Democrats pin Senate hopes on voter fury as midterm polls open

Voters are heading to the polls with Democrats betting that raw discontent will carry them. The Economist's forecast model hands the party a 94% chance of flipping the House of Representatives. Senate ad spending on these midterms is expected to set a record, blowing past even the 2024 presidential race.

It has been a rough cycle for Republicans, who have been dragged down by an omnipresent and unpopular Donald Trump and voters angry over his policies. He promised lower prices, then launched a war and imposed tariffs that raised them. Republican attempts to gerrymander their way to holding the House look set to fail, and the party is now defending Senate seats in places that used to be safe ground.

Two late twists scrambled the closing days. In Michigan, Haley Stevens — the pro-Israel Democrat who narrowly lost her Senate primary to the more progressive Abdul El-Sayed — issued a last-minute endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers. In Alaska, a New York Times report says Democratic nominee Mary Peltola's campaign recruited a candidate with the same name as her Republican opponent to drain his votes. Both stories landed too late to move polling averages, and prediction markets shrugged: on Kalshi, Peltola still sits at a 72% chance of winning, while El-Sayed climbed to 78% by the afternoon of November 2nd.

That El-Sayed number tracks the final batch of New York Times/Siena surveys, released November 1st, which pointed to something bigger than a blue wave. They put El-Sayed up by 11 percentage points and showed Democrats leading in other Senate battlegrounds by anywhere from one to seven points. Markets now make Democrats 75% favourites for the Senate, and Nate Silver's forecast puts them at 82%.

The Economist's own model is far more cautious, pegging a Senate flip at just 53%. The gap comes down to history: the model assumes polls nationwide overstate Democrats by roughly a point, and that skew runs deeper in states that usually vote Republican — Texas, Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and Ohio among them. In those core red battlegrounds, The Economist's win probabilities sit around 20 percentage points below Kalshi's prices, a gap worth about 2.5 points of margin. Ohio polls show Democrat Sherrod Brown's lead over Republican incumbent Jon Husted shrinking.

Even so, the model favours Democrats in enough states — Maine, Michigan and North Carolina included — to reach 49 Senate seats, with even odds in three more, Alaska, Ohio and Texas, that could deliver the 50th and the majority-making 51st. South Carolina, which Trump won by 18 points two years ago, is now tied after Lindsey Graham's death in July and the appointment of his politically inexperienced sister Darline to his seat. Trump's closing pitch has leaned on spurious claims that El-Sayed is a jihadist, boasts about new pipes in the capital's reflecting pool and praise for Husted's posterior, while Democrat James Talarico, chasing Texas's first Democratic Senate seat in more than three decades, gets a 52% shot. At a Houston rally, he framed the race his way: affordability and corruption are the same crisis.