Republicans are heading into the late-summer stretch with a serious case of political heartburn.
A leading election handicapper now shows the number of GOP-held Senate seats rated as toss-ups or leaning Democratic has doubled since May, rising from three to six just as the post-Labor Day midterm sprint is set to begin.
Back in May, only Republican seats in North Carolina, Maine and Ohio fell into those most vulnerable categories. The Cook Political Report now adds Texas, Iowa and Alaska to the toss-up column.
President Trump carried every one of those states except Maine in 2024, winning four of them by double-digit margins.
“I worry about that, for sure,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SC) told Keloland News last week when asked whether Republicans could lose control of the chamber.
“I’m a realist, and … I don’t ever try and sugarcoat things. I think it’s a competitive environment right now.”
As The Post previously reported, the RealClearPolitics polling average shows Republicans trailing in eight of the nine competitive Senate contests this cycle. Iowa is the lone race among them where the GOP candidate currently holds an edge.
Most of those contests, however, remain extremely tight, with nearly all — apart from Georgia and North Carolina — sitting within the usual margin of error. Polling analyst Nate Silver has found a similar overall picture using his own model, which gives greater weight to surveys he rates as more reliable.
“National Republicans have been sounding the alarm that midterms are hard since last year, and we’ve been firm that not a single race should be taken for granted,” a GOP operative involved in Senate races previously told The Post.
“Republicans continue to believe we’ll hold the Senate.”
Despite the bleak polling, some Republicans have taken solace in the fact that many polls have undercounted their voters in recent cycles.
An analysis by Echelon pollster Patrick Ruffini assessed that 3,312 polls had underestimated Republicans by 3.7 points on average over the past four election cycles. The error rate jumped to 5.9 percentage points.
A famous example of this was Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-Maine) 2020 bid when the RCP had her down by roughly 5 percentage points, and she won by 8.6. More recently, polling aggregates overestimated Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s support in Michigan by about 9 points in his primary against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.)
CNN data guru Harry Enten recently noted that if polls have a similar error rate to past election cycles, Republicans could conceivably hold onto the House, despite widely being viewed as the underdogs there.
Additionally, President Trump is armed with a huge cash cannon in his MAGA Inc super PAC, and the official GOP campaign arms are flush with more cash than their Democratic counterparts. Trump’s political team has only really just begun tapping into that firepower, and it is just starting to get splurged now.
During some of those past elections where Republicans were underestimated, Trump was on the ballot. There are questions about whether the GOP’s low-propensity voters will turn out enough for them to win.
Democrats are working to seize on Trump’s approval rating being significantly underwater, gas prices remaining high, affordability being the runaway top issue for most voters, and divisions within the GOP over the war in Iran as well as the Epstein files.
A recent Gallup poll found that Democrats have their biggest party identification advantage over Republicans since about 2008, with a roughly 10-point edge.
There are also historical headwinds that typically go against the party in control of the White House during midterm elections; however, that trend has been true for the House, but not necessarily the Senate.
Both Trump and former President Joe Biden gained Senate seats during the midterms of their first terms, despite taking a beating in the House.
