CNN’s top numbers cruncher couldn’t hide his surprise as he walked through Senate polling in states Republicans once considered safe.
Appearing Thursday on “Anderson Cooper 360,” CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten pulled up polling averages in races from Kansas to Texas and found Democrats tied or narrowly ahead. “My goodness gracious, you really can’t get tighter than this,” he said.
Enten told Cooper the chamber had not looked competitive when the year began. “When we started off this year, I don’t think that most people thought that the Senate was really going to be in play,” he said. “But where we are right now, the Senate is very much in play.”
He pointed to a tie in Kansas, which hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, and a one-point Democratic edge in Iowa, which President Donald Trump won by double digits. Democrats led by two in Maine and by three in Texas, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1988. Michigan was “very tight,” Enten said, while former Sen. Sherrod Brown held a four-point lead in Ohio as he tries to return to the Senate.
“We can take Maine. We can turn it blue. We can turn Ohio blue, we can turn Michigan blue. We can turn Iowa blue and we can turn Texas blue,” Enten said, noting that Alaska polling was also tilting blue. If the polls hold, he said, “the Democrats will be on their way to a majority.”
Cooper asked what history says about polling accuracy in Senate races, and Enten warned of a familiar pattern. “Sometimes it feels like deja vu all over again, Anderson,” he said. “It feels like I’m Yogi Berra, and we’ve seen this story before.”
In the Trump era, he said, Republicans have outperformed their final Senate polling averages in states Trump won by an average of 4.1 points. That matters because Democrats need to flip places like Texas, Alaska, Iowa and Ohio, which Trump carried by double digits in 2024. A repeat of that miss would leave Republicans in control.
“So the question ultimately is, is the polling going to be right this time around or Republicans going to outperform like they have in the past?” Enten said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
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