Democrats May Have Found the Recipe for Flipping Red-State Senate Seats
On paper, the Democrats’ path to winning the Senate in November is daunting. They need to flip at least two seats that President Trump won by 11 percentage points or more — no party has pulled off a similar feat since 2008. But in polls over the last month, the party’s path to the Senate hasn’t seemed daunting at all. Since Labor Day, Democrats have been tied or ahead in nearly every nonpartisan poll of not just two but five states that voted for Mr. Trump by between 11 and 16 points: Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Kansas. Today’s latest New York Times/Siena polls continue the streak. They find Democrats ahead in Texas, Alaska and Ohio; tied in Kansas; and down by only one point in Iowa. If the polls were to be exactly right — they won’t be — Democrats would take the Senate with room to spare.
This is an extraordinary run of polls for Democrats, most of all in Texas and Alaska. The Times/Siena polls — and others over the last month — show Democrats building a consistent and potentially meaningful lead in both states. If Democrats won Texas and Alaska, held their own seats and added North Carolina, as expected, they would need to win only one more Republican-held state, whether in Maine, Ohio, Iowa or Kansas, or elsewhere. Of course, leading polls in September is not the same thing as winning in November — especially in Republican-leaning states, where polls have often overestimated Democrats. And even if they’re not overestimating them this time, Republicans need only to win back reliably Republican voters over the next month to prevail. This is harder than it sounds in this political environment, but it would not be a surprise if they did so. Republicans will have the financial resources they need to make their case. Nonetheless, just about everything has gone right for the Democrats so far. They enter the final month of the campaign in a better position than anyone would have imagined when the year began. While the story varies somewhat by state, Democrats are cooking with the same recipe across all five contests: At a time when Mr. Trump is very unpopular, Democrats have nominated popular, relatively moderate candidates against surprisingly unpopular Republicans. Ingredient No. 1: TrumpBy now, it’s hard to be surprised by bad poll results for Mr. Trump. Still, these results from such Republican-leaning states — which gave Mr. Trump an average of 56 percent of the vote in 2024 — are striking. Across the five states, the president’s approval rating was just 40 percent, while 57 percent had an unfavorable view. That’s not much better than Mr. Trump’s ratings in recent national polls. The results also represent a significant decline in his support since our last polls in four of these states in June. Since then, his ratings have fallen by five points. There are two basic possible explanations for how Mr. Trump’s numbers are this bad in these states. One is that his ratings have continued to slide everywhere, not just in these states, since our last Times/Siena poll, which wouldn’t necessarily be hard to explain with gas prices and mortgage rates rising. Another possibility is that Mr. Trump is suffering disproportionate losses in these five Republican-leaning states. Demographics, alone, would not be a sufficient explanation. It would take something more, like greater exposure to high diesel prices in the Farm Belt. Or there could even be a break in Mr. Trump’s support among the traditional Republicans who never loved Mr. Trump’s conduct or his policies on issues like tariffs or immigration, but nonetheless consistently backed him in every general election. Interestingly, all five of these states voted against Mr. Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Ingredient No. 2: Candidate qualityIn all five states, Democrats have something more going for them, even beyond Mr. Trump’s extraordinary unpopularity: a significant advantage in candidate quality. Let’s take the simplest measure: favorability. In all five states, more voters view the Democrat favorably than unfavorably, while more voters view the Republican candidate unfavorably than favorably. This is a real triumph for Democrats in such reliably Republican states. They’ve managed to find candidates who are both personally appealing and ideologically acceptable to red-state voters. In all five states, voters say that the phrase “has good character” describes the Democratic candidate better than the Republican. In four of the five states (in the fifth, Ohio, it’s essentially even), a greater share of voters say the Republican is “too far to the right” than say the Democrat is “too far to the left.” In contrast, a majority of voters in all five states said the Democratic Party was “too far” to the left, and did not say the Republican Party was “too far” to the right. That’s to be expected in Republican-leaning states, and yet it didn’t translate to the candidates themselves. Let’s look at some of the results by state. Perfect storm in TexasOf all the polls, none capture the Republican challenge better than Texas, where the Democrat James Talarico is leading the Republican Ken Paxton by six points. If Democrats are cooking with the same recipe in all five of these states, Texas is the one where Republicans have contributed the finest ingredients. The president’s approval rating has fallen to just 38 percent among likely voters there — the same as in our last national poll — and Mr. Paxton is the least popular of all 10 Senate candidates tested in these polls. And all of this is occurring in a state where Hispanic voters, who are swinging hard toward the Democrats, represent a large share of the electorate. While the G.O.P. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to bring down Mr. Talarico, so far his candidacy appears essentially undamaged. His favorable ratings actually ticked up since the last Times/Siena poll in June. Only 40 percent say he’s “too far to the left,” barely changed from 39 percent in June — and less than the 47 percent who say Mr. Paxton is “too far to the right.” If there’s a “glass half full” interpretation for Republicans, it’s that the poll found a very favorable electorate for Democrats. If the poll is right about who will show up to vote, then many Trump voters — especially Hispanic and young Trump voters — will stay home. At the same time, an influx of new Democratic-leaning voters would enter the electorate. Together, the electorate jolts to the left. If the 2024 electorate showed up, the race would be a dead heat. Alaska primaries and ranked choiceCan a seven-point lead for a Democrat in Alaska be unsurprising? If there ever were a case, this might be it. Unlike most states, Alaska holds a top-four primary — all candidates from every party compete on the same ballot, and the top four candidates advance. In this year’s primary, the Democrat Mary Peltola finished eight points ahead of the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan — quite similar to the result of the poll. One twist on the ballot — and in our poll — is the other Dan Sullivan. Yes, two people named Dan Sullivan are running for Senate in Alaska, and the other Dan Sullivan will indeed appear on the ballot in November. This was an unexpected issue back in our June poll, when we didn’t specify which Dan Sullivan we were talking about — and may have gotten a handful of confused, serious or trolling responses. To avoid it this time, we asked voters about Dan Sullivan “the incumbent” (as he is described on the ballot). A.I. in OhioAs I wrote after our last national poll, artificial intelligence hasn’t quite emerged as a top-tier issue in electoral politics. For now, it’s a third-tier issue like climate change — something that activists care about and that might matter in a race under certain circumstances, but that doesn’t yet shape national electoral outcomes. That story basically held in our state polls, with one exception: Ohio, where the Democrat Sherrod Brown led the Republican Jon Husted by three points. In Ohio, 3 percent of voters said A.I. was the most important issue to their vote, compared with about 0.3 percent of voters in the other states. That may not sound like a big difference, but that puts A.I. alongside issues that regularly affect the outcome of national elections and the partisan leanings of a broader share of the electorate, like abortion or health care. Ohio has been an epicenter of the backlash over data centers, and Mr. Brown was an early mover in trying to capitalize on the issue against the incumbent, Mr. Husted. As my colleague Shane Goldmacher reported in August, a memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that “more than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.” The Times/Siena poll found that voters preferred Mr. Brown on A.I. and data centers by 10 points — a bigger lead on A.I. than any candidate had in any of the polls. It was Mr. Brown’s biggest lead on any question. Can Hamilton gain in Kansas?Kansas? If you’re not the kind of person who follows the latest polls (and we have a great new page tracking the latest polls, if you would like to do so), you might be surprised that we’re polling Kansas at all. But it has been on the edge of the radar for a while, and over the last month a string of nonpartisan, Democratic and Republican polls have all shown an extremely close race. Our poll shows a tie. How are Democrats so competitive in Kansas? There are a lot of factors, but what might get them over the top is the appeal of their candidate, Adam Hamilton. He is the senior pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, and he’s a first-time candidate who says he’s running against socialism and health care cuts. Mr. Hamilton has the highest net favorability rating of any of the candidates tested in these polls, and he may have more room to grow. Overall, 28 percent of likely voters said they hadn’t heard of him. The danger for Republicans is obvious: If more voters learn that he’s no ordinary Democrat, Mr. Hamilton might gain more support. Mr. Hamilton is actually performing worse than the Democratic Party on the generic congressional ballot among the voters who haven’t heard of him. Among the voters who do have an opinion of him, he’s running 12 points ahead of the generic ballot — which would be enough for him to win. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Send me a note at dear.upshot@nytimes.com.
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