NYT/Siena poll: late deciders break Republican by 9 points in seven Senate battlegrounds

In the final New York Times/Siena polls of 5,708 likely voters in seven Senate battleground states, taken Oct. 23 to Nov. 1, voters who decided in the last month favored Republicans by 9 points. That is a battleground number, not a national one, and Democrats still lead in six of the seven states, with Iowa tied.

The New York Times published the figure Sunday night, Nov. 1, in its writeup of the last Times/Siena polls before Election Day. Word for word: "There are still some undecided voters, and voters who decided only in the last month favored Republicans by a nine-point margin." The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal reported the same number from the Times release.

The poll covered Michigan, Texas, Maine, Ohio, Kansas, Alaska and Iowa. Samples ran from 610 voters in Alaska to 1,215 in Texas. Nobody polled the whole country for this, so anyone telling you America is breaking red by 9 is quoting something the Times didn't print.

Now the bad news, because we don't do cheerleading. The toplines are rough for the GOP. Abdul El-Sayed leads Mike Rogers 53-42 in Michigan. James Talarico leads Ken Paxton 50-43 in Texas, a sentence that should keep every Texas Republican up tonight. Troy Jackson is up 51-45 on Susan Collins. Sherrod Brown leads Jon Husted 49-44 in Ohio, and Adam Hamilton leads Roger Marshall by the same score in Kansas. Mary Peltola is up 48-46 on Dan Sullivan. Iowa is Josh Turek 48, Ashley Hinson 47.

That is where the 9 points matter. Republicans hold the Senate 53-47, so Democrats need a net gain of four: keep Michigan and flip four of the other six. Alaska and Iowa sit inside the margin of error. Ohio, Kansas and Maine are at five or six points, close enough that a late Republican break plus the usual polling miss could flip them. A 9-point late tilt won't erase an 11-point lead in Michigan. It can easily erase 2 points in Alaska.

The House is a separate fight. The Times didn't publish a late-decider split for House races, and Democrats need a net gain of only three seats to take the chamber. In a handful of tight districts, a few thousand late Republican votes is the whole ballgame.

The Times admits its own weak spot. Blue-collar white voters "have proved particularly hard to reach in polls, and polling error has previously been among the highest in that demographic." Those are Trump voters. The paper also reminded readers that Collins trailed in every survey in 2020 and won comfortably. Missing the same voters cycle after cycle stopped being bad luck a while ago.

The poll also missed two late shocks. Michigan was in the field almost entirely before Haley Stevens, who lost the Democratic primary to El-Sayed, endorsed Rogers on Sunday. Alaska was mostly done before reports that operatives tied to Peltola's campaign recruited a candidate with a name similar to Sullivan's. Her campaign denies it.

Caveats, plainly. Late deciders are a subgroup, and the coverage we could read doesn't say how many voters are in it. A subgroup carries a bigger error than the 1.6-point margin on the full seven-state sample. This is one poll, not a trend across pollsters. Trump's approval across these states is 38%, and Democrats lead by 9 on cost of living. October holdouts going red doesn't change those numbers.

Siena's Don Levy called a Democratic Senate majority "a distinct possibility" and said either party can still win it. Democrats are ahead, and the voters who waited are leaning the other way. We find out tonight which group the pollsters actually reached.