Montana margin widens in our forecast after new Rutgers-Eagleton poll

A Rutgers-Eagleton survey of 845 registered voters, sponsored by Montana Free Press and fielded August 27 to September 7, has Republican Kurt Alme at 38 percent, independent Seth Bodnar at 30 percent, Democrat Alani Bankhead at 16 percent and other candidates at 5 percent.

Our model now gives the Republican a 100 percent chance in Montana and the Democrat 0 in 100, with an expected margin of R+15.8 and a 5th-to-95th percentile range running from R+25.8 to R+5.8. That is a modest move from the previous run earlier today, which had the expected margin at R+13.0 and the Democrat at 2 percent. The direction of the race is the same as it has been in our last two updates; the new numbers push the central estimate a little further toward the Republican and squeeze what was already a narrow path for the Democrat to zero.

The poll's internals are consistent with that. Bankhead's 16 percent is well behind both Alme and Bodnar, and the contest for the seat in this survey is between the Republican and the independent. Our model reports the race as a two-party probability, so it prices the Republican against the field rather than against Bodnar specifically.

Nationally, our average of 24 generic-ballot polls over the past 45 days stands at D+6.7. Our Senate numbers as of 2:02 PM ET give Democrats a 50 percent chance of Senate control and Republicans 50 percent, with a mean of 50.3 Democratic seats against the 51 Democrats need; a 50-50 tie goes to the Republicans because the vice president is a Republican. In the House, our model gives Democrats a 95 in 100 chance of a majority, with a mean of 240.7 seats against the 218 needed. That House figure is marginally firmer than it should be: our error model correlates districts nationally, by census division, by state and individually, but we lack the data to correlate demographically similar districts across regions.