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.
The one place where Republicans can have some optimism is in Iowa. Democrat Josh Turek could easily win. He even has a nominal lead in the polling averages. But this is a tie race. And relative to what we’ve seen in much redder states, Republican Ashley Hinson, who I think is an objectively good candidate in a very bad environment, has at least kept very much in this race. So these are reasons for GOP optimism in a moment where there’s very few reasons for optimism available.
We’ve had a bunch of strong polls for Abdul El-Sayed. We have CNN and another lower-tier poll just out with El-Sayed 7 points ahead. A few days earlier one of the two in-state signature polls, Glengariff Group, had him 6 points ahead. The outlier here is InsiderAdvantage, a strongly pro-GOP poll, which had him at the same time as the Glengariff poll at +1. El-Sayed could certainly lose but if he does it will be a significant polling error.
South Carolina genuinely, bizarrely, seems in contention. NYT/Siena just showed it a tie race. Three other slightly older polls have Graham up +3,+4 and +1. So a lead but not far off from the Times poll. I saw one operative note that GOP governor candidate Alan Wilson has a very high single-digit lead. That’s a big delta and South Carolina has straight ticket voting. That could potentially save Graham here. Truly everything has to come into alignment for Democrat Annie Andrews to win. The ability to vote a straight ticket in what is not only usually a strongly Republican state but appears to remain strongly Republican outside this one Senate race could make a small but real difference. Who knows? What’s amazing is that there’s a real chance Andrews could win. To put this into perspective, Nate Silver’s probabilities say that Andrews is significantly more likely to win than Republicans are to hold the Senate. Take it for what you will.
We haven’t had a premium poll out of Kansas in about a month. CNN’s new poll shows Democrat Adam Hamilton up four points. Given the partisan muscle memory in Kansas and the real but limited recent history of GOP-underestimating polling error being strongest in very red states, I still think you have to consider this a straight toss up. But still, Kansas.
