Slate 13: Final Update

Our next to last Slate Election Scorecard reaps where things stand in the closest Senate races: Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee and Virginia. Meanwhile I wanted to give one last update on the overall "mashed-up" margin across all the Senate races on the Slate Scorecard. Consistent with the trend on Professor Franklin's Senate "national forces" charts (which have their basis in the same underlying data), the average Democratic margin across the turned downward over the last week -- for the first time in seven weeks.

One interesting twist to these findings is that the Republican Bob Corker's gains in Tennessee explain virtually all of the Democratic decline. The last 5-poll average in Tennessee went from a dead-even tie to a 7.4 point Corker lead in just a week. If we remove that race from the overall average, there is still a leveling off of the six week Democratic trend but virtually no decline. Republicans saw gains on the averages in some states over the last week, but so did Democrats and, except for Tennessee, the changes cancel out.