Who will win the Senate?

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published 3 November 2020

President Trump's entire first term has coincided with a narrow Republican majority in the Senate. While a two-thirds supermajority that could have removed him from office after impeachment has not recently been within reach of either party, the slim advantage made the difference in confirming Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, in filling dozens of other federal judgeships, and in passing the Republican tax bill in 2017.

If Trump is re-elected on Tuesday, he will face divided government regardless of the composition of the Senate, since control of the House is supremely unlikely to change hands. But if Joe Biden wins, there is a distinct possibility that his presidency could begin with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Here are eight races that could shift the current 53-47 balance in the upper chamber.

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The outcome of this one is not remotely in doubt. The incumbent Democrat Jones won a narrow victory in 2018 over Roy Moore after the former judge was accused of sexually assaulting (among other accusers) a girl as young as 14. This time he is facing Tuberville, a beloved Auburn University football coach. This is a state in which the Democrats did not even field a candidate in 2014. It will revert in 2020.

However unpopular Collins is with conservative activists after voting against Barrett (to say nothing of her moderate views on a number of issues), her decision to caucus with the Republicans remains valuable to the party's leadership. Has she been too clever by half? Polling in this race has been all over the place, but the smart money is on her being unable to overcome what looks likely to be a double-digit Trump defeat. That said, in the past she has consistently outperformed Republican presidential candidates in Maine.

In her first re-election campaign, Ernst found herself trailing Greenfield in polls for several months, but recently the race appears to have tightened considerably. Ernst now leads most polls even as Biden appears to have overtaken Trump. While Ernset has occasionally tried to distance herself from the president, I think that support for her is likely to track with Trump's performance on Tuesday. If Biden's lead is for real, she is going down. I have my doubts.

For a brief period some polls suggested that James, a businessman who ran against the state's other incumbent Democratic senator in 2018, was outperforming the president in Michigan. This was always supremely unlikely, not least because Michigan has a history of split ticket voting in the opposite direction. Trump's showing here is James's ceiling. Both Biden and Peters appear to have a roughly five-point advantage on the eve of the election. A victory for James would be the most shocking upset of this year's Senate contests. But I know plenty of real-life Trump supporters who are comfortable with the moderate Peters.

Thanks to the retirement of one Republican incumbent in what would otherwise not have been an election year, there are actually two Senate seats up for grabs in Georgia this year. Thanks to the stupidity of Georgia's election system, candidates in each will have to win an outright majority of at least 50 percent of the vote in order to prevent run-off elections whose outcomes would not be decided until January. Perdue, who is running his first re-election campaign, appears to be slightly behind his challenger Osoff, who failed to win a special House election in the state in 2017. The other race, in which Loeffler (who was appointed to finish Johnny Isakson's term following his retirement) is trailing in a three-way race that pits her against Warnock, a popular African-American clergyman in Atlanta, and Collins, a conservative Republican congressman, is even messier. Both will come down to the question of whether this is the year that Georgia finally turns purple, something that was widely expected in 2018. I still don't think we are quite there, though it would be amusing to see an election in which there are more GOP defections in the South than there are in the post-industrial Midwest.

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.

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