KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE
— The Montana Senate race moves from Toss-up to Leans Republican.
— We were very close to making this change in yesterday’s more expansive Senate update, but we were waiting for some additional polling evidence to do it. We got that polling shortly after publishing yesterday.
— This move means that a majority of Senate seats, 51, now are rated Safe, Likely, or Leaning Republican in our ratings.
Table 1: Senate rating change
Map 1: Crystal Ball Senate ratings
A big move in Montana
Today, the Crystal Ball is moving the crucial Senate election in Montana between Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) and businessman Tim Sheehy (R) from Toss-up to Leans Republican. The upshot of this rating change is that there are now 51 Senate seats rated as Safe, Likely, or Leaning Republican, so this move solidifies the Republicans as clear favorites to flip control of the Senate this November.
We know what devoted Crystal Ball readers are now asking themselves: What is going on here? Didn’t the Crystal Ball just publish a Senate update yesterday that kept the Montana Senate race as a Toss-up? So why change it now, just a day later?
This rating change indeed merits some explanation, as we did not expect to make it so soon after yesterday’s update. But we think the change is a logical extension of what we wrote yesterday, which was that we thought Sheehy was leading but we wanted to see a little more information before moving the race and making Tester, a veteran, successful incumbent, an underdog in our ratings.
Specifically, we wrote the following (in italics below):
We have been debating whether to change our rating for Montana’s contest—we are pulling back the curtain a bit here, although we are also constantly monitoring every race for potential rating changes. In canvassing our contacts from both sides over the past week or so, we came to the conclusion that Sheehy likely is ahead, although not necessarily by much.
The bulk of the recent public polling also suggests Sheehy is ahead. However, the only nonpartisan poll of that race that appears to come from a source that the New York Times defines as “select” was from early August, when Emerson College showed Sheehy leading Tester by just a 48%-46% margin. Another recent poll, from KULR-TV in Billings, gave Sheehy a 51%-45% lead, although Democrats emphasize that this survey was published shortly after Trump held a rally in the state aimed at boosting Sheehy. We’d like to see a little more, ideally from a highly-rated public pollster, before moving to a Leans Republican rating. One challenge is that Montana is not polled very often, and because it is not a presidential swing state, it has not received much attention from prominent public pollsters.
Ask and you shall receive: Little did we know that just hours after publishing this story, another Montana poll from a source we find credible would appear: AARP commissioned a bipartisan polling team of Fabrizio Ward (a Republican firm) and David Binder Research (a Democratic firm) to survey Montana, and the poll came out mid-day Thursday. These are two respected firms on either side of the aisle (the New York Times lists this poll as “select”) and AARP, the sponsor, is a venerable, nonpartisan organization that has been sponsoring useful polling conducted by bipartisan polling teams. No pollster or pollster combination is perfect, of course, but this is the kind of poll we had in mind when we wrote yesterday that we wanted some additional information about this race before moving the race from the Toss-up category.
The poll found Sheehy leading Tester 51%-45% in a two-person race, and 49%-41% when Libertarian and Green candidates were included. These are solid leads for Sheehy, whether in the head-to-head or the multi-party race, and they are similar to some other polling that has been released over the past few months. Just one recent poll we are aware of, from Scott Rasmussen’s RMG Research, has had Tester ahead recently, 49%-44%. Every other recent one has had Sheehy leading—the smallest lead was 2 points in the Emerson College poll we cited Thursday, and a few others had Sheehy leading by margins similar to what the AARP poll suggested. In other words, the AARP poll generally reinforced some of the other polling that’s already out there.
We can see critics of this rating decision arguing, in effect, that we are changing the rating in the cycle’s most important Senate race based on a single poll. But that is not what we are doing. We already were fairly close to being convinced that this was no longer truly a Toss-up race—in our analysis yesterday, we identified Ohio as the “truer” of our two Toss-ups at the time—but we wanted a little more information before doing it. The AARP poll amounted to that last bit of information we were seeking.
Readers sometimes ask us what our schedule is for making rating changes—the answer is that there is no schedule, we just move when we think we have sufficient reason to move. We didn’t feel like we had enough reason to move yesterday, but we do feel that way today.
Beyond the polling, history and recent trends are just not on Tester’s side, as we have mentioned previously. He is one of a relatively small number of partisan outliers in either chamber of Congress, holding a Senate seat that the other party won by 16 points in the most recent presidential election. Many of Tester’s red-state Democratic colleagues have lost or retired in recent years, and it is a credit to his abilities that he has won 3 Senate elections in a state that is otherwise clearly Republican. Democrats used to routinely win statewide elections in Montana, but that is no longer the case—this is similar to West Virginia, a Safe Republican Senate pickup this cycle following now-independent Sen. Joe Manchin’s decision to retire. Perhaps ticket-splitting returns in force this year—if it did, Tester could still survive. But the longer-term trend is clearly toward less ticket-splitting.
We would also stress that Leans does not mean Safe. Montana is a challenging state to poll, and both sides remain very heavily invested there. Polls can be wrong—one big misfire recently was underestimating Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in 2020, a fellow small-state senator who is the only person to win a Senate race in either 2016 or 2020 at the same time as her party was losing the state for president (a feat Tester is trying to replicate now). If Tester does lose, though, Democrats will have no path to win the Senate majority unless they can somehow put a currently Republican-held seat in play. We have heard from Democrats angling for the party to more aggressively go after Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rick Scott (R-FL), and Democrats would have to pick up one of these seats (or an even longer-shot GOP-held target) to have a path to holding the Senate if Tester can’t hang on. As we wrote yesterday, we are monitoring Florida and Texas, but they are only on the periphery of the competitive board in our ratings at Likely Republican.
Today’s change means we only have one Senate race, Ohio, rated as a Toss-up. Democrats surely hope we’ll have to eat crow on today’s update and pull Montana back into the Toss-up category later in the cycle. Republicans hope that 1 or more of the 5 swing state Senate battlegrounds fall into that category soon (we discussed all of this in yesterday’s update).
As of now, we do feel truly conflicted only about the Ohio race, although we have a sneaking suspicion that the amount of uncertainty about a few of these races will increase as opposed to decrease as we get closer to the election.