One month out from the US midterm elections, the state of the race, per Al Jazeera’s state-of-play report, is this: “Democrats have the momentum; Republicans are surging in defence and cash.” Which is a funny sentence, if you think about it for a second. In a normal contest, momentum and money travel together — donors like winners, winners attract donors, and the whole thing feeds on itself. Here, apparently, the two parties have agreed to divide the assets. One gets the voters. The other gets the money.
Start with the voters. A New York Times/Siena University poll released on October 2 found Democrats leading or tied in Senate races in five states that are traditionally Republican: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and Texas, according to USA Today. The paper notes this suggests Democrats are now in a plausible position to flip the chamber for the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term. Alaska and Kansas. If you are the party that holds the White House, those are not states where your Senate candidates are supposed to be having a competitive autumn. They are states where your Senate candidates are supposed to be having a nice nap.
This did not come out of nowhere. The Senate map has been tilting this way for weeks, with Iowa and Texas already in tossup territory and a Florida Republican cutting an ad telling the president he had gone too far, as we noted in forty days out. Democrats had also been clawing back Hispanic support across seven battleground states, one poll showed, after a grim 2024 for the party on that front. The president’s own plan, by all accounts, is less “win over the unpersuaded” and more “get on a plane most days and talk to people who already agree.” Sure. That is also a strategy.
Now the money. The Republican money advantage is real, and even Republicans describe it in a way that tells you everything. Here is Brit Hume, the Fox News analyst, assessing his party’s position, as quoted by The Hill: “They do have more money than the Democrats do, which could be spent wisely, one would imagine, to help them, but this 69 percent number that you show there on cost of living, I don’t think much is going to change on cost of living over the next month.”
“Could be spent wisely, one would imagine” is not a sentence you say about your own team’s war chest when you feel great about things. It is the political version of a football club that has just bought three expensive defenders announcing it is “confident in the project.” The point of spending money in the final month is to change what voters think. Hume’s point is that the thing voters think — that life costs too much, with 69 percent flagging it as a top concern in Fox’s own polling — is not the kind of thing a television ad can fix in four weeks. You can buy repetition. You cannot buy cheaper groceries.
So picture the incentives. On the Democratic side, the problem is abundance: suddenly there are competitive races in places the party had written off, and the party has to decide how much to pour into, say, Kansas, knowing that some of those leads are a point or two wide and polls have feelings. Overreach and you dilute the effort. Underreach and you wake up on November 4 having left a Senate majority on the table. On the Republican side, the problem is scarcity of everything except cash: plenty of money to defend seats, and a map that keeps adding seats to defend. Defence is expensive. Defence in Alaska is expensively expensive.
None of this means the election is decided. A month is a long time, red states are red for reasons that do not vanish in October, and money spent even semi-wisely does blunt bad polling at the margins — that is, after all, why campaigns raise it. But the shape of the final stretch is set, and it has a certain logic: one party is trying to expand a map it did not expect, the other is paying top dollar to hold a map it did. Anyway. Election Day is in November, and one side’s closing argument is, per its own analysts, “well, we can afford a lot of advertising.”