Sabato's Crystal Ball, the election forecast published by the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, announced a set of rating changes on Tuesday that moved every affected contest toward Democrats — including several in red states. Crystal Ball ratings run along a spectrum from Safe or Solid through Likely and Leans to Toss-up, and a broad wave of movement in one direction is widely read as a barometer of the national political environment. These changes, arriving in the closing stretch of the midterm cycle, spanned Senate, gubernatorial and House races at once.

In the Senate, the key Michigan battleground was revised from Toss-up to Leans Democratic. "We continue to believe that progressive Abdul El-Sayed (D) will underperform what a Democratic Senate candidate could or should get in Michigan in a year like 2026," wrote Kyle Kondik. "Yet we still have viewed him as a soft favorite to win, and we're going to formalize that by pushing his race to Leans Democratic. Polling has generally pointed to El-Sayed, but just narrowly, with a Suffolk University poll showing him up 47%-40% released this morning a positive outlier for him."

The Iowa Senate race was shifted from Leans Republican to Toss-up, while the Kansas contest moved from Likely Republican to Leans Republican.

In gubernatorial races, three of the four changes came in red states. The high-profile contests in Texas and Florida slipped from Likely Republican to Leans Republican, with Kondik noting that "possible exhaustion with long periods of Republican leadership may make both of these races fairly close." Ohio and Nevada were moved from Leans Republican to Toss-up. The offices carry stakes beyond a single term: governors elected this year will serve four-year terms extending into the next round of district map-drawing after the 2030 census, a process in which governors in states like Texas and Florida can play a direct role.

House ratings also moved toward Democrats. Iowa's 1st Congressional District, where incumbent Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks faces a difficult reelection, was revised from Toss-up to Leans Democratic, while Florida's 27th District, represented by the increasingly embattled María Elvira Salazar, dropped from Likely Republican to Leans Republican. Perhaps most strikingly, Texas' 9th District — an open, newly created seat in the Houston area drawn through a Republican gerrymander to serve as an automatic hold — was moved to only Likely Republican. That seat was one of the new Republican-leaning districts produced by Texas' 2025 mid-decade redistricting, which redrew the congressional map with the explicit aim of adding GOP-held seats ahead of the midterms.

Kondik placed the changes in a broader political context. "2018, the last most comparable election, was a bad year for Republicans," he wrote, despite "no real economic or inflationary headwinds for Republicans ... this year, the president's credibility on the economy is shot, and has been shot for the bulk of term; the decision to strike Iran has become so unpopular that top GOP Senate candidates, such as Mike Rogers in Michigan and Ashley Hinson in Iowa, are calling on the president to end the war. Based on these big-picture factors, why shouldn't 2026 be as bad or even worse for Republicans than 2018 was?" The historical record lends weight to the question: in every midterm since World War II except 1998 and 2002, the party holding the White House has lost House seats, and 2018 ranked among the largest such losses of the modern era.

Source: Raw Story