A month ago, I argued that Labor Day would be the high-water mark for Democrats. The polling looked like a blue tsunami, the press was writing the obituary for the Republican Senate majority, and I thought both were getting ahead of the voters. I said then that I expected Republicans to lose the House but hold the Senate. I still think that, and nothing in the past month has given me a reason to change my mind.
The RealClearPolitics average of the generic congressional ballot had Democrats up 8.5 points at its peak. It now has them up 7.9 points, 49.8% to 41.9%. That is not a collapse. It is, however, movement in the direction I said it would go, and it comes with a detail worth noticing. Republicans have slipped too, from 42.8% to 41.9%. Both parties have lost ground, but Democrats have lost more of it.
Republicans have not solved their problem. A party sitting below 42% in the national average 3 weeks before an election is a party that is going to lose House seats, and probably a lot of them. Voters are unhappy about prices, unhappy with the President, and unhappy that the party that promised to fix the cost of living has spent much of the year talking about other things. I do not see a path for the GOP to keep the House.
The Democratic number is softening, and I suspect it is still overstated. The polls in the RCP average are all over the map. Economist/YouGov had Democrats up 15 in late September. Harvard-Harris had them up 2, and Rasmussen had them up 3. When pollsters disagree that widely, the average is doing a lot of work. The lesson of recent cycles, which Patrick Ruffini has laid out well, is that the polls have had a habit of underestimating Republicans. In 2020, Lindsey Graham, Thom Tillis, and Cindy Hyde-Smith were all supposed to be in some degree of trouble. All three won.
The House is a national fight that is impacted by the national mood. The Senate is not. Republicans hold 53 seats, and Democrats need to flip four while holding everything they already have. Most of the seats they need are in states President Trump carried, and a 7.9-point national environment does not translate evenly into Iowa, Ohio, Alaska, or Texas. A generic ballot measures how people feel about the parties in the abstract. A Senate race forces them to choose between two actual human beings, and that is where Democrats keep running into trouble with their own candidates.
Texas is the race that should worry Republicans most, and Texas Republicans know it. James Talarico has led or tied Ken Paxton in poll after poll. Fox News had Talarico up 51% to 49% among likely voters in late September. The New York Times/Siena poll had them tied at 47%. More than 1 in 5 Republicans who do not identify as MAGA told Fox they would vote for Talarico. Paxton’s character problems are real, they are long-running, and Republican voters know about them. Early voting starts October 19.
But then there are the last 2 weeks.
