The retirement of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in ruby-red West Virginia left an easy opening for the state’s Republican Gov. Jim Justice to flip his seat. The single poll of this race, conducted in late August, shows Justice ahead of his Democratic opponent, Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott, by 34 points. Justice’s victory will provide the GOP with its 50th seat.

The 51st seat is likely to come in Montana, where Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester is trailing his Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, in the RealClearPolitics‘s polling average by 7 points.

Beyond that, Democratic Senate candidates have outperformed their Republican opponents, as well as both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, by comfortable margins for most of the election cycle. In Arizona, Maryland, and Nevada, Democrats are leading Republicans by 6.1, 11.3, and 4.9 points, respectively. 

However, over the past month, polls for the Senate races in Ohio and the blue-wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have tightened significantly. In Ohio, Republican challenger Bernie Moreno trails incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) by just 1 point. The last three polls in this race (all released in the last two weeks) show Brown up 2 points, up 1 point, and down 1 point. Up until recently, Brown had led by an average of 4 to 6 points.

In Pennsylvania, Republican businessman Mike McCormick, who had trailed incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) by up to 14 points over the summer, now trails by just 1.6 points. 

Similarly, in Wisconsin, Republican candidate Eric Hovde has narrowed his gap with Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) to 0.8 points. 

In Michigan, former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers has come within 3 points of Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin in the race for the open seat being vacated by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI).

Aware of their increasing vulnerability, Casey in Pennsylvania has tried to tie himself to Trump on trade and tariffs, and Baldwin in Wisconsin bragged that she “got President Trump to back her Made in America bill.”             

In a Thursday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, James Johnson, co-founder of polling firm J.L. Partners, and Callum Hunter, the firm’s senior data scientist, explained that these ads “speak to a hidden dynamic that may hand the Senate to the GOP.” 

The candidates are all fighting for the support of undecided voters, whom Johnson and Hunter estimate account for “5% to 10% of the state’s electorates, enough to sway the result of a close race.”

The firm’s internal research indicated that while the numbers vary slightly by state, overall, “twice as many undecided voters in Senate races back Mr. Trump over Ms. Harris.”

Although candidates from both parties are targeting these (mostly) Trump-supporting undecided voters, the pollsters warn that the “Democrats’ efforts may be doomed to fail.” 

The pair cited “Steve, a 58-year-old factory worker from Pittsburgh,” who participated in a recent focus group. Steve plans to vote for Trump but “has no preference in the Senate race” because he is unfamiliar with the candidates. Steve said he would ultimately vote for the Republican candidate, in his case, Dave McCormick, because “that’s what Trump would want.”

They said there are many voters, such as Steve, who “tend to be older, low-information, less-educated Trump voters. Come Election Day, we expect them to vote Republican down the ballot.” 

[Note: This is a reasonable assumption. As per CNN political analyst Ronald Brownstein, there has been a “dramatic decline” in split-ticket voting. Brownstein noted that “as recently as the 1980s, it was common for voters to split their tickets in Senate races.” Today, most voters favor straight-ticket voting.]

According to Johnson and Hunter, “current polls don’t reflect this likelihood.” This is why we see Trump leading in states where the downballot Republican candidates are running behind. 

The firm’s internal polls in Ohio and Pennsylvania show “more than 60% of undecided Senate voters lean toward the Republican candidate when pushed for an answer.”

They argued this would propel the Republican candidates in these states to victory or within reach of victory, although the current polls may not reflect it.

“When we run our machine-learning model, which predicts how undecided voters will vote by surveying their policy priorities, demographics and more, we see the same dynamic,” they wrote. For example, “In Ohio, these undecided voters break 65% for Mr. Moreno, putting him on course for a clear win.”

They believe undecided voters could increase the GOP’s expected 51-seat majority to 53 or perhaps even more, which would indeed be welcome news.

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Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.