Shades of red and blue are popping up in unexpected places as Senate Republicans and Democrats vie for a majority in the upper chamber.
Ohio and North Carolina, thought for most of the cycle to be safe for Republicans through most of the 2022 cycle, are now deeply competitive, a slate of polls show. Meanwhile, one longtime top Democratic Senate race target, Wisconsin, is slipping away. And with less than 40 days until the votes are counted on the night of Nov. 8 (and most likely beyond), Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is playing defense against her hard-charging GOP rival in Nevada.
None of this ensures Democrats will win Senate races in Ohio and North Carolina, which twice gave their electoral votes to former President Donald Trump, nor that the perennial swing states of Wisconsin and Nevada will go Republican. But the very fact that scenario is possible reflects the volatility and difficult-to-predict nature of 2022 Senate races, as each side seeks to bust out of the 50-50 split of nearly the past two years, with Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote giving Democrats their current razor-thin majority.
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The change in political calculus is fueled at least in part by a new poll out of North Carolina. Republican Sen. Richard Burr is retiring after 18 years in the Senate (and 10 more in the House), but the race was not initially thought to be a top-tier contest. Democrats had gotten their hopes up about North Carolina becoming a swing state when in the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama narrowly won the Tar Heel State. Since then, though, Democrats have endured a string of disappointments in presidential and Senate contests.
The Cygnal Poll, conducted for the John Locke Foundation, shows Rep. Ted Budd, the Republican nominee, locked in a 44%-44% tie with his Democratic opponent, former state Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley. The poll was conducted Sept. 24-26 with 650 likely general election voters. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.79 percentage points.
Beasley has been advertising heavily statewide lately. Budd’s campaign, meanwhile, has had to endure a string of negative headlines about his family’s business operations. It’s a noticeable improvement from a Hill-Emerson poll released on Tuesday that had Budd up by 3 points over Beasley.
Democrats are also growing cautiously optimistic about their chances in Ohio, a red-trending state long thought to be off the board in calculations for a Senate majority. The seat is open because GOP Sen. Rob Portman is retiring. A Spectrum News-Siena poll released on Monday showed the Democratic nominee, Rep. Tim Ryan, leading his Republican opponent, Trump-endorsed author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, 46%-43%. The poll was taken Sept. 18-22 with 642 likely voters and a margin of error of 4.5 points.
The survey was in line with others released lately giving Ryan a small lead — though scattered polls have also shown Vance on top. Any trend line in Ryan’s favor is positive for his party’s Senate fortunes, as it shows him staying above water in Ohio’s choppy political waters. Trump in 2020 beat President Joe Biden in Ohio by about 8 points, a similar margin as his 2016 Buckeye State victory over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. That after Ohio twice backed the Obama-Biden tickets.
All that potentially good polling news for Democrats, however, is tempered by increasingly desultory poll results in states where they had high hopes until recently. Democrats have been chomping at the bit to defeat Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, a product of the 2010 tea party wave who in many ways presaged Trump’s populist appeal in the Badger State.
Yet an AARP-Fabrizio poll out Thursday shows Johnson beating the Democratic nominee, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, 51%-46%. It’s the first part of that figure that’s most troubling for Democrats, as any candidate polling at 50% or above must be considered a favorite. The survey was taken Sept. 18-25 with 500 likely voters and a margin of error of 4.4 points.
The poll came as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel dug into Barnes’s Twitter history over the past decade, several posts of which give Republicans an opportunity to paint the former state lawmaker as a left-wing radical.
Among the highlights (or lowlights, depending on perspective): “I really could not care less about a 2nd Amendment ‘right,’” Barnes tweeted in July 2013. And five years later, he jokingly referred to far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), then a first-time candidate, as “my president.”
Then there’s the Nevada Senate race, in which Democrats unexpectedly find themselves playing defense as Cortez Masto seeks a second term against Republican opponent Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general. Recent surveys show that Cortez Masto is even more endangered politically than thought for most of the cycle. Cortez Masto’s seat may even be in more trouble than those of top Republican targets such as Sens. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Mark Kelly in Arizona.
Cortez Masto has, for the most part, kept a low profile during her nearly six years in the Senate. Running for reelection, she’s playing up her work trying to protect Nevada from being a nuclear waste dumping ground, a long-standing issue in the desert state.
Laxalt is a vocal proponent of Trump’s baseless accusations that the 2020 presidential race was rigged and that he was cheated out of a second term. Laxalt, a grandson and son of senators, has also emphasized his crime-fighting bona fides as state attorney general and has called for tougher measures to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.
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These races could still change trajectory again. Upsets in the making for Democrats in North Carolina and Ohio are hardly a sure thing, nor are Republican wins in Wisconsin and Nevada.
What the polls and recent events do suggest, however, is there’s considerable fluidity in the Senate campaign playing field, like the broader 2022 electoral landscape. And that just may lead to some big surprises on election night.
