If none of the long shots come in, and if the four Midwestern races tighten further, we are looking at a 51-45 Republican Senate and four tossups. If you’re Senate Republicans, that suddenly is not such a bad place to be.
If we look at how the polling has shifted over the past three weeks since I last did this exercise, there is reason for some Republican optimism, but it depends heavily on the gravitational pull of the presidential race – which itself remains a very near-run thing:
Of the six races that have shifted by a point or more, net, in the GOP’s favor, three (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada) are swing states where the Republican has become more competitive, and two (Montana and Ohio) are red states with embattled Democratic incumbents. The other is California, where the increasing tempo of House races is enough to consolidate what remains of the state’s Republican vote behind Steve Garvey. The one significant move has been Michigan, where Mike Rogers now looks as if he might make a very real race of this down the stretch after having been five points in the hole less than a month ago.
Aside from Washington, which again is a feature of only now having fresh polling, three races have shifted a point or more, net, to the Democrats. The two big moves are opposite stories: Larry Hogan is getting taken out by the tide of a blue state, while Kari Lake is blowing what should have been a winnable race. She’s now seven points behind Ruben Gallego in a state where Trump currently leads 48.4 percent to 47.4 percent. The other race that has moved a little over a point bluer in the past three weeks is Texas, which followed a similar trajectory along the way to Cruz’s 2.6-point win over Beto O’Rourke in 2018.
I suspect that Lake should end up a little closer than where she is now; for all of her flaws, it’s hard to see what sort of voter would find her a bridge too far and yet vote for Trump. But there are apparently quite a lot of those voters. A look at the crosstabs for the latest New York Times/Siena poll of Arizona, in which Trump leads Kamala Harris 51 percent to 46 percent while Lake trails Gallego 41 percent to 48 percent, gives us a hint, and it’s all kinds of voters. Look at the list of groups with whom Trump runs double digits better than Lake — she’s struggling worst with Republicans but also with young voters, and her weakness even compared with Trump shows up across the board with voters of every stripe. Even if some of that spread represents the difference between Kamala Harris and Ruben Gallego as well, it’s a reminder what a terrible candidate Lake is.
With three more weeks to go, expect that we have not seen the last break in these races.