NEW: “Voters Continued to Sour” on Republican Incumbents – Top Five Most Vulnerable Now Underwater

The latest round of Morning Consult polling shows that vulnerable Republican Senators have continued to lose support from “voters of all political stripes.” Here are the highlights of Senate Republicans’ increasingly precarious position heading into the 2020 election:

• The top five vulnerable incumbents – Senators Collins, Gardner, Ernst, McSally, and Tillis – are underwater and four of them rank among the most unpopular Senators in the country

• Susan Collins is now the most unpopular Senator in the country and her net approval has plummeted 23 points in a single year

• Senator Thom Tillis sunk more than $700,000 into paid advertising but is still underwater 

• Unelected Senator Martha McSally is “taking heat from all sides” and saw her net approval fall 5 points

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Morning Consult: Impeachment Trial Set to Put Vulnerable Senate Republicans in a Familiar Bind

By Eli Yokley

January 16, 2020

Key Points:

• Morning Consult’s latest Senator Approval Rankings, compiled from nearly 500,000 survey interviews conducted among registered voters in all 50 states during the final three months of 2019, found a small needle for the GOP to thread over the next several weeks. All five of the most vulnerable Senate Republicans head into the trial with voters in their states either souring on their job performance or with perceptions of the president threatening to pull them further down.

• The former applies to Sens. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), whose respective 5- and 4-percentage-point declines in their net approval rating between the third and fourth quarters of 2019 put them a respective 3 and 10 points underwater.

• Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) are contending with the latter problem. The president’s net approval rating is 17 points underwater in Colorado and 15 points in the red in Iowa. And while Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) saw a modest improvement in his net approval at the end of last year (plus 3 points), he’s still in negative territory…

• …[Collins has] lost some of the ground she made up with Republican voters in Maine following her strong defense of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his controversial Senate confirmation. Meanwhile, she continued to bleed support among Democrats (from minus 41 points to minus 48 points) and independents (from minus 5 points to minus 10 points) in the fourth quarter, ahead of what’s expected to be a competitive race against a well-funded Democratic rival this fall, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon. 

• With downward movement among voters of all political stripes between the last two quarters of 2019, she ended the year as the country’s most unpopular senator as she launched her re-election campaign, unseating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for the distinction with a 52 percent disapproval rating.

• On the other extreme is McSally. The first-term Republican, who was appointed to her seat by Gov. Doug Ducey (R) after her unsuccessful open-seat challenge to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D) in 2018, saw her net approval drop, especially among Republicans (from 49 points to 41 points). Last month, McSally said she hadn’t been convinced the president deserved impeachment in the first place. And on Wednesday, McSally amped up her rhetoric, refusing to answer a CNN reporter’s question about her position on additional witness testimony and calling him “a liberal hack…”

Read the full analysis here.

See Also: 

Morning Consult: Things Aren’t Getting Better for 2020’s Most Vulnerable Senate Republicans

Morning Consult: “Republican incumbents have seen their popularity decline, and they must contend with Trump’s lack of popularity“

###