About Those Senate Polls.....

The 2024 general election season is officially underway with Labor Day having come and gone.  The latest rounds of polling indicate zero convention bounce for Kamala Harris and actually show nominal movement toward Trump.  I have zero faith in contemporary polls for giving an accurate read on the race but Trump's mirage of resilience in the face of his campaign going completely off the rails in the last month will undoubtedly result in a lot of entirely legitimate sweaty palms among Democrats.  But another theme that has remained consistent throughout 2024 and continues to heading into the general election campaign is that Democrats are outperforming Harris (and Biden before her) in nearly every competitive Senate race.  In some cases, the Democratic Senate candidate is running way ahead of the top of the ticket.  But is it sustainable?  Or even real in the first place?

It's hard to qualify the answer to the second question.  Voters have been late to engage this cycle even in the Presidential race and I suspect their interest is lagging even further in the Senate races.  It's likely to only be in the next few weeks that voters start paying attention downballot, insofar as paying attention even matters anymore given the degree of polarization in contemporary politics which ultimately renders nearly every Senate race a mirror image of the Presidential race.  And that probably helps answer the first of my two questions.  I just don't see the Democratic advantage in battleground Senate race after battleground Senate race being sustainable now that the general election season spotlight is shining.  The gravitational pull of hyperpartisanship seems extremely likely to rear its head.

The two Senate races that epitomize the Democratic overperformance that I suspect won't last until November are Nevada and Arizona.  In the Silver State, first-term Democrat Jacky Rosen has been crushing GOP challenger Sam Brown by an average of 10 points.  This one makes the least sense on paper as Rosen is about as anonymous of a Senator as exists in the country and certainly doesn't have the kind of unique brand that would explain this kind of overperformance.  Perhaps Brown's physical deformity left a bad first impression on voters or perhaps he simply hasn't gotten the kind of exposure needed to close the gap on Rosen, but the only way I see Rosen winning by double digits as the polls suggest is if Harris significantly outruns the polls as well.  Since it's Nevada, that's a possibility but I'd be stunned if the gap between Harris and Rosen was ultimately more than 2 or 3 points.

Ditto for the open seat in the Grand Canyon State.  Polls would have us believe Democrat Ruben Gallego is running away with it and that the GOP challenger, 2022 gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, is so badly damaged that voters are unable to take her seriously.  Considering how closely Lake is tied to Trump, it defies any kind of credibility that there would tens of thousands of Trump voters who split their tickets and vote for Gallego in the Senate race.  The premise currently being peddled of Lake being way behind while Harris and Trump are neck and neck is assuredly unsustainable.  I'd be surprised if there was more than a single point of separation between the Presidential and Senate ballot lines in Arizona come November.

As for what's widely agreed upon as the Democrats' two most vulnerable incumbents--Montana's Jon Tester and Ohio's Sherrod Brown--I still think the "settling" of the races post-Labor Day dooms them both.  It looks like Tester's goose is already cooked, with a trio of recent polls showing him running behind GOP challenger Tim Sheehy.  Nobody should be surprised to see him losing, but what's delusional is that the conventional wisdom peddled by both parties as recently as last month is that Tester could run 15 points ahead of Harris at the top of the ticket and still win....but would only be doomed if Harris were to lose Montana to Trump by 20 points or more.  This is far-fetched.  Not since 2012 has any Senate candidate run double-digits ahead of their party's Presidential nominee.  Granted, Tester was one of those who did in 2012, but the more recent example that better depicts the contemporary polarized spread was 2020 when popular Democratic Governor Steve Bullock ran for the Senate and lost by 10 points in a year Trump beat Biden by 16.  And by modern standards, that's a really big spread between the Presidential race and the Senate race.  It's unthinkable that Tester would be able to triple that spread as would be needed to win in Montana this year.  I expect him to lose by double-digits just as Bullock did four years ago.

The Ohio story has been a bit different thus far as long-time Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown is leading his heavily flawed GOP challenger Bernie Moreno in all recent polls, including polls showing Trump winning the Buckeye State by 10 points.  Republicans are nervous about this race, even assigning Brown magical survival powers.  I don't think they should be nervous, particularly since campaign laws have prevented Moreno from running ads since his primary while Brown has been pulverizing him on the airwaves.  Between Moreno's pending comeback on the airwaves and the strong partisan tide at the top of the ticket for Trump, it's a pipe dream that Brown can defy gravity for another two months.  Recall that Brown underperformed polls the last time he was on the ballot in 2018, and that was a Democratic year.

On the other side of the aisle, don't expect Maryland's former Republican Governor Larry Hogan to continue keeping it close in the Bay State.  It's just too overwhelmingly Democrat.  In the end, there's no serious case for his candidacy and he'll almost assuredly lose by double digits.  He's gonna be the Linda Lingle of 2024.  I'd be astonished if he didn't.

That brings us to the trio of "blue wall" states, all of which are hosting competitive Senate races.  The polling has been more unpredictable in these three Senate races and has failed to show the kind of commanding Democratic overperformance noted above in Nevada, Arizona, and Ohio.  This could be big trouble for Democratic incumbents Tammy Baldwin and Bob Casey, as well as Elissa Slotkin running for the open seat in Michigan, given Trump's tendency to outperform the polls in all three states in November.  In other words, these three races already seem to be in the place where I expect Nevada, Arizona, and Ohio to be by election day, with little voter interest in crossover voting detected.  I don't think Republicans are likely to pick up all three, but the sweep is certainly within reach if the race breaks in any way toward Trump in the next two months.

Now is it possible that I'm wrong and Democratic Senate candidates like Gallego, Rosen, Brown, and Tester continue to run ahead of Harris by double digits or high single digits?  I mean, after all, this kind of ticket-splitting was very common in the Bush years and even into the Obama years.  As an eye-opening example, recall that 20 years ago North and South Dakota had FOUR Democratic Senators.  Could it happen again in 2024?  Possible, but doubtful.  In 2020, only 43 out of more than 2,000 counties with Senate races on the ballot voted differently in the Presidential race than they did in their state's Senate race.  Have we become that much more bipartisan in the last four years?  I don't see it.  

The only vaguely plausible scenario for this to occur was more tenable two months ago when it looked like Trump was poised to beat Biden.  Perhaps there were wide swaths of reluctant would-be Trump voters that wanted to hedge their bets with a Democratic Senate.  Ultimately I think very few voters nowadays make such a calculation, and even if they did, those voters probably aren't nearly as confident that Trump will win now as they were two months ago.  That makes the prospect of 100,000+ Arizona voters casting a ballot for Donald Trump but deciding that voting for Kari Lake for the Senate is a bridge too far that much more implausible and unlikely.

I'll return with formal state-by-state predictions in the Presidential and Senate races next month.