One way to look at what needs to happen, for Democrats to gain a majority in the Senate, is that they absolutely need to win one of the seats that we at Daily Kos Elections (and most other prognosticators as well) consider to be “Lean Republican”: North Dakota, Tennessee, or Texas. You can think of any of those as the “51st seat,” in other words, the one that gets them barely over the top. A 50-50 split would be inadequate with a Republican vice-president acting as a tiebreaker (well, unless, one Republican Senator decides to take a page from Jim Jeffords circa 2001, and break the tie by switching parties).
The problem is, none of those seats are looking to be in very good shape right now. Things haven’t gotten any worse in North Dakota this week … but that’s because no new polls have shown up from North Dakota this week, and the damage was done the previous week when two different polls showed Democratic incumbent Heidi Heitkamp down by double digits.
Instead, it was Democratic ex-Gov. Phil Bredesen’s turn to get the same treatment in Tennessee; after having trailed only narrowly in our polling average last week (down 3 to Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn), two new polls released over the last week showed him getting beaten pretty soundly: a YouGov poll showing him down 50-42, and then a Siena poll for the New York Times finding him losing 54-40.
There are a number of possible schools of thought about this. Many pundits think a polling shift that big has to be “about” something, and one major item in the news that may have been a factor was the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. Some people have argued that there really was an enduring Republican bump gained from his confirmation, but that theory isn’t borne out at all with the last week’s generic ballot polling, which mostly saw things get worse for the Republicans. (It’s possible, though, that the bump is real in the dark-red states, like Tennessee and North Dakota, even while their position got significantly worse in the rest of the country, and the small drop in the generic ballot accounts for both of those trends.)
Others might argue that the Kavanaugh story is just a Tennessee-specific problem, where Bredesen’s unnecessary support for the Kavanaugh nomination has, anecdotally at least, cost him some support from campaign volunteers. Others argued that the alleged bump isn’t real, but has some short-lived illusory effects on individual polls because of “differential response,” where temporarily-enthused Republicans are more eager than usual to pick up the phone and answer a poll while temporarily-unenthused Democrats are, for a brief period, less eager to respond. (If that was true, though, it theoretically should have also shown up in the generic ballot polling as well, and not just individual Senate races.)
The other possibility, unfortunately, is that the drop wasn’t “about” anything. That’s a very boring interpretation, but it’s also consistent with the general idea that, in this heavily polarized era, most big external events have very little impact on the trajectory of races. Most people’s minds are already made up from the start, based simply on partisan ID. Instead, the growing gap isn’t so much a drop for Bredesen as a gain for Blackburn, as undecided voters — the majority of whom, in a dark-red state like Tennessee, are already more disposed toward voting Republican — are coming off the fence. You can see that with Blackburn suddenly polling over 50 percent in the most recent polls, unlike before. (That predictable pattern, unfortunately, is why we were reluctant to ever move the Tennessee race up to “Tossup” even when Bredesen was leading in the polls for many months.)
Once again, here’s the “totem pole,” revised for this week:
STATE |
D CAND. |
D AVG. |
R CAND. |
R. AVG. |
DIFF. |
FLIP? |
OHIO |
Brown (inc) |
51 |
Renacci |
35 |
+16 |
|
MINNESOTA (sp.) |
Smith (inc) |
51 |
Housley |
36 |
+15 |
|
WISCONSIN |
Baldwin (inc) |
52 |
Vukmir |
42 |
+10 |
|
NEW JERSEY |
Menendez (inc) |
49 |
Hugin |
40 |
+9 |
|
MONTANA |
Tester (inc) |
48 |
Rosendale |
44 |
+4 |
|
INDIANA |
Donnelly (inc.) |
44 |
Braun |
42 |
+2 |
|
WEST VIRGINIA |
Manchin (inc.) |
43 |
Morrisey |
41 |
+2 |
|
ARIZONA |
Sinema |
46 |
McSally |
45 |
+1 |
D FLIP |
FLORIDA |
Nelson (inc.) |
46 |
Scott |
46 |
0 |
|
RED LINE |
RED LINE |
|
RED LINE |
|
|
|
NEVADA |
Rosen |
44 |
Heller (inc.) |
45 |
-1 |
|
MISSOURI |
McCaskill (inc.) |
44 |
Hawley |
46 |
-2 |
R FLIP |
TEXAS |
O’Rourke |
43 |
Cruz (inc.) |
51 |
-8 |
|
TENNESSEE |
Bredesen |
40 |
Blackburn |
51 |
-11 |
|
NORTH DAKOTA |
Heitkamp (inc.) |
41 |
Cramer |
52 |
-11 |
R FLIP |
MISSISSIPPI (SP.) |
Espy |
26 |
Hyde-Smith +
McDaniel
|
45 |
-19 |
|
The third possibility in the “Lean Republican” column is Texas, where Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke has shattered all known Senate fundraising records, but is still swimming upstream against the state’s Republican lean. Two new polls released in the last week indicated that he hasn’t quite closed the gap with Republican incumbent Ted Cruz; he trailed 51-43 in a Siena poll for the New York Times, and 54-45 in a Quinnipiac poll. In last week’s average, O’Rourke trailed Cruz by only a 3-point gap (48-45), but this week that’s also expanded to an 8-point gap, at 51-43.
O’Rourke’s deficit may be more easily fixable than Heitkamp’s, or certainly Bredesen’s. Unlike North Dakota or Tennessee, Texas is perceptibly moving in the Democratic direction. (One key indicator is that while Barack Obama lost Texas 57-41 in 2012, Hillary Clinton lost Texas only 52-43.) Texas has a lot of two different favorable demographics that North Dakota and Tennessee don’t have much of: college-educated suburban white voters, and Latino voters.
However, while O’Rourke seems to have, anecdotally at least, made some significant headway with suburban swing voters, there’s growing concern that Latino turnout in Texas may not be adequate to meet his needs (not so much because his campaign is doing anything wrong, as much as there just isn’t the GOTV infrastructure present in Texas’s Hispanic communities, thanks more to decades of institutional neglect than anything). The same thing may be happening in Texas as Tennessee, in addition: Republican-leaning undecided voters may be finally coming off the fence, back to their usual GOP home.
Problems with Latino turnout may also be a factor in one other better-positioned race that keeps hanging around the cusp: the Nevada Senate race, which has had only a narrow Democratic advantage in the last few weeks and this week has fallen below the cutoff point, with Republican incumbent Dean Heller leading Democratic Rep. Jacky Rosen 45-44 in our polling average (thanks to yet another Siena poll for the New York Times, giving Heller a 47-45 lead).
The good news in Nevada is that there’s more of an infrastructure in place for GOTV for Hispanic voters, much of it left over from Harry Reid’s electoral machine but also thanks to a strong union presence in Nevada, especially the well-organized and mostly-Latino Culinary Workers Union (the state’s largest union). However, despite some of the groundwork for victory already being in place, Heller still receives the traditional benefit of incumbency, in one of the swingiest of all states.
The Nevada race is no better than a jump ball, and keep in mind that if Rosen loses the race, it really doesn’t matter whether or not the Democrats can salvage one out of the trio of North Dakota, Tennessee, or Texas. (Which isn’t to say that all those pieces can’t, or won’t, fall into place, just that Democrats have to nearly run the table in order to win a bare majority. Keep in mind that that did happen, for instance, when the Democrats flipped the Senate in 2006 with a 51-49 win.)