Which Party Will Win Control of the Senate?
Assuming Justice wins in West Virginia and Florida Republican Rick Scott holds onto his seat, the GOP needs to flip only one additional seat to win control of the Senate.
Although this election cycle has been anything but predictable, at this moment in time, the Republican Party’s chances of winning back control of the Senate are looking pretty good.
This was always going to be a tough year for Democrats. Republicans, with only 10 seats to defend this cycle, have a very favorable Senate map. Democrats, on the other hand, have 19 seats to defend plus four more that are currently held by independents who caucus with the Democrats.
But even with an unfavorable Senate map, until President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate with former President Donald Trump in June, Democratic candidates (especially sitting senators) had been performing quite well in the polls. In fact, many Democrats were outperforming Biden by wide margins.
The first polls released after the debate showed that Biden’s abrupt drop in the polls was already taking a toll on a handful of Senate races considered by RealClearPolitics to be “toss ups.”
Toss up races include Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Of these races, Republicans have an excellent chance of winning Florida and Montana, and a shot at Ohio and possibly Pennsylvania. Democrats are likely to win Senate races in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The impact was more noticeable among candidates who continued to support the president. Leaders worried that any Democratic candidate who continued to back Biden after his cognitive decline was exposed in such a humiliating, spectacular, and irreversible way was telling voters they think it’s OK to reelect a senile president.
This is one of the most frequently cited reasons for Biden’s exit from the race. Party leaders worried that his continued presence at the top of the ticket would hurt their chances of retaining the Senate majority and taking back control in the House.
And they weren’t wrong.
Republicans have 72 percent chance of winning Senate.https://t.co/DM39WYaRvl
— Tony Seruga (@TonySeruga) August 29, 2024
The Remington Research Group was the first polling firm to release post-debate survey results.
RRG’s poll of the Montana Senate race showed Republican challenger Tim Sheehy with a 5-point lead over incumbent Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), the first survey of this race ever to show Sheehy with a lead. Tester’s leads in previous polls had ranged between 2 and 9 points.
While RRG is a right-leaning pollster, the four subsequent polls of this race have all shown Sheehy with leads of 2, 6, 7, and 6 points. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls in this race, Sheehy is up by 5.2 points.
What happened? Well, the senator remained silent after the debate. Perhaps prodded by the RRG poll, Tester issued a statement that said, “President Biden has got to prove to the American people — including me — that he’s up to the job for another four years.” Not exactly a call for Joe Biden to go, but he was heading in that direction. Too little, too late?
It doesn’t appear that his decision to skip the Democratic National Convention in Chicago helped him to reverse the trend.
Another incumbent, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), continued to support Biden. Up until Biden’s debate, Casey had maintained a solid lead over his Republican opponent, Dave McCormick, since polling began in this race. The RRG poll showed Casey leading by a single point. A CNN poll released on Wednesday found the pair tied.
Although the post-debate RRG poll found incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) ahead of his Republican challenger, business man Bernie Moreno, by 6 points, which was slightly higher than his lead in previous polls of the race, Brown’s lead in the RealClearPolitics average of polls has dropped from 5.2% to 3.6% since that time. Many analysts consider Brown to be vulnerable.
Meanwhile, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) maintains a strong lead over Republican rival Eric Hovde. And Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Rep. Elise Slotkin (D-MI) have held onto solid leads in their respective races and are expected to prevail in November.
Democrats currently control the Senate by a margin of 51-49. West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is almost guaranteed to win the open seat being vacated by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who is retiring. In fact, Justice’s victory is so certain that pollsters don’t even bother to survey this race. Assuming Justice wins and Florida Republican Rick Scott keeps his seat, (where he currently leads in the RealClearPolitics average by a margin of 4.3 points), the margin would be 50-50.
Republicans need to flip only one additional seat to win control of the Senate. Which state is most likely to produce the 51st seat for the GOP? Montana. Which is precisely what RealClearPolitics predicts.
As far as Senate elections go, I think the GOP is narrowly favored to retake the Senate.
I think the GOP will probably hold of their current seats and flip West Virginia with Joe Manchin retiring. It then comes down to Montana and Ohio. pic.twitter.com/8T66uFlgHs
— Chris Niland (@jim_niland) September 4, 2024
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
Listen?
Do you hear it?
That giant sucking sound?
That’s Kamala Harris’ campaign sucking the life out of the Democrats chances.
I predict a trifecta for this election.
I’m strongly confident the Republican Senate caucus will be at 51 or more seats. A little farther down the scale: steadily confident and hesitantly confident, is Trump winning the electoral collage and Republican Party retaining the House of Representatives majority.
We really need around 50 seats given the squishes.
53-54 seats sorry for the typo,
Probably needs to be bigger than that, closer to 60 to cancel out the rino’s and squishies to make it a safely conservative senate.
Then with no Paul Ryan and McConnell in the way perhaps conservatives can finally have a go at governing America.
True. Maine is gonna be willing to send Susan Collins or someone like her to the Senate. Purple and Blue(ish) States ain’t gonna send populist center/right fire brands to DC. Nothing gonna change that anytime soon. The Red States gotta do better in getting candidates elected who are at least as center/right as the electorate is. I would point out that Cornyn in TX and Graham in SC are examples where a Red State sent folks to DC who are LESS center/right than the majority of voters in the State. That’s something we can fix.
Well, I’m hoping that this purple state will send Kari Lake to the Senate. I don’t believe Gallegos has enough mindless myrmidons to clear the hurdle.
The Republican party might win the Senate, but its useless in the hands of ‘leadership’ like McConnell.
McConnell announced in February that he is stepping down in November.
https://apnews.com/article/mitch-mcconnell-senate-republican-leader-stepping-down-ba478d570a4561aa7baf91a204d7e366
don’t believe until they actually make a selection
Bank your vote, talk to 10 people and get 10 people to the polls. The only way they left doesn’t seal this is if everyone does their part.
I live in Florida and laugh every time I hear that the senate race is a toss up or too close to call. Sigh, none of these pollsters nor political prognosticators pushing this either don’t live here or understand the shifting dynamics of the conservative dominance in the Sunshine State.
Scott, will win and the race will be called by 9pm at the latest.
It’s like everyone who works in media has forgotten the LAUGHABLE polling of the 2022 Florida Governor’s race. The final RCP average (which tends to throw out the more obviously partisan leftist polls) had DeSantis winning by 12-points. DeSantis won by almost 20-points. The polling for Rubio in the same election was similarly bad. RCP average had Rubio winning by 8-points. He won by 16-points.
Demings tried to turn a short stint in the House into a senate seat and lost by 16 points in 2022. Powell from the Miami area lost her House seat and is now thinking she can win a state wide election, it won’t happen.
By all rights this should be a Red Wave, ( that it should be blue as red is the Marxists color). That the Marxists control %95 of the media is their only saving grace. A honest media would be hounding Harris as she is part of the current administration and ran the country 12 of last 16 years.
It is very difficult to get an incumbent voted out of office no matter what party or state. The opposing party has to find the right candidate and willing to bankroll them.
To get them out they have to become incredibly unpopular. Just ask Liz Chaney 😂😂
The GOP will hold no less than 51-seats on the morning of November 6th. WV and MT are sure-fire pickups. Scott’s not going to come remotely close to losing that seat. I’m less optimistic about the rest of the races, unfortunately. Ohio has a very long history of voting for Republican presidents while sending very liberal Senators to DC. They did this throughout the 80s with Metzenbaum and Glenn. In 1988, Ohio voted for Bush by 11-points, roughly the same Trump will win the state this fall. In that very same election, they reelected Metzenbaum – one of the most liberal Senators at the time, not unlike Brown today – by 14-points. It’s crazy and inexplicable.
Having said that, McCormick, Lake & even Bernie Moreno (OH) are all within striking distance in their respective races. Depending on how strong Trump’s showing is in all three states, it might be enough for them to ride his coattails. The same dynamic may play out in WI. GOP will definitely finish with 51-seats, but it’s conceivable it could be 54-seats.
Remember the “Red Wave” 2 years ago? Never happened, because of Trump.
I sincerely hope that the Republicans win a solid majority in both the House and Senate. We are going to need it to reign in President Harris.
Trump wasn’t on the ballot in ’22 so kinda tough to attribute it solely to him.
In fairness though the record for his endorsed candidates in COMPETITIVE general election races statewide and CD is ….not good. Picking a winner in a +5 GoP CR or State isn’t a big deal. Where an endorsement counts and the relative strength or weakness of the endorsement shows up is the tight races and DJT doesn’t have an overall solid record of his endorsed candidates winning the tough competitive races. Granted those are harder to win but that’s also where the DJT mystique/touch either does/doesn’t put the candidate over the top. Mostly it hasn’t. See GA, AZ, NV, PA among other tough Statewide races where his candidate didn’t get sworn into office.
Except by all measures but the fraud count Trump did win.
And we got not a peep out of the supposed 81 million who saw their candidate unceremony bailed out of the election by a E signature on a unofficial announcement.
3M more people voted for House Republicans than voted for House Democrats in 2022. That was 1M-votes larger than their margin of victory in 2016 which produced 241-House Seats for Republicans. But, we had a census in 2020 and significant redistricting that followed. Both the GOP and the DNC have gerrymandered in a way that has bifurcated the House almost directly in half. The DNC could win the next House Election by 3M votes and their House majority would be razor-thin…if it would even be enough to win back the House.
Yep. Wanna hear the bigwigs of both parties squeal alongside the legacy media? Propose that State level redistricting of CD (and State legislative seats) AFTER apportionment must contain an equal (+/- 5%) of US Citizens. They lose their damn minds over this concept that that political representation should be distributed more/less evenly among US Citizens instead of what we have now where some CD have 2x to 3x + the number of US Citizens than other CD.
I don’t think razor thin margins are a problem for Democrats. Pretty much the only thing I take my hat off to them is for how they get EVERYONE to vote the “right” way when it comes to needing something to get through.
We can’t even get ex-presidents to parcel out zero-cost endorsements for each other.
It was Dobbs that caused the 2022 result.
And that effect still lingers today.
Controlled opposition doesn’t win anything when it’s controlled opposition.
What happens if there are vacancies? If Mitch McConnell dies in the lame duck period, Congress could open up with a vacancy until a special election fills the seat, and make the Senate tied. This could matter if the EC is tied, or if the Democrats try to disqualify Trump under 14A.3 on Jan 6.
How vacancies are filled depends on state law. In McConnell’s case, the Republican Party would give Beshear three names, and he would have 21 days to appoint one of them to fill the vacancy until a special election, which would be held in 60-90 days. So yes, depending on the timing he could deliberately hold the seat open for three weeks (plus however long the GOP takes to come up with its list), which could include Jan 6.