New polling from this year’s race for control of the U.S. Senate reveals favorable news for Democrats, whose seats in close or GOP-leaning states including Montana, West Virginia, Nevada, and Ohio will be on the ballot.
A survey done by a Florida Atlantic University team in collaboration with Mainstreet Research found Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) in the lead in hypothetical match-ups in this year’s general election with three Republicans currently running in the state’s primaries in hopes of ultimately challenging him. That list includes Trump-endorsed candidate Bernie Moreno, who trailed Brown by some 11 percentage points — ending up, in other words, way behind the Democratic incumbent.
Brown’s smallest lead was against Republican Matt Dolan, who trailed him by just four percent. The polling was conducted on March 13 among a sample of Ohio adults registered to vote.
Also doing well in polling is Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), another of the politically vulnerable Democrats who will be on the ballot this year in search of another term. Recent data from SurveyUSA, which polled Montanans on behalf of the state’s outlet NonStop Local, found Tester leading potential general election challenger Tim Sheehy by nine percent — though in Montana, Ohio, and elsewhere, there’s still ample time for the Republican challengers to attempt to raise their positive profiles with prospective voters.
Polling from the presidential race, in which Donald Trump and Joe Biden are again on track to face each other later this year, is mixed. While Trump leads in a fair share of polling done on the national level, it’s not all the polling, and his leads are generally minuscule. And a large share of Americans remain intensely opposed to the former president, as evidenced by the new polling data from Civiqs that showed half of registered voters expressing the belief that Trump is guilty of criminal acts that should land him with prison time.
