GOP has a shot at taking the Senate

 Elizabeth Stauffer:

...

All else remaining the same, Republicans need to win five of the eight Senate races rated as toss-ups by RealClearPolitics : Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

RCP projects the Republicans will hold onto Senate seats in Ohio, North Carolina, and Wisconsin and will pick up seats in Nevada and Georgia.

In Ohio, Trump-backed candidate J.D. Vance leads Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan by 2.7 percentage points for the open seat held by Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), who is retiring.

In North Carolina, Republican Rep. Ted Budd is ahead of his opponent, Cheri Beasley, a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, by 1.3 points. They are vying for the open seat being vacated by the retiring Republican Sen. Richard Burr.

In Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is in a tough fight against progressive challenger Mandela Barnes, who is ahead by 1.7 points. However, the race has tightened. A Marquette poll released this week shows Johnson ahead by 1 point. A Marquette poll conducted last month gave Barnes a 7-point advantage.

It’s worth noting that right up until the 2016 election, Johnson trailed his opponent, longtime former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) by 2.7 points , but won the race by 3.4 points. Polling isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, it seems.

In Nevada, Republican challenger Adam Laxalt could easily unseat Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto. Laxalt currently prevails by just 1 point, but he has momentum on his side.

And in Georgia, football legend and Republican Herschel Walker might just pull off an upset against Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock. Trump-endorsed Walker got hammered in the polls this summer when revelations of his illegitimate children and history of mental health problems surfaced, but he has rebounded strongly over the past month. Though the RCP average of polls is currently tied, summer polls showed him trailing Warnock by as much as 10 points. Walker has made significant gains, and strong voter support for Republican Gov. Brian Kemp might be enough to pull Walker across the finish line.

The three remaining races in the toss-up column are ranked by RCP as Democratic holds. In Arizona , Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly remains stubbornly ahead of Republican Blake Masters by 4 points, although the polls have tightened in recent weeks. In New Hampshire , Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan leads Republican challenger Gen. Don Bolduc by 4 points. And in Pennsylvania, far-left John Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, has held onto an early lead against the Trump-backed Dr. Mehmet Oz. I wrote about this race earlier this week.

Recall the overly optimistic polls in the 2020 election. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was projected to lose her reelection bid by 6.5 points. Instead, she won by 8.6 points . Although less dramatic, the story was the same for Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Steve Daines (R-MT).

There is reason to believe that pollsters are once again overestimating Democrats' chances and underestimating those of the Republicans. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned as much this week when he predicted Masters would win over Kelly, arguing Kelly's small lead makes him vulnerable.
...

The polls overestimated Democrat performance by the same margins in the last election.   While there have been some complaints about the weakness of the GOP candidates the Democrats have much the same problem in some of these races.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more