Election wonks don’t play favorites with polls. We love them all equally. (Translation: We do our best to judge them impartially based on their past accuracy, methodology, question wording, context and other relevant factors.) But it’s hard not to have a soft spot for surveys that offer something unique—such as Morning Consult’s Senator Approval Rankings.
This poll regularly gauges the approval rating of each Senator in his or her home state, making it easy to compare them to each other and track changes in their popularity over time. And the data is mixed for both parties.
The Good News for Democrats / Bad News for Republicans
If Democrats want to retake the Senate in 2018, their best bet is to hold onto seats in Trump country while picking off a few Republicans. In order to do that, red state incumbent Democrats need to partially separate themselves from the party’s national brand and maintain their own image. The polling suggests some Democrats are doing just that.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has an approval rating of 53 percent, despite over two thirds of Mountain State voters having chosen Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota is also above water at 55 percent approval, despite Trump winning her state by over 30 points. In Montana Jon Tester also has a 53 percent approval rating. These numbers are arguably good news for Democrats—if all three of these senators were more closely associated with the national Democratic brand, their approval ratings would likely be lower and it would be easier for the GOP to flip those seats.
And Republican Dean Heller’s approval rating in Nevada is another piece of good news for Democrats: Heller sits at 39 percent approval in a state where Trump’s approval rating is (according to an earlier Morning Consult poll) only 43.6 percent. Democrats have relatively few pickup opportunities in 2018, so they’ll likely view Heller’s low numbers here (and in the primary) as signs of weakness.
The Good News for Republicans / Bad News for Democrats
While some red state Democrats are already above 50 percent approval, others aren’t faring so well.
Missouri’s Claire McCaskill has a 42 percent approval rating. Now, almost 1-in-5 Missourians either don’t have an opinion of McCaskill or don’t know if they approve or disapprove of her—but even so, it’s unclear how much upside she has. A September Morning Consult poll put Trump’s approval rating in the state at 49.4 percent here, with 44.6 percent disapproving. In other words, McCaskill’s brand probably isn’t as strong as Manchin’s, Tester’s or Heitkamp’s. Indiana Democrat Joe Donnelly fares better than McCaskill (47 percent approve, 26 percent disapprove, and 27 percent don’t know or are unsure), but those numbers aren’t great, either.
It’s also worth noting that some of the most successful red state Democrats (Heitkamp, Tester, and Manchin) aren’t all that far above 50 percent. Their positions aren’t completely safe. As others have pointed out, the general election hasn’t really started yet—and once it does, Republican challengers might try to tie their opponents to the Affordable Care Act and national Democrats. And while not every voter in West Virginia, North Dakota, and Montana will think that their senator is ideologically identical to Hillary Clinton (they aren’t), Republicans might only need to pull them down a few points to make the races competitive.
The last piece of favorable news for the GOP is that Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who is no longer running for re-election, registered a 33 percent approval rating. Flake’s low numbers bolster the case that he might have had a hard time winning re-election next November. If Republicans nominate a capable candidate—not a given, by the way—then Flake’s absence will likely improve their chances of keeping the seat. (For a more thorough analysis, see here).
The Underlying Dynamic Remains the Same
This polling shows that the basic dynamic of the 2018 Senate race—Democrats face a bad map, but Trump’s unpopularity might help them—is, for now, unchanged. If Hillary Clinton were president and Democrats faced a typical midterm penalty, it might be more difficult for red state Democratic senators to keep their seats. But at the moment the map and the national environment are still pushing against each other.
