The final New York Times/Siena polls of the campaign, released Sunday, put Democrats ahead in every Senate race likeliest to decide the majority, including Texas, Kansas, Ohio and Alaska.
- Democratic Senate leads run 11 points in Michigan, 7 in Texas, 6 in Maine, 5 in Ohio, 5 in Kansas, 2 in Alaska and 1 in Iowa, all among likely voters.
- The same surveys have the Democrat ahead for governor in all seven states, including Texas, where Greg Abbott trails Gina Hinojosa 48 to 47.
- Only two of the seven Senate leads, Michigan and Texas, are larger than the polls’ own sampling error.
- The release covers Senate and governor races. It says nothing about the House.
Every write-up we found reports the Senate toplines. None sets them against the error margins Siena published beside them, and none reads the governor column from the same release, which is where the story is. Greg Abbott is a point behind in Texas, Vivek Ramaswamy is six behind in Ohio, and Rob Sand leads by eight in Iowa, according to Siena’s release. A Republican party that has to defend the governor’s mansion in Texas on the final weekend is not losing on a single bad nominee.
The arithmetic bears that out. Take each state’s Democratic margin for governor and subtract the margin for Senate. In five of the seven states, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Iowa and Alaska, the Democrat for governor runs at or ahead of the Democrat for Senate. In Maine the gap is six points (12 against 6), in Iowa seven (8 against 1) and in Alaska six (8 against 2, with the Alaska governor number computed under ranked choice). If this were about Paxton or Collins or any one Republican, the governor’s numbers would hold steady while the Senate numbers sank. They sink together. Texas is the exception that proves the point from the other side: Paxton runs four points behind Abbott (43 against 47), and Talarico runs two points ahead of Hinojosa (50 against 48), so the Senate race there is a candidate story layered on top of a ticket that is already close.
Now the part the headlines skip. Siena lists margins of error from 3.4 points in Texas to 5.0 in Alaska. A lead’s margin of error is roughly double the one printed for a single candidate’s share, so a lead has to be larger than about twice the number to be statistically clear. Run that over the seven states and only Michigan (11 points against about 7.6) and Texas (7 against about 6.8, barely) clear it. Maine, Ohio and Kansas lead by five or six inside errors of nine; Alaska and Iowa are ties by any honest reading. The method is a rule of thumb applied to Siena’s published figures, not a number Siena printed, and it flatters nobody on either side.
| State | Senate (D vs R) | Governor (D vs R) | Senate margin of error |
|---|---|---|---|
| Michigan | El-Sayed 53, Rogers 42 | Benson 52, James 39 | 3.8 |
| Texas | Talarico 50, Paxton 43 | Hinojosa 48, Abbott 47 | 3.4 |
| Maine | Jackson 51, Collins 45 | Pingree 49, Charles 37 | 4.7 |
| Ohio | Brown 49, Husted 44 | Acton 49, Ramaswamy 43 | 4.4 |
| Kansas | Hamilton 49, Marshall 44 | Holscher 48, Masterson 47 | 4.4 |
| Alaska | Peltola 48, Sullivan 46 | Kreiss-Tomkins 54, Wilson 46 (ranked choice) | 5.0 |
| Iowa | Turek 48, Hinson 47 | Sand 51, Lahn 43 | 4.7 |
What the control math asks of that table is simple. Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats, and Democrats need a net gain of four for a majority, since a Republican vice president breaks a 50-50 tie. Michigan is the one seat of the seven that Democrats hold now. So Democrats need to keep Michigan and take four of the six Republican-held seats here, assuming they lose nothing elsewhere. The poll has them ahead in all six. It can only separate Texas from a tie, and Texas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988.
“Democrats gained ground right to the end,” the Times wrote of its last round of polling.
That line deserves a number beside it. In Maine, the Times, Siena and the Portland Press Herald had Susan Collins ahead of Troy Jackson 49 to 46 in a poll fielded September 15 to 22, conducted almost entirely before a ProPublica report on a shelved federal corruption inquiry that touched Collins. The final poll has Jackson ahead 51 to 45. That is a nine-point swing in the Democrat’s favor in about six weeks, from a sample of 714 against 619 earlier, and each carries an error near five points, so we would not hang the whole movement on it. We would hang the direction. Jackson became the nominee after Graham Platner dropped out of the race, and Collins, who has run on her own brand in Maine for three decades, is now trailing the replacement.
Our read is plain. Republicans are exposed in places they never had to think about, and the exposure is a property of the ticket, which is why it shows up in the governor’s races as loudly as in the Senate ones. Kansas went for Trump by 16 points in 2024, and in the final Times poll its Democratic candidate for governor, Cindy Holscher, leads by one while the Democrat for Senate leads by five. We reported in September that Texas and Alaska were already moving, and the final numbers say that was no blip. A party that finishes the campaign defending Kansas has lost the argument about the map.
None of this is a forecast. Polls miss, in both directions, and a one-point lead in Iowa is a coin flip with a headline. But if Michigan and Texas hold, the majority is decided in the five states this poll cannot tell apart from a tie, and every one of them runs through a Republican ticket that has stopped pulling its own weight.