I don’t want to go poll by poll. You know where to find them. But we have new and pretty bullish new poll data in the battle for the Senate. (Yes, they’re just polls. They can be wrong and all that.) A bunch of polls have come out in the last 48 hours, including two high quality ones (CNN and NYT/Siena). Both show pretty substantial leads for Democrats in key Senate races.
Here are some general observations.
I jest, a bit, in the title. As I’ve told you several times, friends don’t let friends watch the early vote. But there’s one thing I want to point your attention to. I’ll explain in a moment why this leaves me mainly consistent.
There’s one thing that seems to be showing up fairly consistently across the country and particularly in the Deep South. That is a high proportion of generally younger, non-regular Democratic voters. And they tend to be less white, relative to the rest of the electorate. In a number of Deep South states you’re seeing high turnout for non-regular Democratic voters which in states like Mississippi for instance means mostly Black voters.
Very much a feature of this moment that while Donald Trump is spending resources to upend the constitutional order he’s also expending resources on weird personal fetishes, like in this case a maniacal need to refurb a semi-run-down but comfy and convenient local D.C. golf course.
As we get ready for the final days of the 2026 midterm campaign, I wanted to flag some key parts of our coverage. First, don’t miss our midterms liveblog which you can find on the front page and also at this link. We’re starting with a focus on election interference issues and then we’ll shift toward broader Election Day news and results as we move into next week. Next, the TPM team has done a comprehensive analysis of just who certifies election results in each of the Senate swing states and what funny business they can pull. You can see that here. We also have our take on which 13 races we think will define the midterms, which you can read here. Finally, join us here Tuesday night. For the first time we’re going to be doing live video coverage of election night. Think of it as comparable to what you might see on CNN or MS NOW but with more insight about how to understand the results, what’s happening in key counties and precincts rather than just the toplines and just TPM level analysis. I hope you’ll join us.
Axios reports on a new private GOP poll conducted in the aftermath of Vivek Ramaswamy’s decision to run his ad questioning his opponent’s having been raped by her stepfather when she was 12. It shows Ramaswamy falling to 8 points behind Amy Acton compared to 2 points behind in a poll conducted by the same pollster a month ago. The poll found that 86% of respondents had heard of the ad and by a 2 to 1 margin those said the ad made them more likely to vote for Acton.
Ramaswamy has always been an especially Trumpy character in the sense of leaning — both in his actions and how he describes his actions — into transgressive verging on sociopathic behavior as a signifier of Republicanness or Trumpiness. Indeed, when he released this ad he said explicitly that he was sending a message that he was ready to break rules and conventions in the context of Ohio politics just as Trump had at the federal level. All of this comes under the headline of being, as the phrase goes, “extremely online” and shaped by the aesthetics, mores and instincts of online trolling.
That’s a remarkable and a remarkably frank expression of MAGA politics and aesthetics. The problem, however, is that Ramaswamy is not Donald Trump. What’s most notable about this episode is that lots of fellow Republicans appear to have warned him not to do this — not because of some subjective sense of decency but because it seemed so obviously self-destructive. I’ve thought from the beginning that this ad might not only backfire on Ramaswamy but possibly pull down the whole ticket. Ohio has very Trumpy demographics. It’s the kind of state where, if there’s going to be a GOP-underestimating polling error, you’d expect it to be particularly pronounced. Sherrod Brown — who, remember, is a semi-incumbent — has had a very steady if modest lead for months. He’s currently about three points ahead on average. So this ad, a performance of bad personhood, could end up making a difference in that race too.
This is the weekly, free edition of The Backchannel. If you’d like to receive the free edition of The Backchannel in your inbox, you can subscribe here.
Here’s a brief follow up on yesterday’s Israeli election now that the actual vote count and results are coming into view. We began with exit polls suggesting that the “change” bloc had secured slightly more seats than the Netanyahu bloc — 52 to 50 seats — with the two Arab parties getting a historically high 18 or 19 seats. Then the exits started to shift to the Netanyahu bloc and Likud officials were claiming he had been dramatically underestimated and would get upwards of 60 seat and perhaps even a majority. The actual results were lopsided in Netanyahu’s direction but as they’ve been counted they’ve trended down. Now with 86% of the vote counted it’s down to 53 seats Netanyahu bloc, 48 for the “change” bloc and 19 for the two Arab parties. If the trend continues, the Netanyahu bloc might fall one or two seats lower but I have no insight whether the votes that remain will continue that downward trend.
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
