On Monday, Daily Kos Elections rolled out its new 2018 elections portal. It’s a place with one-stop shopping for elections geeks, with interactive maps showing our race ratings and with polling data from our partners at Civiqs. Maybe most significantly, we have separate Senate, House, and gubernatorial pages, where you can look in more detail at each of those three battlegrounds. Click on any state on those pages and you can get a full list of polls released in those races, along with a trendline that charts the current polling average in each state.
Each week, we’re going to be talking in more detail about each of these battlegrounds, with separate posts about how each of the Senate, House, and governors’ situations are shaping up. Today, we’re going to start with the Senate. The House, oddly enough, has seemed to get the most attention in the runup to the 2018 election, probably because it always seemed a better shot for the Democrats to flip one chamber and restore divided government. (Democrats need to flip 24 seats to take control of the House, which seems like a lot, but midterm waves quite often reach that size for the party out of the White House. And a phenomenal pace of House Republican retirements, often in already vulnerable seats, certainly greased the skids toward that goal.)
The Senate, by contrast, was always kind of the ugly duckling of the duo. Because 2018 is the boomerang for the very successful Democratic Senate campaigns of the 2012 election, there are only nine Republican-held seats up for grab this year (including a special election in Mississippi), and that’s compounded by the problem of the Democrats having to defend a number of seats in dark-red states. Most prognosticators have stayed skeptical about Democratic odds of flipping the Senate, even while considering a House takeover likelier than not.
In recent weeks, though, the Senate has started to move a bit more toward center stage — potentially very important, because, as nice as control of the House would be from an oversight perspective, it’s only the Senate that gives you control over the power of confirmation for the federal courts and executive branch positions. That shift in focus may partly be because, as things increasingly fall apart for House Republicans, many prognosticators have started treating a flip in the House as almost a given (note: it’s not a given, and please don’t treat it that way) … but also because several key Senate races have either solidified a bit for the Democrats (i.e. Florida) or moved more visibly into contention (i.e. Texas), making the math more plausible. The path to a majority still requires almost everything to go right for them, but it’s also becoming more clearly visible.
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