It looks like Republicans may not win the Senate after all. The reason? Montana

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OJust one day before Election Day 2024, Republican control of the Senate suddenly appears much more uncertain.

Some have thought it was almost inevitable for months. With the loss of West Virginia's seat due to the resignation of Joe Manchin and the defeat of Jon Tester – the incumbent senator from Montana who trailed his opponent Tim Sheehy over the summer and fall – the majority should fall into Republican hands. unless Democrats unseat a Republican incumbent elsewhere.

But on Monday this calculation looked completely different. Two new surveys were released over the weekend Des Moines Register And New York Times/Siena College featured a race that suddenly swung in Democrats' favor in nearly every major battleground state. This also includes Iowa, where Harris now leads Donald Trump by three percentage points Register Opinion poll.

And Montana may be no different. Stephen Leuchtman, poll director at Pharos Research Group, tweeted Monday that his firm had conducted a final poll on the Montana race that concluded Sunday. According to Leuchtman, who did not release the full poll results (his company conducts polls privately), Tester was four percentage points ahead of Sheehy, just within the poll's margin of error of 4.97 percent.

That's far from certain, but the poll is roughly consistent with two other polls conducted in mid- to late October that found the gap between the two candidates has narrowed rapidly compared to the beginning of the year. One from The Hill/Emerson College showed the Republican ahead by three percentage points – within the margin of error – while a second poll conducted by the University of Montana – Billings found a tie.

Sheehy's electoral collapse and possible defeat on Tuesday may well have been due to his failure to provide a clear explanation and evidence for a scandal that has dogged him for months: the case of the gunshot wound to his right arm that Sheehy was alleged to have suffered during a deployment to Afghanistan suffered.

His opponent, Tester, is a centrist Democrat but a more reliable Democratic voice than other Biden-Harris administration perennials who have been a headache for Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin (both Sinema and Manchin declined to run for re-election). , as they faced their own polling realities.) Tester is no stranger to being the Democrats' most “vulnerable” incumbent — he carried that distinction in both his 2012 and 2018 elections, both of which he narrowly won, the latter time while Donald Trump was campaigning with his opponent. But 2024 has seen some of the most brutal polling of his campaign in recent memory, with some polls showing a gap of up to 8 percentage points in early October. For weeks everyone was convinced that everything was over.

Then there was a controversy surrounding his Republican opponent. Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL who was decorated for his combat actions, claims he was shot in the right arm during his deployment in a possible friendly fire incident. The bullet lodged in his arm, but he said he received no formal medical treatment at the time and covered up the injury to avoid involvement by Afghan security forces, who he suspected had accidentally hit him.

Then in 2015, a year after he left active duty, the story developed even further, Sheehy says. He claims he was on a trip to Glacier National Park when he fell while hiking and injured the same arm. He sought medical treatment and was reportedly told at the time that medical professionals needed to report the bullet in his arm to law enforcement. Then, Sheehy says, he lied again – This time to a U.S. park ranger, Kim Peach, who told her that he accidentally shot himself in the parking lot when he dropped a loaded gun and it fired, hitting him in the arm.

His latest attempt to explain the incident came Saturday during a conversation with Megyn Kelly, a conservative journalist. Kelly began the interview respectfully, but soon found herself questioning the veracity of very basic aspects of his statement.

“Did you shoot yourself in the arm?” asked a sternly skeptical Kelly Sheehy.

“No, that was never the accusation,” Sheehy replied.

It was. Peach spoke up in an interview with The Washington Post to claim that Sheehy definitely said he shot himself in the arm that day in 2015 in Glacier.

Still unclear after his interview with Kelly is why Sheehy would have had to lie to a U.S. park ranger who had no authority or ability to investigate his (allegedly true) story that he was actually shot in Afghanistan. Still unclear: Why Peach, the ranger, said a gunshot had been reported in the park that day, which prompted her investigation. Still unclear: Why would the doctors in the park even have to report the presence of a bullet in his arm to law enforcement if there had been no shooting in the park that day?

There are also Sheehy's statements about the medical records – he says they don't exist. And he has nothing, not even a photo, to prove there was a bullet in his arm before that park visit in 2015.

To put it simply, there are many gaps in a story that should actually only be about one thing.

Republicans are in complete panic. Given the new early voter numbers, Trump's campaign team desperately tried Monday to portray a reduction in the number of early voters compared to 2020 pandemic levels as a positive sign. But several media reports indicate that the party is struggling with sometimes very poor poll numbers.

“The meltdown is about to begin,” former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci wrote Sunday evening. “They found out how bad things are.”

If this collapse is as real as it looks, Jon Tester could return to Washington next week as the ultimate comeback kid.