If a red-state firewall is going to save the Republican Senate majority, the polls aren’t showing it yet, just four days out from Tuesday’s midterm elections.
The RealClearPolitics polling averages showed Democrats leading in six of eight toss-up Senate races as of Thursday night. The Republicans lead by 2.7 percentage points in South Carolina, which wasn’t considered especially competitive until a New York Times-Siena College poll this week showed Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC) tied with her Democratic challenger.
These are mostly red states. All but one was carried by President Donald Trump two years ago. The sole exception, Maine, awarded a single electoral vote to Trump, who has won the state’s Second Congressional District in each of the last three presidential elections.
Just as South Carolina has come on the board as a toss-up state, North Carolina and Georgia are now almost universally expected to elect Democratic senators on Tuesday. Georgia would be a hold, but North Carolina would be a Democratic pickup.
The only state where Republicans are playing offense is Michigan, where they haven’t elected a GOP senator since 1994. But Democrat Abdul el Sayed is now up by 3.2 points, with three straight polls showing him pulling away by 6 to 7 points after weeks of low-single-digit leads.
Trump won Michigan in two of the last three presidential elections, and former Rep. Mike Rogers, this year’s Republican nominee, narrowly lost a bid for the other Senate seat in 2024.
But Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) is down by the smallest of margins, 0.2 points, in the RealClearPolitics average despite representing a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Republicans are down by 2.1 points in Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988.
Trump has canceled planned in-person rallies in Kansas and Iowa, where Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) is down by 0.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average, in favor of remote tele-rallies in 19 states.
“I think he’s doing well,” Trump said of Marshall at Joint Base Andrews on Thursday. “We’re going to do a tele-rally for him instead.”
Is that a sign of strength and renewed confidence in endangered red-state Republicans, as the White House and its allies are projecting? Or is that merely spin as Republicans try to cut their losses next week?
Time will tell. But the map was supposed to safeguard the 53-47 Republican Senate majority in this year’s elections. The path to flipping the upper chamber runs heavily through states Trump won two years ago, many by double digits, many of them Republican bastions for decades.
Defending the House majority was always going to be a heavier lift because it is so small. But it was also heavily composed of districts Trump won by at least 10 points even before the push for mid-decade redistricting in GOP-led states.
In the 2018 blue wave, Trump’s first-term midterm election, Republicans didn’t lose a single seat in a congressional district he had carried by at least 20 points in 2016. Zero. Republicans lost three seats in districts Trump had won by 12.6 to 19.9 points and another three in districts he had won by 7.6 to 12.5 points.
Democrats did the vast majority of their damage on the way to a 41-seat pickup that returned the gavel to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in the 25 GOP-held districts that had voted for Hillary Clinton and another 23 Trump had won by 7.5 points or less.
Structurally, this year’s midterm election was always going to be a competition between a congressional map that favored Republicans and a national political environment that favored the Democrats. The question was always whether political conditions could deteriorate to the point that states and districts that shouldn’t be competitive suddenly are.
The Senate race polling suggests that the answer is yes, even if Republicans manage to hang on in many of these individual races. The same applies to what we know about district-level polling and the two parties’ campaign activities in the House, though there are few equivalents to Democrats competing in Kansas.
Trump and the White House have tried to combat this with rallies aimed at turning out Republican voters in these historically red states. If Republicans turn out and vote for their party in these races, the argument goes, Democrats won’t have the numbers to counter.
In recent red-state Senate races, we’ve also seen some polling misses. Maybe we’ll see them again as undecided Republicans come home and the rural voters pollsters admit they are having trouble reaching them to show up to vote.
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But Republicans would have liked to have seen the polls tighten after Labor Day. For the most part, they haven’t. In many cases, they’re worse. And they are worried that this might actually be the year that soft GOP learners and rural voters don’t come to save them.
If a blue wave is going to be stopped by the red wall, it is going to need reinforcements soon.