Polls show Democrats ahead in Senate, House with 30 days to midterms

Senate Leadership Fund pulls ads from North Carolina race

Thirty days before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have fanned out across the country to campaign for vulnerable lawmakers, super PACs aligned with the GOP have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and outreach, and the polls show Democratic candidates leading anyway.

The most recent wave of New York Times-Siena surveys, released over the weekend, found Democratic Senate candidates ahead in Alaska, Ohio, and Texas — all states Trump carried by double-digit margins two years ago. In Kansas, where no Democrat has won a US Senate election in 94 years, Democrat Adam Hamilton ran neck-and-neck with Republican Senator Roger Marshall. In Iowa, Democrat Josh Turek trailed Republican Ashley Hinson narrowly. The Times and Siena surveys also found Democratic gubernatorial candidates leading in many traditionally Republican states.

“Candidate quality is beating gobs of Republican money,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said over the weekend as the polls were released. Democrats need to win at least four seats to retake the Senate majority lost in the 2024 election.

In Texas, where Republican leaders drew new congressional maps intended to favor their candidates, the Times and Siena survey found Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa both leading. Republican state representative Briscoe Cain wrote on X on Monday that the situation had reached a critical point. “If the election were held tomorrow, all state wide races [would] go blue,” Cain wrote. “Republican voters feel too comfortable and are not as intense about this election as they should be. We have more voters than the left in Texas, but we have to vote.”

Last Friday, Semafor reported that the Senate Leadership Fund planned to pull advertising from Whatley’s North Carolina Senate campaign and redirect spending toward Marshall in Kansas. No Democrat has won a US Senate election in North Carolina since 2008, but Whatley has trailed in polls for months.

The picture for House races appears similarly difficult for Republicans. A CBS News-YouGov poll released Sunday gave Democrats a nine-point lead on the generic ballot, an indicator of voter intention in congressional contests. Republicans currently hold the House by a narrow margin.

A Reuters-Ipsos poll released Monday found Trump’s job approval at 32 percent among adults, the lowest level of his presidency. Independent voters — whose views often decide close races — planned to back Democrats by a 16-point margin, though many remained undecided.

The president’s poor marks are believed to be a major cause of the Republican candidates’ struggles nationwide, but several other factors are also at work. Discontent over the price of gasoline and other consumer staples, the on-again, off-again conflict with Iran, and concern over Trump’s hardline approach to enforcing immigration laws are all cited as drags on the party’s candidates.

Republicans maintain that they have paths to victory in both chambers. Eight House Republicans represent districts that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, compared with 22 House Democrats in territory carried by Trump — a gap that has widened through the redistricting war Trump instigated. Many polls show voters holding unfavorable views of the Democratic Party, though views of Republicans are similarly negative. And despite strong fundraising by some Democratic candidates, Republicans and groups allied with their agenda retain an edge in cash to spend on the election.

The shift among Hispanic voters, however, poses a particular threat to Republican hopes. Only 26 percent of Hispanic voters — who swung toward Trump after years of leaning Democratic — plan to vote Republican this year, while 52 percent prefer the Democrats, according to the Reuters-Ipsos poll.

“We’ve been seeing among Latino voters, as we’ve been seeing kind of in the electorate as a whole, a real strong rejection of the Trump administration, and that has inflated into an increase in support for Democratic candidates,” said Maria Isabel Di Franco Quinonez, a senior research director at Equis Research, a progressive firm that focuses on the community.

Should the trend hold, it could bode well for Democrats’ hopes in states and districts with large Latino populations. The effect may be pronounced in Texas, where Republican leaders drew new congressional maps to favor their candidates, but only if Latino voters continue voting the way they did in 2024.

“If we see those levels continue to rise and see those districts look more like the kinds of support levels for Democrats that we had seen back in 2018, then that would result in maybe Republicans get one more seat after redrawing all the lines, as opposed to getting four or five more seats,” Quinonez said.