Eight races that will determine the fate of the Senate

Which party controls the upper house will go a long way to deciding the composition of the Supreme Court and how easily the next president will be able to make key appointments to the executive branch.

Republicans currently hold a 54-46 Senate majority, counting Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. But they have to defend a number of seats that were won in the GOP wave of 2010 that has since receded. Turnout by key Democratic voting blocs is much higher in presidential years than in midterms and a handful of GOP seats were won six years ago under perfect conditions that are not in place this time around.

Mitch McConnell’s status as majority rather than minority leader is also in danger because of the presidential contest. Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump — in some polls by quite a lot, although some recent surveys show the Republican presidential nominee gaining ground once again as the shock of “Access Hollywood” and various sexual assault allegations subsides for some GOP-leaning voters.

To get a sense of how volatile the presidential race is, RealClearPolitics just moved the Republican reach state of Pennsylvania back into the toss-up column — where it joins deep-red Texas. There remains a narrow path for a Trump upset and a somewhat more plausible scenario where he loses by a margin that won’t jeopardize many battleground state Republicans, but there’s also real potential for an electoral bloodbath that would be hard for down-ballot Republicans to survive.

Democrats need a net gain of five seats to win the majority outright, but that number goes down to four if Clinton is elected as they would be able to organize the Senate with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Tim Kaine.

President Clinton plus a Democratic-controlled Senate would virtually ensure the liberal bloc of the Supreme Court would achieve majority status before Republicans would have a chance to win the body back in the 2018 midterms.

THERE ARE EIGHT Senate races that will determine which party has control come January:

1. Rob Portman vs. Ted Strickland in Ohio This was billed as one of the nation’s toughest Senate races when the former Democratic governor decided to challenge the freshman Republican senator. It hasn’t lived up to the hype.

Portman leads in statewide polling averages by nearly 16 points and has exceeded 50 percent of the vote in four of the last five major polls. Ohio is a battleground where Trump has been consistently competitive, but Portman is running well ahead of the controversial businessman and looks capable of weathering even a Trump collapse.

“We’re running our own campaign independent,” Portman told the Washington Examiner‘s Al Weaver earlier this year. “We’re not expecting [national party] help and we never did.” Portman rescinded his support for Trump this month after the “Access Hollywood” tape broke.

Strickland has to be a disappointment to Democrats who thought he would be their best shot of taking Portman’s seat. According to one poll, Portman is even beating him handily in the congressional district Strickland represented off and on for a dozen years.

“Ted Strickland turned his back on Southeast Ohio when he moved to Washington for his dream job, which paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to be a D.C. lobbyist, and then lobbied against the interest of Southeast Ohio,” Portman’s campaign manager told the Examiner.

So the GOP should hold at least one swing state seat in November.

2. Pat Toomey vs. Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania Toomey in the neighboring Keystone State hasn’t been as lucky. Like Portman, he is a freshman Republican who has managed to remain competitive without endorsing Trump, navigating the divide between rural voters who strongly support the GOP presidential nominee and white college-educated suburbanites who are abandoning the top of the ticket in droves.

Toomey told the Examiner that Trump “said things that are very, very objectionable and he’s indicated support for policies that are very, very problematic” but at the same time he “can’t see why in the world” Trump voters would pull the lever for McGinty. Maybe he’s right: also like Portman, Toomey is running ahead of Trump.

Unlike Portman, Toomey hasn’t been able to put his Democratic challenger away. He edges McGinty by just 1.7 percentage points in the RCP average and is polling below the 50 percent threshold that’s generally seen as a warning sign for incumbents. A former head of Club for Growth, Toomey is the most conservative senator to represent the state since Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006.

George W. Bush has trekked to the state to fundraise for Toomey. The national party has shown no signs of conceding this race and it could be one of the bellwethers for the Republican majority.

3. Kelly Ayotte vs. Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire This race pits another freshman Republican senator against the Granite State’s sitting Democratic governor. And as is the case with Ohio and Pennsylvania, Trump is a factor.

Trump has fallen behind in New Hampshire polling averages but he won the Republican primary big and remains popular with the state’s GOP base. Where he is much less popular is with the swing voters Ayotte needs to win re-election, a fact that Hassan has exploited with relish.

During a debate, Ayotte said she believed Trump could be a good role model for young people. This was before his lewd remarks about women became public or the allegations of unwanted advances began to mount. Even then, she had to walk the comment back. Once Trump was heard bragging to Billy Bush, Ayotte had to say she wasn’t even going to vote for him anymore.

Nevertheless, Ayotte clings to a slim lead statewide. The polling has been finicky, however, as it often is in New Hampshire. Earlier this month, polls showing Ayotte up by 1 and 6 points were followed by one showing Hassan up 9 and then another showing the race tied.

Ayotte is running ahead of Trump, but has rarely been above 50 percent in recent quality polls. This has the feel of a race that could come down to how close the Clinton versus Trump contest winds up being.

4. Marco Rubio vs. Patrick Murphy in Florida Rubio had hoped to be the Republican presidential nominee against Clinton and hadn’t planned on running for re-election to the Senate either way. But he changed his mind after GOP leaders ranging from Trump to McConnell urged him to look at polling data showing that he was the strongest candidate to keep the seat in his party’s column.

That decision has so far paid off for both the Republicans and Rubio. A Bloomberg poll, for example, shows him leading by 10 points. Most other public polling is much closer, but Rubio usually has the edge.

It’s not hard to figure out why. Trump is competitive in some Florida polls. Rubio is holding Trump’s white voter base while doing better than him with Latino Republicans, who are more numerous in the Sunshine State than elsewhere. His opponent, Rep. Patrick Murphy, has been dogged by charges of embellishing his resume.

Murphy tries to tie Rubio to Trump and calls him an absentee senator while Rubio portrays Murphy as a do-nothing congressman. A win here could be a big reversal of fortune for Rubio, who lost his Tea Party darling luster nationally and seemed to have alienated voters back home when he lost Florida’s presidential primary to Trump. Now he stands a decent chance of six more years in Washington and perhaps another presidential run, if his party can hold it together in the homestretch.

5. Todd Young vs. Evan Bayh in Indiana If Rubio was the surprise contender whose decision to run improved Republicans’ chances, Evan Bayh is the Democrats’ equivalent. Also a former governor, Bayh is running to reclaim the Senate seat from which he retired after the 2010 elections.

Bayh is a relative moderate with a long history of winning Republican crossover votes in Indiana. He is also the son of a senator. But he’s had a rocky introduction to the Hoosier State. He misidentified his own address. An Associated Press report found Bayh didn’t stay in his Indiana condominium overnight even once during his final year in office and that he often embarked on taxpayer-funded trips.

Despite all that, Bayh is leading in the polls. Residency and authenticity questions have had a mixed record in recent Indiana Senate races. When Republican Dan Coats came out of retirement to take back this Senate seat, opponents unsuccessfully branded him as more Beltway than Hoosier. But not really living in the state did help cost Richard Lugar his seat in the Republican primary in 2012.

Todd Young hopes that running on conservative themes in a Republican state will help him upset Bayh. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is Trump’s running mate, although the pair is only narrowly ahead there according to recent polls. If Young can’t close the sale, the result will be an unanticipated Democratic pickup.

6. Roy Blunt vs. Jason Kander in Missouri The same goes for the Missouri Senate race, where Blunt is the rare Republican incumbent running behind Trump. He is up by just 1 point in statewide polling averages and hasn’t cracked 50 percent in months.

“This has been one of the big surprises of this Senate election season,” University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato told the Examiner‘s Susan Ferrechio. Few thought Burr would be in any danger this year.

Kander is 35 and has stoked anti-Washington sentiments in this year of Trump. “We won’t change Washington until we change the people we send there,” is his catchphrase. An Army veteran who enlisted after 9/11 and served in Afghanistan, he is hard to paint as a crazed liberal.

Blunt is 66 and was first elected to Congress 20 years ago. He was slow to realize that he might be in trouble and now faces allegations of coordinating with a super PAC. Some documents reportedly show him claiming a D.C. address rather than a Missouri one.

If Blunt goes down, it increases the Democrats’ chances of capturing the Senate. His loss wasn’t one Republicans were prepared to absorb.

7. Joe Heck vs. Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada The news isn’t all bad for Republicans. Congressman Joe Heck has been competitive in the race to replace retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in the upper house. An NBC/Marist poll showed him up 7 points against Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto. Cortez Masto was up by 1 in a Las Vegas Review-Journal poll.

Heck has disavowed Trump and is running a separate field operation from the top of the ticket. The Examiner‘s David Drucker reported they cleared 1 million voter contacts in mid-August, “with an emphasis on Hispanic and Asian voters,” and knock on 150,000 doors a week.

For her part, Cortez Masto seems to be running behind Clinton with Hispanic voters, a crucial demographic for Democrats in the state. That has given Republicans hope that they can actually pick up a seat this year rather than just playing defense.

Yet Reid has shown that the Democrats can pull a rabbit out of a hat in Nevada before. Reid trailed Republican Sharron Angle in the 2010 RealClearPolitics average and was regularly under 50 percent of the vote. On Election Day, he beat Angle by nearly 6 points and won an absolute majority. In 1998, Reid was re-elected by just 401 votes.

8. Richard Burr vs. Deborah Ross in North Carolina The emergence of North Carolina as a swing state is not a favorable trend for Republicans. But black voters and the Research Triangle have helped put the state that sent Jesse Helms to the Senate six times in play. Mitt Romney barely won there in 2012 and Trump is in a tight fight with Clinton this year.

Republican senators Lauch Faircloth and Elizabeth Dole have lost re-election races in North Carolina. Burr is at risk of joining them, although he is up 3.2 points in the state polling averages.

This is a bit of a rebound for Burr. In September, Ross was semi-regularly taking leads as high as 9 points. She has only led him once in October in poll included in the RCP average, by just 1 point, and she has tied him in another. Otherwise, Burr has held leads of up to 8 points, though generally much narrower than that.

Burr is generally running ahead not only of Trump but also embattled Republican Gov. Pat McCory, who faces a tough re-election battle against Democrat Roy Cooper this November. Not getting dragged down in the undertow is key for Burr — and possibly the Republican Senate majority.

BOTH PARTIES HAVE a good chance of success in all of the above races except Ohio, where the Republican is the clear favorite. The problem for Republicans is there are two other GOP-held seats that look all but lost:

1. Ron Johnson vs. Russ Feingold in Wisconsin A rematch of the 2010 Senate race, this was always going to be a difficult seat to defend. It is simply easier for a Republican to win with a midterm electorate and Gov. Scott Walker at the top of the ticket than in a presidential election year with Clinton beating Trump.

Johnson and Feingold are about as far apart ideologically as any two Senate opponents this year. Feingold was a liberal leading light through three Senate terms. Johnson was part of the Tea Party wave six years ago.

The problem is that Feingold’s politics are a better fit for the state overall, notwithstanding Walker and House Speaker Paul Ryan, while Johnson’s success looks more like an aberration. The national GOP has left him for dead but outside conservative groups aren’t giving up. A Marquette poll earlier this month showed Johnson cutting Feingold’s lead to a mere 2 points, CBS News/YouGov to 3.

So it might not be impossible for Johnson to win re-election. But two more recent polls show Feingold opening up leads of 8 to 12 points and Wisconsin would be susceptible to any Clinton wave. Trump wasn’t popular there even during the Republican primary and has troubled relations with the state’s GOP leaders. He’ll be of no help to Johnson, though he once hoped to put the state in play himself.

2. Mark Kirk vs. Tammy Duckworth in Illinois The race is the polar opposite of Portman against Strickland in that it is the hardest for the Republican to win. Mark Kirk was elected to this seat as a popular moderate in a Republican year against the backdrop of Democratic corruption and still won by just 2 points, taking less than 50 percent of the vote.

Now Kirk must win re-election against a tough Democratic challenger while Clinton is winning Illinois in a landslide with Barack Obama’s help. It’s a tall order, but Kirk has done just about everything he can to try to stay competitive.

Kirk was the first senator up for re-election to refuse to endorse Trump, long before any of the recent scandals. He voted against defunding Planned Parenthood. He was the second sitting GOP senator to support gay marriage (Portman was the first). He is the only Republican senator with an F rating from the NRA. He has hit Duckworth on her connection to the VA scandal, one of the Iraq war veteran’s few vulnerabilities.

For his efforts, Kirk is down by an average of 7 points and is pulling less than 40 percent of the vote. He is the most endangered incumbent on this list and he is not getting much help from the top of the ticket.

What often happens is that one party comes close to running the table in the tough Senate races. Until we see how that breaks in the final weeks of the campaign, the Republican majority in the Senate is very uncertain.