Plan B Forum

What the Polls Say About a Lindsey Graham vs Jaime Harrison South Carolina Senate Race

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham could face a tougher re-election campaign than previously thought against Democrat Jaime Harrison.

Graham, who safely won his last Senate race by roughly 15 points in 2014, is only slightly ahead in the latest polls. Harrison, the first black chairman of the state's Democratic Party, joined the race in 2019 and is currently running unopposed for the party's nod.

Polls conducted earlier this year found Graham way ahead of Harrison. A Marist College survey from late February had the Republican up by 17 percentage points, as 54 percent of registered voters said they'd back him for another term. Just 37 percent of respondents said they'd vote for Harrison.

But the latest surveys and election forecasts paint a different picture. A poll from late March showed Graham's lead had dwindled to 4 points. Forty-seven percent of likely voters said they'd back Graham at the ballot box compared with 43 percent who would vote for Harrison.

The poll, conducted by Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, also found Graham's approval rating to be underwater as 45 percent of voters approve of the job the Republican incumbent is doing. The poll surveyed over 800 likely voters and has a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points.

Plus, two recent analyses from Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball found that the odds are no longer all in Graham's favor. The non-partisan election forecasters shifted their rating of the race from "solid" Republican to "likely" Republican.

The forecast change came after Harrison outraised Graham in the first three months of 2020. According to the latest campaign finance data, Harrison raised $7.4 million between January and March, as compared with Graham's $5.6 million. But Graham still has nearly $5 million more cash on hand than his Democratic counterpart.

CNN)With all the focus on a slew of new polls that show President Donald Trump falling further behind former Vice President Joe Biden, one number has largely slipped through the cracks -- and it is a blaring warning signal to Republicans on the ballot this fall.

Here it is: 51% of registered voters said they would prefer a Congress controlled by Democrats in 2021, while just 40% preferred a Republican-controlled Congress, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NBC poll released Sunday. That marks a change in Democrats' favor from January when the party had just a 6-point edge over the GOP on what is known as the "generic ballot" question.

(Side note: it's called the "generic ballot" because no specific candidates named are used. Just the two parties.)

The generic ballot has long been used by political handicappers as a sort of blunt instrument to understand voter sentiment. Think of it as a sort of weather vane that tells you which way the political winds are blowing and, roughly, how strongly.