The five Senate seats most likely to flip in the midterms, ranked

As the midterm elections come barreling down, Republicans are still confident of winning the House – but they’re already downplaying expectations that they can flip the Senate. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has all but admitted that the GOP likely won’t gain control of his chamber. Meanwhile, The Washington Post this weekend published a damning piece about how the National Republican Senatorial Committee is running low on money under chairman Rick Scott.

Still, the party has time to turn things around. We like to give it to you straight and move beyond the noise; with that in mind, here are the top five Senate seats most likely to flip. They’re ranked in order, from most likely to least.

#1: Pennsylvania (Democratic pickup). Democrat John Fetterman’s merciless onslaught against Republican Mehmet Oz in the race to replace retiring GOP Senator Pat Toomey is only gathering steam. The state’s sitting lieutenant governor has relentlessly mocked the Donald Trump-endorsed physician and former television host on social media and in ads for not living in Pennsylvania and for his mortifyingly misjudged “crudité” video.

It appears to be working: last week, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report changed its rating for the race from “Toss Up” to “Lean Democratic”, and even the conservative Trafalgar Polling Group found that Fetterman beat Dr Oz by four points. As a sign of how much Oz needs help, Trump announced he would hold a rally in Wilkes-Barre on September 3 with “the entire Pennsylvania Trump Ticket”. That might help, but as of right now, Democrats undeniably have the momentum.

#2: Nevada (Republican pickup). The Silver State still remains Republicans’ best chance to flip a Senate seat. Unlike certain other races where they’ve nominated borderline extremists, Republicans are putting forward a relatively moderate candidate in former attorney general Adam Laxalt, whom Trump nevertheless endorsed despite his almost non-MAGA bent. And his hopes are high; Nevada’s large Hispanic population has moved rightward in recent years, and the famous “Harry Reid Machine” that maximized Democratic turnout isn’t what it was.

Still, incumbent Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto received a life raft when Roe v Wade was overturned. Nevada has already codified abortion rights, and a new Suffolk University/Reno Gazette-Journal poll has found that 45 per cent of voters prefer Cortez Masto over Laxalt, who scored just 38 per cent. Still, Nevada is notoriously difficult to poll, and so long as she leads, she should still worry about cracking the 50 per cent watermark.

#3: Georgia (Republican pickup). Senator Raphael Warnock and University of Georgia football legend Herschel Walker’s race might just be the weirdest Senate contest in the country. The GOP desperately needs to win back the Senate seat Warnock captured in a special election runoff in January last year. But Walker has become a liability, thanks to revelations about domestic violence and secret children, as well as his seemingly endless stream of nonsensical and downright false statements.

In another erratic move last week, Walker declined a debate invitation on the basis it would have taken place on a Sunday night and thus clashed with an NFL game. The problem? The debate was in fact scheduled for 13 October, which would have been on a Tuesday, not a Sunday.

Polling has been scarce lately, but Warnock leads many surveys. He also notched a victory when Democrats passed his widely popular amendment to the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the price of insulin for Medicare patients at $35 – while Republicans scrapped a provision that would have applied to private insurance customers.

#4: Wisconsin (Democratic pickup). Before last month’s Democratic Senate primary, Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes suddenly received a lucky break when his Democratic rivals dropped out to endorse him in his campaign to unseat Senator Ron Johnson.

Johnson has received a ton of lucky breaks himself since first running for the Senate. His first run in 2010 rode a Republican wave, helping him defeat progressive hero Senator Russ Feingold. He then won a rematch in 2016 when Trump won Wisconsin, and actually outperformed the president’s extraordinarily slim victory. But since the inception of the Trump era, Johnson has veered sharply to the extreme, minimizing the January 6 riot and repeatedly promoting conspiracy theories about Covid-19 vaccines.

Two polls last week showed Barnes in the lead. There is concern among some that Barnes’s record might be too liberal for swing-state Wisconsin, but he certainly has wind in his sails.

#5: Arizona (Republican pickup). The Grand Canyon state once seemed like Republicans’ best shot at flipping a Senate seat, with incumbent Senator Mark Kelly – who is less than two years in Washington after a special election – has a decidedly more liberal voting record than Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema. But Trump’s endorsement made all the difference.

The former president spurned Mark Brnovich, the state’s attorney general, for not going along with his big lie that the election was stolen, and instead backed Blake Masters, a little-known candidate with a history of making racist and otherwise inflammatory statements. Masters’ primary win has given the GOP a severe handicap, and their hopes of turfing out Kelly – who is raising astronomical sums of money – are slipping away: a Fox News poll last week showed him beating Masters by a whopping eight points. Still, there’s a possibility there for Republicans, even if it’s an increasingly slim one.