Nevada Could Determine the Fate of the Senate. So Why Is No One Paying Attention?

Catherine Cortez Masto is locked in a tight race that could secure the Democratic majority in the Senate. But no one’s noticing.

James Surowiecki

--

With a week to go until the election, what’s going to happen next Tuesday still feels very much undecided. While the Democrats’ chance of holding onto the House are, at this point, slim at best, they still have a reasonably good shot at keeping the Senate, as a new series of New York Times/Siena polls released today showed. Contrary to all the recent talk of a possible “red wave,” the Siena polls suggest that not much has changed in the past couple of weeks. Mark Kelly still has a 5-point lead over Blake Masters in Arizona and John Fetterman has a 5-point lead over Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, while Democratic incumbents Raphael Warnock in Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada are both essentially in dead heats.

In Georgia, Raphael Warnock is still clinging to a lead that he has held for months but has never really been able to expand, despite his opponent, Herschel Walker, being beset by a near-ceaseless flow of scandals. The race in Georgia is so close, n fact, that it will be unsurprising if it ends up going to a run-off (as Warnock’s race against Kelly Loeffler did in 2020). In any case, while Warnock is much the better candidate, Georgia is still in many ways a red state (though certainly on its way to being purple). So it would…

--

--

James Surowiecki

I’m the author of The Wisdom of Crowds. I’ve been a business columnist for Slate and The New Yorker and written for a wide range of other publications.