Polls: We have plenty of new Senate polls, including some surveys from some rarely-polled battlegrounds:
Most of these come from a set commissioned by Fox News, which for years has employed the Democratic firm Anderson Robbins and the GOP group Shaw & Company to conduct all its polling. While it would be tempting to assume that Fox's numbers would show the same sort of conservative bias that they show in everything else they do, that hasn't been in the case. In 2014 for instance, Fox's final surveys (which were released almost a month before Election Day) generally overestimated Democrats.
Fox also gave Team Blue some very favorable numbers in last year's Alabama Senate special. In October, a month before several women publicly accused Republican Roy Moore of predatory behavior, Fox found him tied with Democrat Doug Jones at a time when every other poll gave Moore a clear lead. Their final poll, which was in the field in the last days of the race, found Jones up by a gaudy 50-40, but the Democrat ended up winning by a tight 50-48 margin.
So, let's look at the numbers. This North Dakota poll is the first survey we've seen here at all in months. Heiktamp is one of the most vulnerable, if not the most vulnerable, Democrats in the Senate, given that she’s seeking re-election in a state Trump carried 63-27, so it’s certainly plausible if she's down. Still, while a 4-point deficit isn't anything to celebrate, it's not insurmountable.
In most other states, by contrast, we have some recent data with which to compare this latest pile, but not a lot. Marist recently released polls for Indiana, Missouri, and Tennessee. Fox and Marist show very similar results in Missouri, while in the other two states, Marist's margin was 5 points better for the Democrats than Fox's. We don’t have much else to work with, though, so we don't have a good sense for who is on-target. Still, both sets of polls point to tight races in all three states, which is what we'd expect.
Recent polls from two local GOP firms have also shown a close contest in Arizona, with OH Predictive Insights giving McSally a 49-46 lead while Data Orbital had Sinema ahead 46-42. Fox's numbers are much closer to Data Orbital's, though, so we’ll have to see which side other pollsters come down on.