Nonpartisan election handicapper Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics shifted its Montana Senate race rating to "leans Republican," one day after keeping the race a "toss-up."
Crystal Ball cited a new poll commissioned by AARP that found Republican challenger Tim Sheehy leading three-term incumbent Democrat Jon Tester by 6 percentage points, 51%-45%. Further, Sheehy leads 49%-41% with third-party candidates included.
"We can see critics of this rating decision arguing, in effect, that we are changing the rating in the cycle's most important Senate race based on a single poll. But that is not what we are doing," Crystal Ball managing editor Kyle Kondik wrote Friday. "We already were fairly close to being convinced that this was no longer truly a Toss-up race – in our analysis yesterday, we identified Ohio as the ‘truer' of our two toss-ups at the time – but we wanted a little more information before doing it. The AARP poll amounted to that last bit of information we were seeking."
AARP commissioned a bipartisan polling team of Fabrizio Ward [Republican firm] and David Binder Research [Democrat firm] to conduct the survey.
"[T]his is the kind of poll we had in mind when we wrote yesterday that we wanted some additional information about this race before moving the race from the Toss-up category," Kondik wrote.
The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Sheehy with a 5.2-point lead over Tester.
The implications are "crucial," Kondik wrote. With the retirement of erstwhile Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Republicans would hold a 51-49 advantage in the Senate with an expected victory in West Virginia — popular two-term GOP Gov. Jim Justice is expected to win Manchin's seat — and a Sheehy victory in Montana.
The Cook Political Report has the Montana race listed as a "toss-up."