This is their 4 months out snapshot….
It’s kinda up in the air….
But Democrats would need some heavy lifting to make Chuck Schumer the Majority Senate leader in January….
January 2021 is another story…
How are Democratic incumbents doing in Indiana, Michigan and Missouri, three other states that Trump carried in 2016? There haven’t been recent, non-partisan polls of those states’ Senate contests. Nor are there recent polls in Arizona, Nevada or Tennessee, the three GOP-held seats that surveys back in April suggested Democrats could win. Another state to watch, but where there has not been much polling is Minnesota, where Democrats have two incumbents (Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, Al Franken’s replacement). Trump lost there by only 2 percentage points in 2016.
Overall, the landscape is better for Democrats than it seemed at this time last year. But more recently, several things have broken the Republicans’ way. Republicans avoided nominating the controversial Don Blankenship in West Virginia. Scandal-plagued Eric Greitens resigned from the governorship in Missouri, removing a potential political problem for Missouri Attorney General and GOP U.S. Senate candidate Josh Hawley. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who has brain cancer and has not been on Capitol Hill for months, opted not to resign. If he had stepped down by May 31, there would have been a special election this November for his seat. But now, if McCain’s seat is vacant (either because he dies or steps down from office), GOP Gov. Doug Ducey will appoint his replacement.
The Weekly Standard’s David Byler (a friend of our site) this week released an election model estimating that Democrats have a 31 percent chance of winning the Senate. FiveThirtyEight will have its own model, but I think Byler’s conclusion broadly lines up with what we know right now about the Senate dynamics…..