WI-SEN (Marquette): Barnes +2 / close races

[GALeftist]

But what about the red wave....

This race was always going to be close. Wisconsin is the ultimate purple state and Johnson really is a flawed incumbent. Belongs up there with Arizona, Georgia and Nevada in likelihood to flip.

It really feels like people are not ready to have the conversation that Johnson is one of the worst candidates for the GOP in a swing state in the entire country.

You've said this about every Republican candidate in a non-safe race.

DeSantis, Rubio, Drazan, Budd, Kleefisch, Schmidt, Scott and Sununu, a litany of House candidates including Valadao and Garcia – I haven't seen anyone call these candidates bad.

[GALeftist]

Obligatory -

Exactly what I expected.

Vance is going to underperform Trump by 5 in a year where polling is 9 points more favorable to R's compared to 2020. Here's some other things that "high quality" polls will likely show:

 - Barnes/Lasry will lead Johnson in WI
 - Fetterman will lead Oz in PA
 - Kelly will lead R's in AZ
 - R's will continue to hold miniscule 1-2 point lead in generic ballot

By election time, many people will be convinced the Democrats are favorites to hold the Senate and R's will get no more than 230 House seats. And the narrative will be because R's are "too extreme" while Dems all have good moderate candidates.

There's a middle ground here. No one is saying that Barnes is the favorite or Johnson can't win.

But again, the GOP candidates ARE far-right and ARE more extreme than they should be for their states, so that should be worth nothing, and IS important.

Disagree tbh. Oz is definitely not ‘far right’, and honestly Johnson is basically the median R senator. Whoever comes out of the AZ primary is very likely to be a true nut job and Mastriano is straight up insane, but most of the other ‘weak’ R senate or Governor candidates are really not weak at all as far as I can tell. Maybe Walker is but that’s because he can’t formulate a sentence, not because anybody is going to care how many children he has come November.

This board loves to paint practically any R candidate in a swing state as a hard-right neonazi with extremist views, while their Dem counterparts are either moderate heros (like Kelly) or progressive lions with ‘strong grassroots appeal’ (like Fetterman).

Now I do think that Dems probably have better candidates on average across the swing state races than Rs do. However, the gal isn’t nearly as large as most on here want to portray, and I really don’t think some here understand that if the environment swings where most trend lines / indicators point (I.e. R+5-7), then Dems aren’t going to be able to hold many / any of these swing state seats. Candidate quality just isn’t going to matter in that case.

If Rs win the national vote by 5, they win PA and WI, the latter potentially by double digits. For reference, in 2021, they won it by 9.

In 2009, McDonnell won Obama+6 Virginia by 17 and Christie won Obama+16 New Jersey by 4. This indicates a shift right from 2008 of about 21 points or so, if you split the difference. The nation was Obama+7 in 2008, so someone in early 2010 might have similarly predicted a GOP+14 environment, but ultimately it was GOP+7, and Rs lost a number of close races: CO-SEN, CO-GOV, NV-SEN, DE-SEN, and MN-GOV are a few examples. Some of these races, particularly NV and DE, were even famously blown due to poor candidate selection. Extrapolating from off year elections and predicting that one party sweeps the close races because of that is just a bad idea.