Montana Democratic senator Jon Tester hasn’t led a poll since mid-August over at FiveThirtyEight. Over at RealClearPolitics, he hasn’t led a poll since March.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I’m a bit surprised we haven’t seen more “Tester’s tough, he knows what he’s doing, and he always figures out a way to win in the end” spin. Instead, the coverage of his reelection bid is elegiac:
With Jim Justice all but assured of a victory in West Virginia, and Sheehy increasingly looking like a safe bet to win in Montana, the floor for Republicans in the Senate next year looks like 51 seats. A vice president Tim Walz probably wouldn’t have to spend much time hanging around Capitol Hill, on standby to break ties.
Even the folks at the Daily Kos recognize that a GOP Senate seriously hinders what a President Harris could do:
Losing this seat and Manchin’s would effectively halt the agenda of a President Kamala Harris if she were elected this year. It would slow down cabinet appointments or force her to use acting secretaries. It would enable politicized impeachment trials if Republicans also held their House majority. Perhaps most consequently of all, a Republican Senate majority would be able to swat down any of Harris’ potential Supreme Court nominees.
The Kos advice is that Democrats redouble their efforts in Texas and Florida.
Democrats keep getting excited about surveys that show Colin Allred within four or five points of incumbent Republican Ted Cruz. But that’s actually a larger margin than Cruz’s 2.6 percentage point margin over Beto O’Rourke in 2018.
What’s more, in the last presidential cycle, 11.3 million people voted in Texas. Assuming turnout is about the same this year, one percentage point is about 113,000 people. Allred needs to find about 452,000 more votes to pull even.
In Florida, the polls don’t look much better for Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell; like Allred, she’s never led a poll. Incumbent Republican Rick Scott leads in the RealClearPolitics average by 4.5 percentage points. (Keep in mind Scott won his first gubernatorial race by about one percent, his second gubernatorial race by about one percent, and his first U.S. Senate race by one-fifth of one percent. A four or five percentage point win will feel like a landslide.)
In 2020, a bit more than 11 million people voted in Florida, so again, each percentage point is roughly 110,000 people.
That leaves Nebraska, where certain Democrats insist that incumbent Republican senator Deb Fischer is in trouble.
A new poll by SurveyUSA, commissioned by the Osborn campaign, has Osborn ahead of Fischer 50 percent to 44 percent.
You’re telling me in a state with roughly twice as many registered Republicans as Democrats — 614,665 registered Republicans and 333,902 registered Democrats – and in a state where everyone expects Trump to win by about 20 percentage points, the de facto Democratic Senate candidate is not merely leading, but leading handily?