Poll: Five Senate Dems would lose to GOP challenger if elections held today

Five Senate Democrats trail their GOP challengers and would lose their bids for reelection were the 2018 midterms held today, according to polls from SurveyMonkey.

New polls published Thursday morning in Axios show Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) would all lose reelection to GOP challengers if voters were heading to the polls this week.

With the exception of McCaskill, who is squaring off against Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley (R), the senators were polled against generic, unnamed GOP challengers.

{mosads}President Trump’s approval rating hovers above 50 percent in those states, all states he won in 2016, while the five Democrats all suffer from approval ratings below the 50 percent line.

At the top of the list is Tester, who trails an unnamed GOP challenger by 13 points in a state where Trump enjoys an approval rating of 58 percent, considerably higher than his 43 percent national average.

The two least-vulnerable Democrats in the poll were Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who both enjoy at least a 10-point gap between them and their announced challengers.

Democrats would need to defend all of these seats as well as pick up two others in order to take back the majority in the upper chamber in 2018.

SurveyMonkey conducted the poll online between Feb. 12 and March 5 and surveyed 17,289 voters in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Montana and North Dakota. The poll did not display a margin of error.