Senate Majority Leader John Thune says Republicans will beat the polls and hold their narrow Senate majority on Nov. 3 — even as GOP-aligned groups pull millions of dollars from candidates who look like they're sinking.
Thune, R-S.D., made the prediction on the trail in Fremont, Neb., where he was campaigning for Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., according to Fox News Digital. Asked about races that polls show slipping away, Thune said he isn't cutting bait.
"I think there are a lot of races right now just looking at the polling that are up for grabs," Thune told Fox News Digital. "I mean you could call them jump balls, however you want to say it. They're margin of error races, and there are some that are maybe a little out of the margin. But I do think the polling right now, like it has been in past elections, under-reflects the Republican vote."
"And I think you'll see some of that. So we're not giving up on any of them," he continued.
Republicans are defending six toss-up races this cycle, according to the Cook Political Report. Some contests that looked safe for the GOP earlier — Mississippi and South Carolina among them — have shifted toward Democrats in recent weeks.
The cash tells its own story. Republican PACs and outside groups have dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into races across the map this midterm cycle, Fox News Digital reported. But that money is moving. Earlier this month, the Senate Leadership Fund pulled millions of dollars out of Georgia, where Republicans are trying to hold a seat, and redirected it into Kansas, where a race has suddenly tightened.
Thune has spent the closing weeks crisscrossing the country for vulnerable incumbents. He told Fox News Digital that Republicans can keep their 53-to-47-seat majority — but he also acknowledged the party faces headwinds as Election Day closes in.
The Georgia shift is tough to spin. Republicans need to win the seat to protect a majority that has almost no room for error. Pulling money from a race the party once expected to win and sending it to Kansas — a state that shouldn't be competitive in a normal year — is the kind of move campaigns make when the map is breaking the wrong way.
North Carolina is another headache. Fox News Digital reported that race may be slipping away from Republicans. That's on top of the six toss-ups Cook lists as pure coin flips.
On social media, Thune's closing pitch is getting clipped and shared. An Instagram reel caption from a Thune-aligned account reads, "Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) on Friday ..." and another post tells followers, "HERE'S THE GAME PLAN" — framing the final stretch as a get-out-the-vote push in margin-of-error states.
Prediction markets aren't buying what Thune is selling. As of this week, tracking of U.S. Senate odds shows Democrats leading with two weeks to go, according to one market tracker published a day ago. If Thune is right that polls undercount Republicans — a pattern he says has held in past elections — those markets are priced wrong.
Thune's argument isn't complicated: the polls miss GOP voters, the toss-ups are tight, and the party's ground game will close the gap. The counter-argument is the money. Campaigns and the outside groups that fund them don't move millions of dollars out of a state they expect to win. They move it when internal numbers say a race is gone.
For everyday Americans, the stakes are concrete. A Democratic Senate would control committee gavels, confirm or block the Trump-Vance administration's judicial picks, and decide whether the second-term agenda — border enforcement, tariffs, deregulation — gets funded or stonewalled. Control of the chamber runs through six toss-ups and whatever is left of Georgia and Kansas.
Thune says he's not giving up on any of them. The next two weeks will show whether that's confidence or spin.
Our Take
Thune is doing what a majority leader has to do: keep his own troops from panicking while the cash moves. But patriots should read the money, not the press quotes. When the Senate Leadership Fund yanks millions from Georgia and spends it in Kansas, that's not a strategy for expanding the map — it's triage. The polls have missed Republican voters before, and Thune may be right that they're missing them again. But outside groups don't set fire to millions of dollars on a hunch.
The real question for conservatives is why several of these races are close at all. Republicans control Washington, and the Trump-Vance agenda is popular with the base. If the GOP loses the Senate, the blame won't land on Thune's optimism — it'll land on a party that couldn't turn a favorable map into a firewall. Watch Kansas. If Republicans are spending real money to save a seat that should be safe, the majority is in more danger than Thune is letting on.
