Control of the Senate in this year’s midterm elections is coming down to four hotly contested races — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania — in which only one Democratic candidate holds a steady lead over his Republican opponent, a poll released on Monday showed.
The New York Times/Siena College survey was in the field across the states between Oct. 19 and Oct. 27 — meaning most of the poll was conducted before the Oct. 25 debate between Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz.
In three of the states — Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — voters said they prefer Republicans to win a majority in the upper chamber. However, the poll also has the Democratic candidate leading in Arizona and Georgia.
Sen. Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat in the Grand Canyon State, holds a 6-percentage point lead over GOP challenger Blake Masters (51% to 45%).
In Georgia, Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock leads Republican Herschel Walker by three percentage points (49% to 46%), a result that would force a runoff between the two candidates on Dec. 6.
The poll of the Nevada Senate race between Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt shows both candidates tied on 47%.
And in Pennsylvania, Fetterman leads Oz by 49% to 44%, while Keystone State voters are also deadlocked 46% to 46% over whether Republicans or Democrats should control the Senate.
New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn tried to explain away the incongruous results on Twitter, saying the poll “[i]llustrates [the] key dynamic of the race — a favorable environment for Rs v. bad candidates — and helps square with the national picture.”
In a subsequent tweet, however, Cohn admitted a potential problem with the results.
“White [registered] Dems were 28% more likely to respond than white [registered] Reps,” he wrote. “That’s nothing like our national polling and quite a bit like 2020, when party quota/weighting was insufficient. That’s a troubling sign for nonresponse bias.”
“Definitely calls into question the reliability and validity of the results,” responded conservative writer and historian Varad Mehta.
“The best way to see horse race polling is through the lens is that [it] is a reasonably decent measure of public opinion but is perverted in a closely divided country by disproportionate motivation to respond among white progressives,” argued another user.
However, analyst Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics defended the Times results, tweeting: “You can’t [adjust the polls]. There’s no known national/statewide % for ‘likelihood of responding to polls’ or ‘social trust.'”
The Times/Siena poll found that while Pennsylvania voters gave Fetterman an edge over Oz, they are still concerned whether he is healthy enough, especially after his shaky debate performance last week in which he stumbled over words and sometimes lapsed into incoherence.
In calls to voters the day after the debate, a plurality said they believed Fetterman wasn’t healthy enough to serve in the Senate, but still preferred him as a candidate to Oz, the celebrity heart surgeon and longtime daytime talk show host.
Teresa Harry, an independent from York, Pa., said the debate made her question her support for Fetterman.
“Because he had a stroke he really couldn’t get his answers completely out the way he wanted to, so it makes me a little bit concerned to see if he’s going to be able to do the job,” she told the pollsters.
Still, Harry, who is disabled and lives with her 80-year-old mother said she worries about what Oz would vote to do to Medicare and Social Security.
“It’s just scary out there, and I think Oz would be against us,” she said.
The poll also showed all four Democratic Senate candidates far outrunning President Biden’s low approval ratings — 36% in Arizona, 38% in Nevada, 39% in Georgia and 42% in Pennsylvania.
Kelly, the former astronaut, enjoys the largest delta from Biden’s approval ratings (15 percentage points), while Fetterman has the closest gap (7 percentage points).
Andrew Swanson, an independent from Glendale, Ariz., said he was unhappy about Biden’s performance in the White House, but still intends to vote for Kelly.
” [Republican] Blake Masters has got all these wild ideas that he’s putting out there and talking about all these extremes,” he said.
But majorities of voters in all four states cite economic issues likes jobs, taxes and cost of living over favored Democratic themes like abortion, gun control and threats to democracy.
The New York Times/Siena College poll surveyed 604 likely voters in Arizona and Georgia, 885 likely voters in Nevada and 620 likely voters in Pennsylvania. The margin of error in the Arizona and Pennsylvania poll was plus-or-minus 4.4 percentage points. The margin of error in the Georgia poll was plus-or-minus 4.8 percentage points, and the margin of error in the Nevada poll was plus-or-minus 4.2 percentage points.
