Election Eve: Final Polls Put Democrats Ahead in All Seven Close Senate Races, With 54 Million Ballots Already Cast

The midterm campaign reached its last full day on Monday with the final major surveys pointing in one direction and both parties insisting the direction is wrong. The New York Times/Siena battleground polls released Sunday evening show Democratic candidates leading in all seven of the most competitive Senate races — in Texas, Kansas, Maine, Ohio and Michigan, with an edge in Alaska and a virtual tie in Iowa — five of the seven inside the margin of error.

The individual numbers are the kind that redraw maps. In Texas, James Talarico leads Ken Paxton 50 to 43 in a state Democrats have not won a Senate race in since 1988. In Kansas, the Democratic challenger leads Sen. Roger Marshall 49 to 44; in Maine, Graham Platner leads Sen. Susan Collins 51 to 45; in Ohio, Sherrod Brown leads Jon Husted 49 to 44; in Alaska, Mary Peltola leads Sen. Dan Sullivan 48 to 46; and Iowa is effectively tied, Josh Turek at 48 and Ashley Hinson at 47. Across the seven states, only 38 percent of likely voters approve of President Donald Trump — who won five of them by double digits in 2024 — while an NBC News poll released Sunday put his national disapproval at 60 percent and found 52 percent of Americans preferring a Democratic Congress to 44 percent for a Republican one. Democrats lead by nine points on the cost of living in every battleground state surveyed.

Monday is for closing arguments. Democratic campaigns stage their final get-out-the-vote rallies, Talarico's in Texas among them, while Trump's closing argument is a Monday speech at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, after a Sunday spent campaigning more than two hours in Dubuque, Iowa, and then in Salina, Kansas. House Speaker Mike Johnson told the Iowa crowd to dismiss the polls outright. The counterweight in those same surveys is real, and the BBC's election-eve caution states it plainly: polls have let Democrats down before, and the voters who decided in the final month of this campaign broke for Republicans by nine points. In Alaska, meanwhile, a judge dismissed the Justice Department's lawsuit seeking to delay certification of the Senate result — one legal fight settled before the voting it concerned is even finished.

What is already finished is the early vote: a record 54 million ballots cast before Election Day, 690,526 of them in New York City. The arithmetic for Tuesday is simple to state and hard to reach — Democrats need a net gain of three seats to take the House and four to take the Senate, across all 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats on the ballot. New York's own Tuesday carries the governor's race and the city's five charter questions on top of its congressional delegation. The polls open at 6 a.m.