Senate control 'on knife's edge'

Some $400 million has already been spent in the battle for the Senate. Yet the record-shattering early money has hardly budged the half-dozen races that will decide the fate of the upper chamber, and two months out from Election Day, top officials from both parties say the election truly could go either way.

POLITICO interviewed two dozen party operatives and campaign aides about their outlook for November. Most said the GOP has a slight edge because the playing field tilts conservative. But the overwhelming sentiment was uncertainty about what will happen.


“There are probably five states where there’s a statistical tie right now,” said Rob Portman, vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Many of them are right on the knife’s edge.” Ty Matsdorf, the campaigns and communications director at Senate Majority PAC, the biggest outside Democratic group, said, “You have six races that you could conceivably call a coin flip.”

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Among the takeaways:

— Republicans believe President Barack Obama’s unpopularity will ultimately sink some of the most endangered Senate Democrats. But it hasn’t happened yet. The deep home-state roots of Democratic incumbents like Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska have helped insulate them from the president so far. “Given his unpopularity today, we can win. If Obama becomes more unpopular, then we can’t win,” a top Democratic strategist said. “That’s what we think about.”

— Sources say Republicans assume that an ambitious Democratic turnout initiative will give the party a potentially significant 1- or 2-percentage point boost in some key states. Both parties’ turnout operations could be critical because the avalanche of TV ads is fueling concern that voters will simply tune them out. One recent GOP focus group in North Carolina showed voters are disgusted by incessant negativity on the airwaves.

— GOP hopes last fall that anti-Obamacare sentiment would dominate the midterm election haven’t materialized. That has played into the Democratic strategy of turning key contests into discrete battles fought on local terms. In North Carolina, Democrats are criticizing Republican statehouse Speaker Thom Tillis’s actions on education, and in Alaska GOP nominee Dan Sullivan is fending off attacks over his support for a controversial mining project. One wild card: the executive actions that Obama may take this month on immigration, which Republicans believe could drive their voters to the polls.

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— Though Republican outside groups have outspent Democratic groups by a wide margin — roughly $100 million to $68 million — more than one-fifth of the GOP spending appears to have gone toward Republican primaries. Democrats, on the other hand, have spent almost exclusively on beating up Republican challengers before they have had a chance to fully introduce themselves — and their damaged approval ratings reflect the barrage. On the flip side, the GOP establishment’s muscular intervention in primaries has spared them the humiliations of another Todd Akin or Christine O’Donnell.

If Democrats manage to hold on, money will be a big reason. After the GOP lost two Senate seats and the presidential election in 2012, big GOP donors resisted opening their wallets again for months. Despite raising record-breaking sums, the NRSC is still trailing its Democratic counterpart by about $30 million over the course of the election. Democrats have benefited from a slew of high-dollar fundraisers headlined by Obama, who wants to keep the Senate out of GOP hands for the remainder of his presidency.

There are other important dynamics at play. Conservatives have gravitated toward contributing to 501(c)(4) nonprofits, where their names are not disclosed publicly, as opposed to super PACs. But the nonprofits must run issue-focused ads, which research shows are not as effective as straight attack ads.

( Also on POLITICO: Halfway House: GOP falling short in midterms)

“Harry Reid has been effective at pointing donors to super PACs and not (c)(4),” said a plugged-in Republican at an outside group. “That has let them run more efficient ads.”

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Control of the Senate will be decided in the South. Taking for granted that Republicans will pick up open seats in Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia, they need three more to get to 51. The most vulnerable Democratic incumbents are in Louisiana, Arkansas and North Carolina.

The truest toss-up today is Iowa. Republican Joni Ernst is on track to raise more than $3 million in the third quarter, sources tell POLITICO, a reflection of how much hope conservative donors are putting in her. Democrat Bruce Braley replaced his admaker and pollster in a summer shake-up, and his allies have outspent the right the past few weeks — driving up Ernst’s negatives.

The next most vulnerable incumbents are Alaska’s Begich and Colorado’s Mark Udall.

Despite heavy news media attention, Republicans remain favorites to hold on in Kentucky and Georgia. And barring a late-breaking pro-GOP wave, Democrats are expected to win in New Hampshire and Michigan. All four of these lower-tier races will nonetheless draw heavy spending and could still flip.

Arkansas may be the one race that most closely reflects the national dynamic. Last year, Pryor was seen as a sure loser, a Democrat who voted for Obamacare in a deepening red state. But leaning on the identity he and his family forged over decades — Pryor’s father David is a popular former governor and senator — the incumbent managed to keep the race in play. This is a contrast to Blanche Lincoln, a moderate Democrat who trailed double digits by this stage in 2010 partly because outside groups spent no money hammering her Republican challenger.

Democratic outside groups have outspent GOP outside groups $7 million to $3.7 million, mostly on tagging Pryor’s opponent, star GOP recruit and military veteran Tom Cotton, as extreme. They’ve been hammering the Republican congressman pretty much nonstop since last September.

Last week, Pryor became the first candidate to invoke the Ebola scare in television ads, attacking Cotton for voting against spending to prepare for pandemics. Republicans say the ad was a sign of desperation.

Republicans think they’re up in the low-to-mid single digits, with Obama’s low-30s approval too much for Pryor to withstand. A GOP poll in the field last week found ominous signs for Pryor: Only 34 percent of respondents say he has earned another term, with 56 percent saying it’s time to give someone else a chance. On another question, 35 percent said they want someone who will help implement Obama’s agenda and 54 percent said they prefer a check and balance.

Other polls have shown similar numbers in Louisiana, where the president’s popularity is also in the 30s.

“The base is locked in, and the undecided voters haven’t been paying attention yet,” said Rob Collins, executive director of the NRSC.

In the interviews, Democrats acknowledged the president is a liability in key states like Arkansas and Louisiana and said their chances hinge on Obama’s popularity not slipping any further. “We don’t know how far he’s going to drop,” a Democratic strategist said.

In close races, the parties’ turnout operations could prove critical. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is spending $60 million on its biggest field program ever, dubbed The Bannock Street Project, targeting voters who would otherwise stay home in an off-year election. In red states like Louisiana and Arkansas, where Obama was never competitive, there was not as concerted an effort to register black voters in 2012 as in the top presidential battlegrounds of North Carolina or Virginia.

Sources say that internal Republican voter models are built on the assumption that the DSCC project will give the other side a 1- to 2-percentage-point advantage to the Democratic candidate in each race where it is investing most heavily, such as Colorado, Georgia and Iowa.

Still, GOP campaigns are watching for metrics to gauge how effective the Democratic effort is. In Arkansas, for example, Republicans take heart that records show Democrats have registered only 6,000 new voters so far. Democrats say turnout among African-Americans in the state could be the difference in the race. One reason polling has been off is that no one knows whether they’ll make up 7 percent of the electorate or closer to 14 percent. Unlike other states, the black population is spread out and more rural — which makes it a little harder to organize.

The GOP is also investing in its own field efforts. The Republican National Committee upped its budget for get-out-the-vote efforts in Senate races by $8 million in the past few days, and they will use it to fully fund a program aimed at driving up early vote totals for their candidates. The RNC now plans to spend $100 million on the midterms.

While both parties are essentially in agreement on the current state of play, they’re at odds over how the sliver of undecided voters will make their minds.

Republicans believe the elections will turn on a general feeling that the world is in chaos: a stagnant economy, inept implementation of the health care law, the Middle East burning and the border crisis.

“They’ve done a very good job of raising money, but all of the money in the world won’t compensate for the massive headwinds that haven’t really kicked in yet,” said GOP strategist Chris LaCivita, who worked at the NRSC during the 2010 cycle and predicts Republicans will pick up a minimum of six Senate seats.

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who chairs the DSCC, predicted that voters will make a more nuanced choice between what he called independent-minded Democrats and Republicans “beholden to the tea party and the Koch brothers.”

“Even in deep-red states, voters don’t want to elect candidates who are pushing an anti-middle class agenda that would gut Medicare, privatize Social Security and attack women’s health care,” said Bennet.

Indeed, most Democratic spending in Bennet’s home state of Colorado has focused on Republican Cory Gardner’s past support for a “personhood” amendment to the state’s Constitution (which he has since renounced) and his opposition to abortion. The bet is that this resonates with a libertarian-minded electorate and women in the Denver suburbs.

The biggest wild card both parties are watching is immigration. Obama had been expected to bypass Congress and issue an executive order before November, though there are indications the White House might delay action until after the election. If he moves sooner to defer deportations for millions of undocumented immigrants, it could help drive the Democratic base. But it could also threaten to fire up conservatives and turn off independents who feel that Obama has overreached.

“There are a lot of votes hanging out there right now that will break our way late, in early October, or sooner, should the president take the drastic action he’s toying with,” said the NRSC’s Collins.

But Rob Jesmer, the previous executive director of the NRSC, thinks too many close races are on the map for Democrats to hold on.

“I don’t think this is going to be 2010,” he said. “It doesn’t feel the same way to me, but it just seems inconceivable that they’re going to win every one of those races.”