Biden Leads Trump Nationally by 12 Points

The past 2 weeks have seen the report on Donald Trump's tax returns, a disastrous debate, and the President's hospitalization. None of this has helped Trump close the gap with Joe Biden. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll has Biden leading Trump nationally among likely voters 54% to 42%, with 2% favoring the Libertarian Party's Jo Jorgensen and 1% supporting the Green Party's Howie Hawkins. What is significant here is that Biden is appreciably above 50% now. When a challenger is above 50%, that is generally very bad news for the incumbent. In fact, since 1936, no challenger has been above 48% at this point, and only one challenger had a lead of more than 5 points (Bill Clinton in 1992, and he won).

Despite all the events of the past weeks (and years), 45% of registered voters still approve of Trump, versus 54% who don't. As to handling the pandemic, 41% approve and 58% disapprove. However, on the economy, 54% approve of how Trump has handled it, vs. 45% who don't like what he has done. The bottom line is that around 40% of the country thinks Trump can do no wrong, approves of everything he says and does, and will vote for him no matter what.

The gender gap, which has shown up on previous polls, is still present. Among women, Biden leads 59% to 36%. Among men, it is a tie, 48% to 48%. So basically all of Biden's lead is due to women. Another big divide is education. Biden leads by 31 points among white college graduates while Trump leads by 26 points among whites without a 4-year degree. In 2016, pollsters didn't ask about education and ended up undersampling whites without college degrees, which caused the results to be off. Undersampling this group won't happen this time. Of course, some other group could be undersampled by accident this time (gay people? evangelicals? vegetarians? who knows?).

One new question that is popping up on the polls is whether people have already voted or plan to vote early. Half of likely voters plan to vote early. That could be 70-75 million people. Of these, 40% will vote by mail, 22% will use drop boxes, and 37% will vote in-person. If this holds, on Election Night, the in-person vote totals reported will represent only a bit over a third of the total vote.

Of course, it is the electoral vote that matters. In all three of the "Midwest" states that Trump unexpectedly won in 2016, Biden has been leading all year:

For graphs of all the states, click here or on "Graphs of all polls" to the left of the map.

If Biden holds all the states that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and also these three, he gets to 270 EVs and wins. If he loses either Michigan or Wisconsin, but wins Arizona, he also makes it. And he has other possibilities as well, if he can win North Carolina or Florida.

It is increasingly clear that absent some enormous October surprise, Trump's only path to victory is cheating in one form or another. It could involve voter suppression at the polls (photo ID), throwing out huge numbers of absentee ballots, goons intimidating voters standing in line on Election Day, stealing or firebombing drop boxes, or getting the courts to help out. Of course, Biden's campaign knows this and is keeping an eye out. (V)

Time to Rewrite the History Books

High school history books generally portray Warren Harding as the most corrupt president ever. That's probably unfair to Harding, since he was probably a more-or-less honest man (by politician standards) but he was in charge when Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall pulled off the Teapot Dome caper, leasing some oil reserves to his cronies at bargain-basement prices after taking bribes from them. But a new story in The New York Times makes it clear that even Fall was a very small time operator compared to Donald Trump. The article documents dozens among the hundreds of times businessmen got big "favors" from the government after either making big donations to Donald Trump's campaign or spending mucho moola at one of his properties. No president in history has even come close to approaching this level of direct corruption. If Trump loses and the new attorney general hires a special prosecutor to dig through the muck, it will take many years to uncover even a fraction of it.

Earlier stories in the Times show that most of Trump's properties are losing money big time and that he has a personal debt of $400 million coming due in the next 4 years, with almost no liquid assets to pay his creditors. If the debts are to Deutsche Bank, he can probably stiff the bank and get away with it. If the debts are to the Moscow-based Alfa Bank which is run by Vladimir Putin's cronies, that would not be a smart idea unless Trump likes tea that glows in the dark. In 2016, there were mysterious communications between Trump and the Alfa Bank, so that is a real possibility.

Although Trump promised to drain the swamp, he has done the opposite. He has monetized the presidency. If you want something from the government, you have to pay up, one way or another. The scale of the corruption is shocking. Over 200 companies, special-interest groups, and foreign governments decided they were willing to join the pay-to-play game, did so, and reaped government benefits.

Just 60 people with issues before the administration brought the Trump family business $12 million in the first two years of Trump's presidency. Almost all got what they wanted. The ones who didn't were likely victims of Trump's forgetfulness rather than his ire. The list of patrons at Trump's properties include foreign politicians, Florida sugar barons, a Chinese billionaire, a Serbian prince, clean-energy advocates and their adversaries in the oil industry, contractors seeking billions in government money, and much more. More than 70 groups threw lavish events at Trump's properties. Morgan Stanley spent over $156,000 at Trump's D.C. hotel for one event and Deloitte spent almost $350,000 there for another one. A lobbying group, the Food Marketing Institute, paid $1.2 million to Trump's Doral resort for some conferences there. Trump even had 34 fundraisers at his properties, which brought in $3 million to Trump himself as hotelier, in addition to what the campaign raised.

Anthony Pratt, known as the cardboard king, is the face of Australia's richest family, which makes packaging materials. He donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration and built a plant in Ohio. A provision in the 2017 tax cut increased his personal wealth by $2 billion. The GEO Group runs private prisons and wanted a bigger slice of the federal prison pie. It gave $250,000 to Trump's inauguration and held events at some of Trump's properties. It suddenly had its federal contracts go up from $500 million a year to $900 million a year, a pretty good return on investment. Franklin Haney needed some permits from the Dept. of Energy and a $5 billion loan. He contributed $1 million to the inauguration and hired Trump's fixer, Michael Cohen, for $150,000/month to help with Haney's projects. Cohen didn't deliver, so Haney found a new fixer. In the end, he got what he wanted. Evangelical leaders generally weren't after government contracts, but they all got VIP treatment at Trump's hotels. Is it surprising that they tell their flocks to vote for him?

The article is extremely long and very detailed. It goes on and on with details that might be of great interest to a special prosecutor working for a Biden Justice Dept. Will the disclosure of all this garden-variety corruption have any effect on the election? Probably not, because most of Trump's supporters will probably think that if someone does you a favor (like donating $1 million to your inauguration), then it is only natural that you do him a favor (like awarding his company a billion-dollar government contract). People who don't like pay-to-play probably were not planning on voting for Trump anyway. (V)

Absentee Vote So Far Favors the Democrats

Absentee voting is soaring, and it seems to favor the Democrats so far. In one key state, Wisconsin, 647,000 people have already voted absentee. Many of these votes are in Democratic strongholds, like Dane County, where the number of absentee ballots already cast is equal to 36% of the county's total vote last time. In 2016, the total absentee vote in Wisconsin was 146,000, so this year's absentee vote is already more than four times larger than in all of 2016, and there are 3 weeks to go.

In the (usually Republican) suburban counties around Milwaukee, turnout is about normal, but in the dozens of rural counties where Trump won the state, absentee ballots are being returned at a far lower rate than in the cities. Of course, this can be misleading, because rural voters may swarm the polls on Nov. 3. Still, if something happens to reduce voting on Election Day, such as a surge in COVID-19 cases or bad weather, the Democratic votes will already be banked and Republican votes not.

Democratic voting enthusiasm is also high in Pittsburgh; Chapel Hill, NC; Tampa; and Houston, among other cities. However, many ballots will be rejected due to faulty signatures, lack of witness signatures, and other issues.

Among first-time voters, Democrats have a 10-point lead. Among 1.1 million "sporadic" voters, Democrats have an 18-point lead, compared to a 2 point lead in 2016 at this point.

So far, 9 million absentee ballots have been received in the 30 states reporting. This represents 20% of the entire 2016 turnout in those states. The parties have different strategies with respect to absentee ballots. Democrats are telling voters to mail them in. Republicans are telling voters to bring them to municipal or county clerks. However, in rural areas, clerks often work part time, so voters could show up when the office is closed.

Democrats are also returning their ballots faster than Republicans. In Florida, 12% of Democrats who requested a ballot have returned it, vs. only 9% of Republicans. What the rest of the voters are waiting for certainly beats us. (V)

Drop Boxes Are the New Battleground

Democrats want to have as many ballot drop boxes as possible and Republicans want as few as possible. With the election already underway in more than half the states, the battle is going on in the courts. On Friday, a federal district judge struck down an order from Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) that would have restricted ballot drop boxes to one per county. On Saturday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stayed the judge's order, allowing Texas to continue restricting drop boxes to one per county. That means, for example, someone in Lajitas, TX would have to drive 190 miles round trip to deposit a ballot at the county seat, Alpine, TX. The court did not say when it would rule on the merits of the case.

However, in Pennsylvania, U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan on Saturday dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump campaign trying to get rid of drop boxes in that key swing state. The campaign said absentee voting is rife with fraud and the judge said that just claiming that doesn't fly. You have to show some evidence, and you didn't.

It is virtually certain that the campaign will appeal, possibly to the U.S. Supreme Court if needed. The state Supreme Court already said that drop boxes were legal, but the Trump campaign went to a federal court to try to overturn that ruling. The district judge didn't buy that, so a federal appeals court is the next step. Meanwhile, voting has already started in Pennsylvania. If courts don't rule soon, it may not matter. Historically, courts don't like to change election rules so close to an election, though this year court decisions may be coming right down to the wire—and beyond. (V)

Young People Aren't Sold on Voting Yet

In 2016, a substantial number of 18-23-year olds who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said: "I'm not voting for the lesser of two evils" and indeed either voted for a third-party candidate or didn't vote at all. That cohort is 4 years older now, but the new batch of 18-23-year olds isn't a lot better. A new Politico/Morning Consult poll shows that while young people largely hate Donald Trump, they don't especially like Joe Biden and it's déjà vu all over again. The poll of 1,000 eligible voters 18-23 favors Biden over Trump 51% to 25%. But whether they will vote is the big question. Morning Consult figures that these young citizens make up 10% of the eligible voter pool but only 4% of the likely voters. Every cycle it is the same story: Seniors will vote for the candidate they like best, even if he or she is not perfect, but young voters will only vote if they really like the candidate, even if they despise the other one. The poll showed that fully a quarter of the 18-23 cohort said they didn't like either candidate enough to vote. Another third won't vote because their vote won't make a difference.

A whopping 42% don't identify with either party and say they are independents, 39% are Democrats, and 20% are Republicans. In contrast, among all registered voters, 40% are Democrats, 36% are Republicans, and 24% are independents. Prof. Melissa Deckman of Washington College, who is writing a book on this group, called Gen Z, says that the Democrats will have to go much further to the left to win their hearts. The problem with that is then they will lose many moderate voters, especially in the Midwest. Deckman says that the Gen Zers are impatient and want change right now. If Biden wins and moves very cautiously, they will quickly sour on him and the Democrats. The irony here is that if they don't vote, Biden will not feel obligated to give them what they want, which will then confirm that they were right in not voting.

What Gen Zers consider far more important than voting is protesting. After the murder of George Floyd, many Gen Zers were in the front lines of protesting. They are also strong supporters of Black Lives Matter.

Gen Zers don't get their information from newspapers or television. They get it from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Needless to say, none of this information is vetted the way the content of The New York Times or CBS News is. For some of them, if it is on Instagram, it must be true.

Despite this somewhat gloomy report, there are some bright spots for the Democrats (but none for the Republicans). Young women and people of color like Biden better than young white men do. One theme that seems to be popular with the entire cohort is "Settle for Biden." The idea is to elect him, then once he is in office, to maximize the pressure on him to move to the left.

Biden has a youth outreach team but it is running into a problem. The Gen Zers don't want to vote in person due to the pandemic, but voting by mail is a completely foreign concept to them. They never mail anything. Previous studies have shown that many of them have no idea where to get a stamp, so in states that don't provide a postage-paid return envelope, many won't vote. For the record, you can buy stamps from the USPS online, but only in booklets of 20. Of course, a group of friends could pool their money and buy a booklet to share. (V)

Biden Is Outspending Trump 50-to-1...on Radio

Remember radio? It's like television but without the pictures. It's still around and Joe Biden is advertising heavily on it. In fact, he has spent $15 million on radio ads since Sept. 1. The ads have aired in all 50 states. Donald Trump has spent $270,000 on radio ads in seven states.

What Biden is doing is trying to cut into Trump's rural base, which often listens to the radio while driving the relatively long distances in rural areas. It's a cheap medium compared to television and if Biden can shave a few percent off Trump's vote in rural areas, it could possibly flip some close states.

Biden is also trying to reach Black and Latino audiences on radio, with ads specifically tailored to them. Another demographic that uses radio a lot is people over 65. Again, stations and programs popular with seniors allow carefully targeted ads.

The bulk of the radio ads are in five states: Florida ($4.3 million), Pennsylvania ($2.2 million), Michigan ($2.2 million), North Carolina ($1.4 million) and Arizona ($1.4 million). In seven other battlegrounds, Biden has spent over $100,000.

Biden's ability to hit hard on radio is simply a reflection of his financial position. At the start of September, Biden had $466 million in the bank to Trump's $325 million. The gap has only gotten bigger since then, so with money to burn, Biden can do extra things—like advertise on radio—without having to cut his television or digital budgets.

When asked about the spending disparity, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Samantha Zager, said that advertising on radio shows how out of date Biden is. Of course she didn't mention the fact that he is doing it because a large part of the Republican base is also out of date and listens to that medium. (V)

Democrats Are Pushing the Flip Zone Outwards

In 1960, there was essentially no correlation between the population density and voting behavior. Now there is an extremely strong relation between them. The higher the population density, the more Democratic a location is. The lower the density, the more Republican it is. It is almost linear now, as shown in the chart below:

In much of the country, cities, which have a high population density, are extremely Democratic. In many of these areas, Democrats get 80-90% of the vote. As you move out toward the suburbs, the population density drops and so does the percentage of votes the Democrats get. As you continue moving farther from the city, into exurban areas, the population density continues to drop and you find many precincts that vote Republican. It is even possible to quantify the effect: At about 800 households per square mile, the Democratic blue meets the Republican red. There are 640 acres in a square mile, so when the average property is 8/10 of an acre, blue meets red. What happened in 2018 is that the blue zone of many cities expanded outward by a couple of miles. This flipped 41 House seats. This is a different way to think about elections. The article linked to above goes into this effect in detail.

Yet another way to look at elections is by precinct. Many people have seen county-level maps showing the 2016 Trump-Clinton vote. The New York Times did this one better earlier this year and constructed an interactive precinct-level map of the 2016 election. It shows every precinct in the country and how it voted. Here is a screenshot of the map:

As you can see, nearly the entire country is red, with little blue dots here and there. But remember, Hillary Clinton got 3 million more votes than did Donald Trump. How is this possible? She won all the high-density areas by huge margins and badly lost the areas where the buffalo roam. But there aren't so many people in those places and buffalo don't vote. The large blue blob in northeastern Arizona is a Native American reservation.

The still image above doesn't do the map justice. Follow the link and in the search box, type in 94704 (Berkeley, CA), zoom in and move the mouse around. You'll find many precincts in which Donald Trump got under 5% of the vote and Jill Stein came in second. Now try zip code 59077 in Montana. There Hillary Clinton didn't even get 5%. If you zoom in to see detail, you'll find many little blue hotspots in a sea of red. These are Democratic cities and towns in otherwise very red states. As one example, enter zip code 83025 and move the mouse to the dark blue area a bit to the left, right on the Idaho border. There, in deep red Wyoming, is a precinct (Teton Village) that Clinton won 71% to 18%. (V)

Senators Push Back on Coronavirus Relief Bill

Weeks ago, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) reduced her ask and said she was willing to agree to a $2.2-trillion bill to help people deal with losing their jobs as a result of government regulations to stop COVID-19. Last week, Donald Trump said he wanted a $1.8-trillion bill. Back in ye olde days, when compromise was possible, some clever intern would have gotten out a calculator and done some higher math, as in (2.2 + 1.8)/2 = 2.0. Then Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin would have slapped their respective foreheads and said: "Gee, why didn't we think of that!"

Now Republican senators are getting nervous that a deal could happen and they are working hard to nip it in the bud. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said: There's no appetite right now to spend the White House number or the House number. Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) said that giving Pelosi anything that looks like an expansion of Obamacare will be seen as a betrayal by Republicans. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said that giving Pelosi a deal would be the death knell for the GOP majority.

However, none of these senators are up for reelection in November and bills don't need 100 senators to pass. If all 47 Democrats agree to a compromise bill, then only 13 of the 53 Republican senators have to be on board to invoke cloture and pass a bill. With 9 or 10 incumbent Republicans locked in tight races, it shouldn't be that hard to get 13 of the 53 to sign on. In reality, all it would take is for Donald Trump to forcefully back any compromise bill Pelosi and Mnuchin agree to and make it clear to all 53 Republican senators that he damn well expects their votes and there will be hell to pay if he doesn't get them. But so far we haven't seen any sign of action on Trump's part, even though it could mean the difference between the White House and the big house for him. Maybe it's the dexamethasone.

Yesterday Trump's economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, told CNN's Jake Tapper that the Senate would go along with a stimulus bill, and that the final offer the White House makes may even be for more than $2.2 trillion. It is not clear whether he knows what he is talking about, however. Ultimately, if Pelosi and Mnuchin agree on a bill and it comes to a floor vote, there will surely be 13 Republicans joining the 47 Democrats to invoke cloture and pass it. The big question is whether Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will bring it up for a vote when his caucus is so divided. (V)

Cindy McCain Makes an Ad for Biden

The widow of the late senator John McCain has not only endorsed Joe Biden, she has now cut an ad for him:

McCain points out in the ad that her husband and Biden would fight like hell on the floor of the Senate—then they would go eat lunch together because although they didn't agree on many policy issues, they both put service to their country and respect for the troops first.

Will the ad matter? It could. The McCain name still has a lot of clout in Arizona, and Cindy McCain could effectively be giving permission to die-hard Republicans to vote for a Democrat this one time. Arizona has a lot of veterans, so the views of the wife of a veteran who was well liked by Arizona Republican veterans could sway some of them. Biden has a small lead in Arizona, but if this ad gets him another 1-2%, that could seal the deal for Arizona's 11 electoral votes. What also plays a role here is Trump's outspoken dislike of John McCain, something that won't go down well with the people who liked him, and this ad could remind them of that. (V)

Mistakes Absentee Voters Make

Tens of millions of people are going to vote by absentee ballot this year, and a couple of percent of the ballots are going to be disqualified and thrown out. Based on what happened in the primaries, in Pennsylvania alone it is expected that 100,000 ballots will be thrown out. Considering that Donald Trump carried the state by 44,000 votes in 2016, that is a significant number. Here are the top reasons ballots don't count:

• In 2016, 25% of the rejected ballots were thrown out because they arrived after the deadline
• In 2016, 20% of the rejected ballots were on account of a missing signature
• Another top reason ballots are rejected is due to a signature mismatch, often due to a name change
• Some states require a witness to sign the envelope and a ballot lacking that signature will be rejected
• Some other reason, such as a missing affidavit or secrecy envelope, or an incorrectly marked ballot

If you are still going to vote by absentee ballot, read the instructions that come with it carefully and follow them to the letter. And most important, do it right now, not next week, since late-arriving ballots don't count. (V)

Changes in Polling Compared to 2016

No, we don't mean whether Donald Trump is polling better this year than in 2016. We mean the locations the pollsters are focusing on. Are there states that are more interesting to poll this year than in 2016? How about less interesting? That's an easy question for us to answer since we have a database of polls for both years. Below is a table showing the number of polls in the database by state for this year so far and for 2016 at this date.

State	2016	2020	Change
Michigan	18	56	38
Texas	9	37	28
Arizona	18	45	27
Wisconsin	23	50	27
North Carolina	37	60	23
Pennsylvania	36	54	18
Minnesota	7	16	9
Georgia	19	26	7
Montana	3	10	7
Florida	46	50	4
Kentucky	3	6	3
Maine	10	13	3
South Carolina	7	10	3
Alabama	3	4	1
Alaska	4	4	0
D.C.	2	1	-1
Kansas	7	6	-1
Oklahoma	5	4	-1
Washington	7	6	-1
Connecticut	6	4	-2
Delaware	5	3	-2
Hawaii	3	1	-2
Massachusetts	9	7	-2
North Dakota	4	2	-2
New Mexico	7	5	-2
South Dakota	3	1	-2
Mississippi	4	1	-3
Nebraska	4	1	-3
West Virginia	4	1	-3
Wyoming	4	1	-3
California	22	18	-4
New Jersey	12	8	-4
Oregon	6	2	-4
Rhode Island	5	1	-4
Tennessee	7	3	-4
Vermont	5	1	-4
Arkansas	6	1	-5
Idaho	6	1	-5
Indiana	8	3	-5
Louisiana	6	1	-5
Maryland	9	4	-5
Utah	11	6	-5
Iowa	23	17	-6
Illinois	8	1	-7
Missouri	12	5	-7
Colorado	17	9	-8
Nevada	17	8	-9
New Hampshire	29	16	-13
New York	22	8	-14
Ohio	36	22	-14
Virginia	29	9	-20

Before going further, it is useful to note that commercial pollsters, like SurveyUSA and PPP, are businesses and conduct polls when some company, generally a media outlet, commissions one. So their polls reflect the media's interest. A few firms may be polling on their own to become better known and some, like Redfield and Wilton, appear to be polling on their own just to break into the U.S. market. A few of the small universities also have partnerships with media outlets. For example, Siena College is doing the New York Times polling this year and Marist College is working with NBC News. Some of the other colleges may be polling on their own just to get PR for their school and attract new students. Face it, have you ever heard of Quinnipiac University in any context other than polling? Do you even know what state it is in? (Hint: There is another, much more famous, university in the same state in the city of New Haven.) Nevertheless, all of these players know where the action is and poll those states. There is a very good reason we have zero polls for D.C., Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Wyoming so far. Being very blue or very red combined with not having many electoral votes means that nobody cares about you. Sorry about that.

Now let's look at the table. We have triple the number of polls in Michigan compared to 2016. Everyone took it for granted last time. Not so much this time. All of a sudden, Texas is the belle of the ball and everyone wants to dance with her. Could its almost-swing-state status be related to that? We think so. Similarly, Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina round out the top five gainers.

On the other hand, poor Virginia is no longer a swing state and it gets neglected. Ohio looked like it was in the bag for Trump, but now that it is starting to swing, expect it to rise in the next 3 weeks. New York is boring and most observers think that Trump has no chance in New Hampshire and Nevada, so they aren't getting much love. (V)

Jaime Harrison Breaks Fundraising Record

Democrat Jaime Harrison raised a record-shattering $57 million in the third quarter of this year, smashing the old record of $38 million that Beto O'Rourke set in 2018. (Nevertheless, O'Rourke lost.) No candidate in any Senate race in history in any quarter has raised over $40 million—until now. Harrison got 1.5 million contributions, and the average donation was $37. Harrison is going to outspend Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) by a massive margin in the final 3 weeks of the campaign, but dollars aren't votes and South Carolina, is, well, South Carolina. Graham hasn't released his Q3 total yet. Democrats have not won a statewide race there since 2006. Still, the most recent poll has Harrison and Graham tied.

One thing that could help Harrison is the fact that the other senator, Tim Scott (R-SC), is Black. So people there are used to the idea of a Black senator, it isn't a truly scary thought. Of course, Scott is a Republican, but racism is apparently not as great a factor as some people thought it might be. (V)

Today's Presidential Polls

Donald Trump won Iowa and Michigan last time. Now he is tied in the former and behind in the latter. That has to be made up somewhere else and it won't be Nevada. (V)

State	Biden	Trump	Start	End	Pollster
Iowa	49%	49%	Oct 06	Oct 09	YouGov
Michigan	52%	46%	Oct 06	Oct 09	YouGov
Nevada	52%	46%	Oct 06	Oct 09	YouGov

Today's Senate Polls

We haven't had any polling done in the North Carolina Senate race after it was revealed that Cal Cunningham had an affair (which is a bit surprising since PPP is located in Raleigh, NC, and polling that race is a home game for PPP). Still, if Theresa Greenfield can beat Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), that could make up for not flipping North Carolina. (V)

State	Democrat	D %	Republican	R %	Start	End	Pollster
Iowa	Theresa Greenfield	47%	Joni Ernst*	43%	Oct 06	Oct 09	YouGov
Michigan	Gary Peters*	47%	John James	44%	Oct 06	Oct 09	YouGov

* Denotes incumbent

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