The race for the House is tilting strongly toward the GOP, but the struggle for Senate control is still very much a slog that could go either way, even as late-breaking national winds favor the party out of power.
Every race will matter on Election Day as Republicans look to win control of the evenly divided chamber and severely curtail the second half of President Joe Biden's term.
Democrats have a shot in large part because the battleground states on the Senate map were mostly won by Biden in 2020, albeit narrowly. And even though Biden is deeply unpopular in many of those states two years later, Democratic incumbents and challengers amassed massive sums of money that allowed them to run on their own brands throughout the summer while their Republican opponents limped out of contentious primaries. This is where the nitty-gritty of campaign spending makes a difference: Candidates get more favorable advertising rates than the super PACs and outside groups that have had to come in and make up the difference for some Donald Trump-backed GOP nominees with lackluster fundraising.
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Democrats' challenge in the final days of the midterm elections is getting their base to turn out and persuading those remaining undecided voters -- especially those who voted for Biden two years ago but are dissatisfied with him today -- to stick with the president's party. That'll be easier said than done. Just 41% of US adults approved of Biden's performance, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released Wednesday. And Republican voters expressed greater engagement with this year's midterms than Democrats across multiple questions gauging voters' likelihood to vote.
That president's party often loses seats in Congress during the first midterms of a new administration, and lower Democratic enthusiasm would suggest we're on track for history to repeat itself. The enthusiasm gap (favoring Republicans by 14 points) is similar to the partisan gap in CNN's polling from 2010, when Republicans gained seats in the first midterm of Barack Obama's presidency.
This year's key issues for voters would also seem to advantage Republicans. More than half of likely voters in CNN's new poll identified the economy and inflation -- a central component of GOP attack ads -- as the most important factor in their vote for Congress. The Supreme Court's late June ruling overturning Roe v. Wade injected uncertainty into the political landscape, with a majority of Americans disapproving of that decision. But only 15% of likely voters in CNN's poll said abortion was the most important issue determining their vote. More broadly, nearly three-quarters of Americans think things in the country are going badly.
And yet, what's keeping this cycle interesting is the unpredictability and relative messiness of the Senate map -- with races sometimes moving in different directions. Despite Republicans picking up momentum across the country, for example, the seat most likely to flip is a GOP-held seat, not a Democratic-held one. Pennsylvania -- where GOP Sen. Pat Toomey is retiring -- tops the list, as it has since CNN first started compiling these rankings at the start of the cycle in early 2021. Rankings are based on CNN's reporting, fundraising and advertising data, and polling, as well as historical data about how states and candidates have performed. And two other GOP-held open seats -- North Carolina and Ohio -- have proved to be surprisingly competitive for Democrats this year, even if they're much less likely to flip.
But the race that could matter more than any other is a seat Democrats flipped last year. If neither candidate receives a majority of the vote in Georgia on November 8, the race will advance to a December 6 runoff. And if Senate control hinges on the Peach State -- as it did in 2020 -- we'll have to wait another month to learn which party holds the majority.
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