⭐️ Democrats could be getting a #Senate #bump
A big question has been how much Harris’s momentum might filter down to other Democrats this election year
— particularly with both the House and Senate very much in play.
It wasn’t guaranteed it would help, especially given that Senate Democrats were already overperforming Biden.
Well, we got a big new set of Senate polls from the Cook Political Report on Thursday,
and they suggest the Democrats got a significant bump there, too.
♦️Democrats improved their margins by an average of four points across five key Senate races:
Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
They now lead in each race by at least seven points.
♦️Democrats also flipped the generic ballot
— where people are asked to choose between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat
— in two other states that don’t feature a 2024 Senate race:
Georgia and North Carolina.
In total, Democrats actually gained more down ballot than they did in the presidential race in every state except Wisconsin.
We don’t have a ton of other new polls, but the ones we have do suggest some of these races have moved slightly in Democrats’ direction in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
I wrote in my newsletter Wednesday about whether Democrats can dream about actually holding on to the Senate,
which will be very tough given how slanted the map is against them with the specific seats that are up in 2024.
They basically need to sweep all the races mentioned above,
and then some.
It’s worth awaiting more data.
But these numbers have to tempt them to dream beyond just the presidential race.