Sadiq S BhatWashington, DC — Voting in the US midterm elections has started 46 days before Election Day, with Democrats ahead in the polls and Republicans ahead in ad spending.
Campaigns are calling it the home stretch.
David Levine, a law professor at the University of California, doubts the money will matter much. “I think that in this year, large amounts of PAC (Political Action Committee) money may not be all that effective,” he told TRT World.
Voters “get saturated with advertisements,” and “the marginal returns will be minimal in most places.”
Early voting opened in Virginia on Friday, and voters in Idaho, Minnesota and South Dakota can cast absentee ballots in person.
Republican candidates and groups have reserved more than $557 million in advertising in the nine most competitive Senate races, against $343 million for Democrats, according to an NPR analysis of data from the tracking firm AdImpact.
Three Trump-aligned groups, among them the MAGA Inc. super PAC, added more than $150 million in reservations over the past two weeks.
A super PAC can raise unlimited sums as long as it acts independently of a campaign.
The US Supreme Court also opened more room for party spending in June, ruling 6-3 that limits on how much a party can spend in coordination with its candidates violate the First Amendment.
The polls point the other way.
A Marquette Law School survey released on Wednesday found 54 percent of likely voters backing a Democrat for Congress and 41 percent a Republican.
President Donald Trump’s approval hovers around 37 percent.
Prices over ads
The reason sits in the checkout line.
Marquette found inflation and the cost of living the top concern for 37 percent of Americans, and only 19 percent approve of Trump’s handling of it.
Grocery bills are higher than six months ago, say 81 percent. Gasoline prices have climbed since the war with Iran began on February 28, say 80 percent.
Levine ties those prices to Trump’s tariffs and the war with Iran, and says many voters have already made up their minds.
“A late surge in advertising may not move the needle,” he says, especially if the ads try to convince voters that things are wonderful while gas station signs say otherwise.
Votes already cast
Levine expects a big surge in early and mail voting from people “eager to express their opposition to administration policies.”
Voters excited by candidates such as Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, may be among the first at the polls. That blunts late advertising, he says, “because those votes will already have been cast.”
The US Senate has 100 members. Republicans currently hold 53 seats and Democrats hold 47, counting two independents who vote with them.
Democrats need a net gain of four for a majority. At 50-50, Vice President JD Vance would break ties for Republicans.
The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election forecaster, lists seven Senate races as toss-ups: Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas. Five are Republican-held.
On Tuesday, Cook moved New Hampshire, where Democratic Representative Chris Pappas faces former senator John Sununu, from lean Democratic to toss-up.
Texas pits Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, against Democratic state Representative James Talarico. Ohio has Senator Jon Husted against former Senator Sherrod Brown.
In Maine, Senator Susan Collins is seeking a sixth term against Troy Jackson, a former state Senate president.
Democrats must win in several states Trump carried in 2024, including Texas, Ohio, Alaska, and Iowa, while holding Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire.
The House is the shorter climb: Republicans hold 218 seats to the Democrats’ 214, with one independent and two vacancies.
Experts say redistricting does not change national generic-ballot polls. It changes how those votes turn into House seats.
Mid-decade maps in Texas, California, Florida, Ohio and several other states moved about 35 million people into new districts and gave Republicans a net structural estimated edge of roughly two to six seats versus the 2024 map.
Texas and Florida added Republican-leaning seats; California offset much of that with Democratic-leaning seats.
Democrats therefore need a larger popular-vote margin than a bare majority to take the House, though current leads of seven to eight points still put them ahead in most forecasts.
Other factors that can still move the numbers in the next six weeks include gas prices and inflation data, developments in the Iran war, the makeup of early and mail voters, candidate-level events in toss-up Senate and House races, and turnout gaps among younger voters, Hispanics, and independents.
Late-cycle tightening or polling error also remain possible.
David N. Gibbs, a professor of history at the University of Arizona, expects the usual midterm penalty for the party in the White House.
Republicans, he says, “will almost certainly continue this trend and will lose Congressional seats.”
He points to a “poor state of the economy” and warns that “the Republican losses in Congress could be even greater than current polls suggest.”
