Senate majority at risk of falling out of reach for Democrats

Former President Trump’s strength in the upper Midwest is putting Senate Democrats on defense, giving the GOP hopes it can not only win the Senate majority but grow it beyond a seat or two.  

Republicans are already favored to win the Senate with Sen. Joe Manchin (I) retiring in West Virginia and Sen. Jon Tester (D) seen as the underdog in Montana. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has moved Montana’s Senate race to “lean Republican.”

With those two victories alone, Republicans would take the Senate majority as long as they don’t lose any seats.

Democrats have expressed hope about defeating Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas or Sen. Rick Scott in Florida, but both Republicans are favored.

Meanwhile, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) is now in a toss-up race in Wisconsin, where polls also show Trump running neck and neck with Vice President Harris at the top of the ticket. Cook recently shifted that race from “leans Democrat” to “toss-up.”

And in Michigan, where the Biden administration’s Israel policies have turned off Arab American voters, the state’s open Senate seat is also considered a toss-up by Cook.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has been a ray of sunshine for Senate Democrats, with polls showing him leading Republican Bernie Moreno.

But his race is also a Cook toss-up, and internal National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) polling obtained by The Hill found Brown trailing his opponent for the first time. The NRSC polling has Moreno leading Brown by 2 points, 45 percent to 43 percent, and Trump leading Harris by 11 points.

The internal GOP polling found Republican candidate Eric Hovde leading Baldwin by a point  — 48 percent to 47 percent — and GOP challenger David McCormick trailing Sen. Bob Casey (D) by only a point in Pennsylvania, 44 percent to 43 percent.

“After trending positively and gaining 2 points in each of our latest polls, Hovde has been able to surpass Baldwin on a head-to-head ballot,” Jason Thielman, the executive director of the NRSC, wrote in a memo sent to donors.

Democrats say privately that they always expected the Senate races to tighten as they got closer to Election Day and spending by the NRSC and aligned outside groups improved the name ID of the Republican challengers.

Democrats have also repeatedly pointed out that the Senate GOP challengers in battleground states across the country have consistently trailed Trump in the polls, questioning whether the GOP presidential nominee can pull Republicans downballot to victory.

David Bergstein, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s communications director, pushed back on the internal NRSC polling and pointed to internal numbers from the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a Senate GOP super PAC, that leaked over the weekend.

“Everyone already saw Senate Republicans’ real polling numbers from SLF that showed the GOP losing just about every race in the country and running behind the top of their ticket. This cringe-worthy, cooked up polling memo attacking their own Super PAC says more about the panic at the NRSC than the standing of the Senate races,” Bergstein said in a statement.

Trump now leads Harris by one-tenth of a percentage point in the Wisconsin polling average kept by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ; Harris has lost 2.5 percentage points over the last month in that average to the former president.

Internal NRSC polling now shows Casey with only a 1-point lead over McCormick and, in an alarming development for Democrats, shows Trump with a strong lead over Harris among undecided voters — 57 percent to 27 percent.

The polling average compiled by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ found that Harris’s lead in Pennsylvania has slipped from 1.1 percentage points to 0.3.

“This trend, while slight, is consistent across all the upper Midwest states where Harris still maintains a slight probabilistic advantage in Wisconsin and Michigan, but has ceded ground,” Scott Tranter, the director of data science at Decision Desk HQ, wrote in a memo last week.

Republican strategists point out that Wisconsin has a history of electing conservatives, such as former Gov. Scott Walker (R) and third-term Sen. Ron Johnson (R).

“I’ve been polling in Wisconsin for a long time,” said Jim McLaughlin, a GOP pollster who has done work for Trump. “Everybody says it’s a Democratic state, but Ron Johnson’s gotten elected three times. And how many times did Scott Walker win there? It really is the ultimate swing state.

“Because of its working middle-class background and who these voters are, it’s prime Trump territory,” he said.

Walker served two terms as governor from 2011-19.

Brandon Scholz, a Wisconsin-based Republican strategist, said Hovde’s campaign picked up momentum once he got past attacks that he was a California banker trying to masquerade as a Wisconsin native after moving away from the state.

“He sees some Republicans coming home who might not have been certain. I think his message has changed because he got out of that cycle of having to defend not being from Wisconsin,” he said. “Baldwin put a pretty good spank on him.

“He’s been able to get into more of the attack mode on Baldwin, and Baldwin has seemed to have flattened out a little bit. … There’s a sense there’s a little bit of the lull,” he added.

Baldwin and Hovde will debate each other Friday on WMTV in Madison.

A spokesperson for Baldwin did not return a request for comment.

Trump’s strength in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where he is campaigning heavily, is a problem for Democratic incumbents because the outcome of the presidential race in Senate battlegrounds almost always aligned with the downballot Senate races in 2016 and 2020.

When Trump was atop the ticket in the previous two election cycles, the outcome of the presidential contest matched the outcome of the Senate races in 68 out of 69 instances.

The once exception to that trend was in 2020, when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) won reelection even though President Biden carried her state by 9 percentage points.

Internal Senate Republican polling shows the race between former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) for the seat of retiring Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D) as a dead heat.

NRSC polling shows Rogers and Slotkin tied at 48 percent support in a head-to-head match-up. Slotkin leads Rogers by 1 point, 49 percent to 48 percent, in a multicandidate field.

“Rogers’s name awareness and image have continued to show improvement across the state — 40% say they are favorable of Rogers and 38% say unfavorable,” Thielman wrote.

The NRSC data is substantially different from the internal polling by the SLF, the super PAC aligned with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.).

The super PAC’s polling showed Slotkin with an 8-point lead over Rogers, 46 percent support to 38 percent, putting the former representative substantially behind where Trump is polling.

The group found Harris leading Trump by only 3 points, 45 percent support to 42 percent.